Vivo has now become one of the first few brands in the Indian smartphone market that is providing industry-first features for the masses. The company has in the past few months introduced technologies like the in-display fingerprint sensor to the market at an affordable price tag.
With V11 Pro being one of the favourite smartphones of the user, Vivo has recently introduced its successor with new advancements and new segment-first feature, the pop-up selfie camera, with V15 Pro. The phone comes with a price tag of Rs 28,990. The smartphone’s front camera works on a pop-up mechanism, which was first came in Vivo NEX. This coupled with a massive 48-megapixel sensor at the back along with powerful hardware makes it an exciting proposition. But, will it be as successful as the Vivo V11 Pro? Let’s find out.
Triple cameras + Pop-up selfie makes a unqiue combination!
The Vivo V15 Pro is equipped with a triple-camera setup, which comes with a combination of 48-megapixel quad pixel sensor, that delivers an output of 12 million effective pixels along with an 8-megapixel super wide angle lens and a 5-megapixel depth sensor. For the front, there is a 32-megapixel selfie shooter with f/2.0 aperture, which pops up when you open the selfie mode.
Camera performance of the Vivo V15 Pro is impressive in broad daylight condition ( Vivo V15 Pro camera samples). The phone delivered sharp images with colours being close to the source. The macro shots too came out well, and you will have no trouble in focusing on the subject. We also liked the portrait mode in the Vivo V15 Pro in which we get Natural, Studio Light, Stereo Light, Loop Light, Rainbow Light and Monochrome background modes. Out of all the modes, we liked the Rainbow Light and Monochrome background. In the monochrome background, the camera basically highlights the colour of the subject, while the background colour is in monochrome.
The default settings of the phone come with 12-megapixel output, which relies on pixel binning. This means that the smartphone combines 4 pixels into one large pixel. One can also choose a 48-megapixel option, though we liked sticking to the default settings because one would not notice any major difference between the two modes with a naked eye. Coming to the low light performance, the smartphone does a decent job as the images were lit enough, though some noises were seen in photos where the light was bare minimum.
Now let’s talk about the big highlight of the smartphone – Front Camera. The working of the pop up mechanism of front camera is quite smooth. However, we do have some concerns about the dust particles assembling at the camera. Coming to the performance, the selfies with 32-megapixel sensor came out well in our opinion. They were sharp and detailed. Eventhe low liught shots were good. Though, we feel that the beauty mode lighten the skin tones a bit.
Premium Design, immersive display!
Once you are over with the whole pop-up mechanism craze, you will notice that the smartphone is equipped with an attractive design language. The back panel of the phone comes with a gradient finish, which has a lighter blue tone at the middle and it fades out to the dark colour tone of blue around the edges. There is a micro-dot pattern at the back, which looks nice and the company calls it “Spectrum Ripple Design”. You can check the photos of Vivo V15 Pro here.
This basically gives a feel of a wave-like pattern. The glossy finish pretends to be glass, but it is plastic. On the downside, the phone does attract some smudges, but with dark blue colour option, it is not that visible as compared to other smartphones with a glossy finish. The company is also offering a bumper protective case with the smartphone, which protects the phone when it takes a fall. The phone feels quite comfortable to hold (thanks to the curved edges), and it is not that slippery. There is also a dedicated Google Assistant button. Double tapping on the button will open image recogniser or Google Assistant Visual Snapshot. That said, the smartphone is designed erely to give a premium look and feel.
Coming to the display, the Vivo V15 Pro is equipped with a 6.39-inch Full HD+ Ultra FullView Super AMOLED screen with a resolution 2340 x 1080 pixels along with a 2.5D curved glass. The phone features a high screen-to-body ratio of 91.64 per cent. There almost no bezels on this device and the absence of notch make a quite immersive screen. The viewing angles of the phone are uite excellent and the colour reproduction is amazing. The deep blacks are decent, and you will enjoy streaming content on YouTube on this device. The sad thing here is that it comes with Widevine L3 certification and not Widevine L1. It means that you cannot stream HD content of Netflix or Amazon Prime Videos. This might be a turn-off for streaming enthusiasts.
Performance, Software and Battery
The Vivo V15 Pro is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 675 processor, which is paired with a 6GB of RAM and 128GB of internal storage. The memory can be further expanded via microSD card slot. The performance is quite smooth and you will not notice any lags or shutter during your usage time. The phone can handle most of the daily tasks like streaming music, browsing the web and more quite easily. Even when there are 10 to 15 apps opened in the background, the multitasking between the apps is quite smooth in our testing.
Coming to gaming performance, the phone handles most of the casual titles like Candy Crush Saga, Subway Surfer like a piece of cake. The graphic-intense games like PUBG Mobile, Asphalt 9: Legends and more were handled with ease. The phone comes with Game Assistant application that optimises the gaming experience, and it also lets you block calls, notifications, rejects calls, and optimises the CPU and RAM for a fluid gaming experience.
Vivo 15 Pro runs on FunTouch OS, which is based on Android 9.0 Pie. Vivo has improved the user interface with the latest FunTouch OS. The UI feels smooth as compared to its predecessor. However, you simply cannot ignore the IOS-inspired layout with the user interface. We liked the fact that the UI offers a host of interesting features. For example, you can simply swipe down from the screen to open a global search, where you can search for the apps and other things. Then there are some smart features like Smart Motion. The feature comes with three different sections like a smart wake, smart turn on/off the screen and smart call.
There is an option for split-screen, three-fingerprint swipe to take a screenshot, App Clone and Smart Mirroring that helps to cast music, videos and more. Coming to the downside, it comes with some noticeable amount of bloatware whether be it company’s own applications like AppStore, iMusic, VivoCloud among others or third-party apps like Paytm, PhonePe, Gaane, UC Browser, WPS office and more. Secondly, it becomes a tedious task to find something in the setting menu, which can be a turn off for many.
V15 Pro is equipped with a 3,700mAh battery and the company has bundled Fast charging support. In our testing, we found out that the battery was able to last one full day of normal usage. When we pushed the device with heavy tasks, it comfortably lasted 7 to 8 hours. The fast charging support works fine and it was able to charge the device from 10 per cent to 90 per cent in 1 hour or so. The phone took almost 1 hour and 35 minutes to get fully charged.
The in-display fingerprint scanner works quitewell and so does the face unlock feature. The call connectivity is decent and so is the volume of an earpiece. The audio output thru speakers seems to be fine and at par with the competition.