Vivo V7 Plus detailed review

In the beginning of the year, dual cameras were a craze and after the Samsung Galaxy S8 and LG G6 came into the picture, the edge-to-edge display became a feature to have. While we have already seen phones like the LG Q6 and the Micromax Canvas Infinity bringing that technology to the mass market categories, Vivo is putting its own twist into the mix. Meet the new Vivo V7+, which is Vivo’s first phone to feature the new 18:9 aspect ratio display in addition to the 24MP front facing camera. Being a Vivo phone, the selfie feature was a given, but the phone also has a DAC inside for audio lovers. So, to find out whether the Vivo V7+ can live up to Vivo’s motto of “camera and music”, we took the phone through its paces in our review.

Selfie camera
We don't know about you, but we are a little weary of all the selfie phones Vivo has to offer. That being said, it seems consumers are unhappy with the quality of their selfies and that they are more than likely to be the primary buying factor. Hence, the 24MP front facing camera on the Vivo V7+ seemed to be fit for the job. We took multiple selfies in various light conditions and observed that while the front facing camera lives up to its megapixel count, it is just decent. Images in natural lighting conditions or come out to be good with decent details and almost true to source colour. However, as soon as you move indoors or in dim lighting, images tend to be noisy. Now, we can do some nitpicking here about the overall quality, but the fact of the matter is that the selfies you will achieve with this camera will be usable on social media, which is often all you need from selfies. 

(L-R) - Normal mode, Beauty mode

The phone features a front facing flash as well, which Vivo says allows you to take “moonlight selfies”. However, besides blinding you and taking an overexposed image most of the times, there is nothing new here, we would recommend against using it as long as possible.

You still get softer focus as default to undermine those skin blemishes, but it does not make you look as artificial as some others. Although, if you want, you can do that too by tweaking the toggles on the beauty mode. You can also click a wide selfie with the phone and the phone uses the panorama method to take this image. These images only look good when your subjects maintain their expression through the process, otherwise you end up with a rather funny image.

Group Selfie

Rear camera
The 16MP rear camera on the other hand is better than the front camera. It is not a huge leap in terms of what we usually get in this segment, but it serves its purpose well. Images taken in ideal daylight conditions come out to be good with rich colours and you won’t find the minor lack of details unless you’re pixel peeping.Images however start getting grainy as soon as you move indoors or anywhere with improper lighting. Image details, however, remain intact and images themselves are fairly usable. It does take the camera an extra moment to capture photos at night, which is not really an issue at its price and considering the quality, in our opinion.

The other good thing about the rear camera is that the separation of the foreground and background seems slightly superior compared to its peers.

You also get tons of filters, face beauty mode for the rear camera, an ULTRA HD mode that stitches multiple image captures to produce a 64MP image, but doesn’t really look much better, and a professional mode. You also get a ‘Live’ mode similar to the one we have seen on the iPhone, which takes a 3 second video of the subject alongside the image, but otherwise does not add much value. Although, you might like the feature for making gifs.

Build and Design
All these images are presented on a large 5.99-inch IPS LCD display, which comes in a 18:9 aspect ratio. As you may have noticed from the TV adverts and the images in this review, the phone does have thinner bezels and higher screen-to-body ratio. However, even with the thinner bezels and a relatively slim design, the Vivo V7+ is not much more ergonomic than a 5.5-inch device. That being said, the display certainly plays a major part in the looks of the phone and while it does not make it intriguing, it is certainly interesting to watch video on such a display.

The screen is wrapped in an all metal unibody shell that looks and feels quite premium and is lightweight as well. Vivo has done a good job of integrating the antenna lines with the metal body, although it looks quite similar to the six string antenna lines we saw on the Oppo F3 Plus. The two physical keys on the right are tactile and have good feedback. However, the buttons as well as the fingerprint scanner are a little higher up, which means one might have to shuffle the phone in hand to reach them. So, it is most certainly a two handed device, which is well designed and features good build quality. I would also like to add here that the phone misses out on a USB Type-C port and has a slight camera bump, which does not look good.

Display and UI
As we mentioned earlier, one of the key USPs of the phone is its display and it is an extremely good one at that. Even with lower resolution, Vivo has managed to make the display look good, so once you get over the fact that you can’t view 1080p content on this display, it is not bad. Colour reproduction is decent, as is the touch response. What seems quite impressive though is how auto-brightness on this display works. It is not super fast, but it calibrates the brightness just right, somewhat like an iPhone. The display is quite bright as well, our luminance meter touched almost 700 lux on the Vivo V7+ display, which is in the flagship territory.

What is a bummer though, is Android is not yet mature enough to solve the app scalability issue with 18:9 aspect ratio. Hence, almost older apps have black pillars in full screen, which breaks the purpose of this elegant display.

As for the UI, it is business as usual and by usual we mean, iOS inspired. We have called Vivo out earlier for making an identical looking UIs to iOS, but it seems FunTouch OS won't be changing anytime soon. Vivo has tried to make the UI look as identical as possible and has even gone to the effort of hiding essential message settings in the main setting menu, instead of the app itself. The quick toggle menu is a swipe up from the bottom and if you give a closer look at the icons, they appear to be pretty much the same. 

All that said, everything remains very functional and is easy to use. Using a Vivo phone comes with a small learning curve, but once you are through that, it is as easy to use as any other device. We are not going to go into the app duplication bit and the theme manager and the V-appstore, as that is something that has been carried forward for a long time now.

On the security front, the rear mounted fingerprint scanner is fast enough and for that extra something, you also get face recognition. While the fingerprint scanner works as intended, face recognition works with the display on and does not work properly in low light situations. Vivo does mention that this method is not very secure and can be fooled. However, in our testing the device didn't unlock with a picture.

Performance
While the camera does a decent job and we have just minor complaints about the design, the performance something which we are not very happy about. Vivo has employed a relatively new Qualcomm Snapdragon 450 SoC for the task. While this chip is as powerful as the Snapdragon 625 in benchmarks, it feels slightly less ‘snappy’ compared to the latter. Using the phone for more than week, we saw slight lag in animations more often than expected, making it noteworthy. The phone, however has 4GB of RAM, and manages all kinds of tasks reasonably. It is certainly not the fastest while switching between apps, but if you are not counting time on a stop-clock, it is not a deal breaker either.

Gaming on the phone is not bad either and games like Vainglory do take advantage of the extra screen space, offering better view of the game and your characters. We did not find any major issues with gaming on the device, apart from some occasional lagging. Game load times are certainly a bit slower, but you’ll probably not care about it.

Call quality on either end is quite good. However, we did observe call drops a lot more than usual while using this phone. We also observed loss of total connectivity in underground parkings and other secluded areas, where other test phones have worked in the past. 

Lastly, we need to address the audio quality on this phone, which is indeed best in it class. Vivo has employed a (AK4376A) Hi-Fi audio chip, which makes the sound output via headphones much better than usual. The phone truly excels if you have a high fidelity audio on your phone and a good pair of headphones. 

Battery life
While performance is not the Snapdragon’s 450’s strongest suit, the chip is not very power hungry. Powering a 5.99-inch display and taking care of all the apps we threw at it, the phone survived through the day easily. Gaming and camera do burn the battery quickly, but not at a very alarming rate. In our battery test, the phone scored 6 hours and 33 minutes, is expected from a relatively smaller (by today’s standards) 3225 mAh battery. The phone also supports fast charging and Vivo bundles a fast charger with the device. Although, it is not as fast as a OnePlus or even Samsung’s A series devices.

Bottomline
The Vivo V7+ is a decent phone, but at an asking price of Rs 21,990, it is not something we would recommend. The front facing camera is good, but could have been better and the same can be said about the rear camera. We do like the large display and battery life is reasonable, but it would have been a more compelling device if it had better performance as well.

How it compares
Is it the best selfie phone in the market? Well, no. If you compare selfie-to-selfie, the older Oppo F3 Plus beats the Vivo 7+ squarely. The Vivo V7+ does take better selfie than the Asus Zenfone 4 Selfie Pro, which gives it an edge. However, we’d still recommend an Oppo F3 or F3 Plus, depending on your budget. 

As for the overall performance, the Xiaomi Mi Max 2 is a better phone than this. If you can raise your budget by around 4K, you will have the Oppo F3 Plus and the OnePlus 3T as option.

Huawei P20 Lite 64GB detailed review

Huawei made a comeback last month to the Indian smartphone market with the flagship Huawei P20 Pro with three cameras at the back, and the toned-down, but similar-looking P20 Lite. While the P20 Pro set a benchmark for the smartphone camera, the Huawei P20 Lite doesn’t have an USP like that. Heck, it doesn’t even have the Leica branding at the back. What it does have is the notch cutout from part of the display and a dual camera setup at the back. It’s no doubt the P20 Pro is the flagship here, but can the P20 Lite set a precedent in the mid-range market similarly? We find out.

Design

Rarely do mid-range phones try to look good without compromising on the feature set. The Huawei P20 Lite is not an original design by any means, but it does look elegant for the price it is offered. Hold the phone and you’ll know where the inspiration came from. The P20 Lite rocks a display notch and is not the first Android device to do so. Now, a lot of controversy has happened over the notch, but truth be told, the notch serves a purpose. The demand for full-screen phones are at an all time high and the notch allows phone makers to utilise more free space on the body for the screen, than ever before. The iPhone X of course has more use for the notch. It needs the TruDepth camera to be centrally positioned to facilitate Face ID, but the Huawei P20 Lite has no such sensors housed in the notch. Instead, the notch houses the front camera, the ambient sensor and the microphone. The notch is also much smaller than the iPhone X. Amidst phones with univisium display with the more common taller form factor, the P20 Lite is easily distinguishable thanks to the notch and its compact size. But with more ‘notched’ phones incoming this year, that advantage may soon be gone.

Now, the purpose of the notch is to utilise the free space on the top and the bottom of the body. But while the Huawei P20 Lite shave off inches from the top, the bottom chin has a lot of free space where the Huawei moniker is placed. It sort of defeats the purpose of the notch and one could question Huawei’s design choice for simply following a trend more than anything else.

The notch, however, isn’t omnipresent. Huawei gives an option to hide it by simulating a black patch over it. The area still houses the notification badges and the network icons, but the content doesn’t take up the extra space. Note that by ‘removing’ the notch, you will be giving up roughly 0.2-inches of screen real estate.

But enough about the notch. Turn the phone around and you will be greeted by a vertically aligned dual camera setup placed raised above the glass body. Huawei’s colour choices are interesting. The phone is available in a deep midnight black which we received for the review. It’s akin to the iPhone 7’s Piano Black variant but with a slightly glossy glass body. There’s also a blue and pink colour variant along with a new twilight variant that can change colours based on the angle you’re looking at. Unfortunately, the twilight variant is not available in India. Hopefully, Huawei will introduce it soon.

As mentioned above, the phone does have a glass body, which requires it to be handled very carefully. Once again, the design choice of putting a glass back is somewhat pointless. Apart from better aesthetics, glass back is used to facilitate wireless charging. The P20 Lite has no such provision. As a result, it comes off being intentionally brittle. One drop might shatter the back and take away all the beauty the phone boasts of. The frame, however is made of solid aluminium. It’s polished to give a smooth finish that adds to the elegance. The phone uses a USB-Type C port to charge which is placed at the bottom, flanked by the 3.5mm headphone jack and the external speakers on either side.  The more expensive P20 Pro houses an infrared sensor as well, but that’s missing on this one.

All said and done, the P20 Lite is one of the most compact full-screen phones out there right now. It fits a 5.84-inch display in a 5.85-inch body which makes it score high on ergonomics. It feels nice to hold and the finger can reach the other end of the display quite easily. There’s nothing to complain about Honor’s craftsmanship save for the reasons behind certain choice of materials.

Display

The panel on the Huawei P20 Lite is one of the brightest we have seen at the sub-20k price range. It’s an IPS LCD panel of full HD+ resolution and stretches to 5.84-inches diagonally. The colours are also quite vibrant and at medium brightness, it tends to pop out when indoors. Outside under the sun though, the colours seem a little faded, but thanks to the higher max brightness, texts are legible enough.

Huawei does offer a lot of options to tweak the display though. You can cycle between a cooler and warmer colour temperature, but you’re better off sticking to the default option. There’s a blue-light filter, which has become more or less standard across smartphone. What’s interesting is that you can switch between 720p and 1080p resolution. Dialling down the resolution helps save battery. There are also options to tweak the text size and font as well as the above-mentioned option of hiding the notch. However, even after hiding the notch, you can still make out its presence as the panel is LCD which cannot selectively turn off pixels to achieve full black.

Furthermore, not all apps support the notch currently. While common apps like Facebook, YouTube and WhatsApp supports it, games like PubG and Asphalt haven’t been optimised for the cutout in the middle.

Videos and photos on the display are rich and well-detailed. The sharpness is also commendable. The colour temperature by default is a little on the cooler side, but that doesn’t come in the way of enjoying content on the screen.

Performance

Now, the P20 Lite may score high on aesthetics and imaging prowess, but Huawei has held back in upgrading the performance. The P20 Lite is powered by the same HiSilicon Kirin 659 chipset that powered all of Honor’s mid-range devices last year, including the Honor 9i, the Honor 7X and more recently, the Honor 9 Lite. That is coupled with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. The Kirin 659 was a challenger to the Snapdragon 625 last year, and for the most part, it did give a good competition to one of Qualcomm’s most popular chipsets. However, with current mid-range devices being powered by the more powerful Snapdragon 630 and the Snapdragon 636, the Kirin 659-powered Huawei P20 Lite lags far behind.

The same is evident in benchmark results. The P20 Lite registers an AnTuTu 7.0 score of 88282 which is way lesser than the Redmi Note 5 Pro's score of 112652. It proves that despite being priced higher, it cannot match up to the performance of more affordable devices. The CPU performance of the phone is also lesser than the current industry average, although the phone can hit a max clock speed of 2.36GHz which is higher than any other mid-range chipsets currently. However, clocking that high a frequency will require a lot of computational load for a long duration. Also, at full power, the CPU will drain the battery a lot faster. It’s not the highest frequency that matters when it comes to mobile chipsets, but how efficiently can the CPU allocate the resources and get the job done without stuttering and stumbling.

Speaking of which, the real-world performance of the phone was more or less satisfactory. The EMUI UI on top of Android 8.0 tends to put a lot of load on the processor which does tend to bog down the phone sometimes. Huawei claims to use machine learning to understand the user’s usage habits and tunes the phone accordingly. Frankly, I didn’t see a difference after a week-long use of the phone. There are occasional lags and stutters in the UI and apps take a wee bit longer to launch. Once running, there was no slowdowns or stutters though. Gaming is also quite satisfactory. PubG mobile runs on medium settings and I didn’t encounter any frame drops while playing.

The EMUI interface is what takes away from the elegance of the phone. It’s a premium phone if you don’t turn on the screen. Once you do, it feels like one of those amateurish interfaces seen in budget Chinese phones. The asymmetrical icons, the choppy animation and a bunch of bloatware apps makes it one of the lesser appealing interfaces on a phone. Having said that, EMUI comes loaded with a lot of personalisation options. The Settings app is a long scroll packed with options ranging from security features and accessibility options. There’s a face unlock option as well which isn’t secure but works when there’s light outside. In fact, the phone was easily unlocked when someone else pointed it to my face. Otherwise, the rear-mounted fingerprint sensor is as fast as it can get.

Camera

While the performance aspect of the P20 Lite is underwhelming, it more than makes up for it in terms of imaging prowess. The P20 Lite may not rock the Leica branding like its more expensive elder sibling, but the dual cameras at the back are one of the most effective we have seen in that price range.

The P20 Lite sports a 16-megapixel sensor with f/2.2 aperture and 1.0um pixel pitch along with a 2-megapixel depth sensor. That’s the usual dual camera setup seen in mid-range phones. But Huawei does some magic behind the scenes that makes the colours come out quite vibrant and more or less accurate. The daytime imagery is more than satisfactory with the right amount of exposure and dynamic contrast. Highlights and shadows are well-balanced and comes close to what the Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 Pro can produce with the rear camera.

Closeup shots can give good details and sharpness although the algorithm tends to simulate the depth of field which makes the background blur a little inconsistent. The colours are lush and vibrant and nothing to complain about.

Low-light is where it aces, though. The P20 Lite can take good photos even there’s little light. There is some noise, but the details and sharpness are well-preserved. It’s perhaps the most well-tuned camera at the mid-range.

The only place where it falters is in the bokeh mode. The background blur in the P20 Lite isn’t as very consistent although it can produce circular bokeh, which is a mark of a professionally shot  photo.

As for selfies, the 16-megapixel shooter is good enough. It has the added beautification modes and software-based bokehs, which tends to make you look quite artificial. It will remove all blemishes and spots and make the skin look softer. It’s up to the user to decide whether to use it. In case you don’t, there’s an option to turn it off.

Battery

The P20 Lite is powered by a 3,000mAh battery that just about does the work. When used lightly, the phone will last over a day, but a little stress can drain the battery by the end of a typical work day. Using the phone over a week, I felt the battery drain is higher when taking photos and browsing the internet. Gaming is more optimised. Playing PubG for an hour drained the battery by around 30 percent, which is more impressive than some flagship-grade phones. Huawei claims to use machine learning to tune the battery to eke out more juice, which seems to be the case considering how certain tasks are less stressful for the battery while some are more. However, we can never know for sure. In the PC Mark 2.0 Battery test, the phone lasted around 6 hours, which is decent enough for its price.

Bottomline

The Huawei P20 Lite is a welcome offering at the sub-20K price point. It’s a tad overpriced, yes, but considering the design chops of the phone and the camera, the price is quite justified. Is it better than the Redmi Note 5 Pro? If you consider the value for money, then no. Otherwise, the camera is at par with Xiaomi’s offering. The P20 Lite feels like the younger sibling to the P20 Pro in every sense. They have similar designs and cameras that are class-leading in their own segment. Save for the battery life and the performance, the Huawei P20 Lite can be hailed as one of the better mid-range phones around.

Xolo Q600S detailed review

A very good thing about smartphones today is that manufacturers have started paying attention to the looks, build and design even in the lower price segments. If only that was enough to sell a smartphone though. Lava chairman and MD, Hari Om Rai, has often asserted that his two brands, Lava and Xolo, are not only competing against others, but also each other. A few days ago, I reviewed the Lava Iris X1, which knocks it out of the park in the looks department, but fails in most others. Now, I have the Xolo Q600s, which is the same price as the Iris X1 and is again, a good looking phone that pales when you put it to the test. Here’s how.

Build and Design

The Iris X1 looked almost exactly like Apple’s design for the iPhone. The Xolo Q600s is a smaller, plastic version of the Xiaomi Mi3, built by the ‘Apple of China’. It’s got the sharp corners and rounded edges, which give the Mi3 its impressive looks. It’s missing the metallic finish of the Mi3 though, among other things. Still, the Xolo Q600s is one good looking smartphone and much better than many others in the segment, with the exception perhaps of the Iris X1 and Asus Zenfone 5. (Click the photos to enlarge)

Good looks don’t mean a good phone though and here’s why. The Q600s has a somewhat glossy back cover, which isn’t the best against falls and bumps. You may end up bruising it quite easily. Moreover, if you look around the body, you’ll see gaps in the places where the back cover attaches to the rest of the device. This points towards lack lustre work.

So, overall, while the Xolo Q600s, does look good, it doesn’t do quite as well build wise. In fact, the Iris X1 has better build quality than this, even though I wasn’t very impressed with that one either.

Display and UI

The display on this phone is a 4.5-inch 720p IPS LCD version, which is not very bad. It is in fact one of the better things about this phone. Here again, the screen is a fingerprint magnet, which forces me to penalise it. Moreover, it isn’t the brightest screen that you will find and coupled with your fingerprints, makes for bad sunlight visibility. Still, it is not the worst display in the under 10k price segment.

I’m actually quite happy with the choice of UI though. Xolo chose to stay away from customisations and keep a stock UI for the Android KitKat 4.4.2 OS on this. There’s not much that Xolo has done, except the coloured SIM (SIM 1 and SIM 2) card symbols on the top.

Performance

From all of the above you would have gathered that I was quite disappointed with this phone. But nothing disappointed me more than its performance. The Q600s has a 1.2 GHz Broadcom BCM23550 quad core processor, with a Broadcom Videocore IV GPU for graphics. This is the same as the Iris X1, but not only did the Iris X1 perform better, but so did other phones in this range.

I tried all kinds of games on this one, from the simple Subway Surfer and Temple Run to high-end ones like Dead Trigger 2. It doesn’t do well, practically or in synthetic benchmarks. While Antutu X and others may give you a ‘good’ rating, there are plenty of other phones in this segment that have way higher rankings than the Q600s. While Subway Surfer and other less resource intensive games perform all right on the phone, this is not one for high-end gaming. Then again, you do not expect that out of a device in this range either.

One of the benefits of having a stock UI is that it doesn’t lag easily. The UI on this though is sluggish and slow, which is a let down for a phone that looks this good. The only saving grace was the battery life, which is not all that bad. Still, it is not the best and you could get better options from brands like Intex, Sony, Asus, HTC and even Lava (with the Iris X1).

Camera

The camera on this smartphone is a 5 MP rear shooter, while the front selfie camera has a VGA sensor. The rear camera performs quite well for one in this range. The pictures taken were vivid, with minimal noise, which is good. The camera UI is also stock, with a few settings options that can be accessed from the top right. While the camera on its sister brand’s competitor is slightly better, the Q600s definitely has a better camera than the Moto E and some other smartphones in this range. Under proper lighting conditions, the camera actually took some pretty decent pictures. (Click the photos to enlarge)

Conclusion

Overall, the Xolo Q600s is not a phone that I would recommend. If you want a phone in this range then the Asus Zenfone 5 is a much better choice. If you don’t want to spend the couple of thousand for that, then the Moto E is a better choice. You could also consider the Karbonn Titanium S1 Plus, which gives a more fluid performance, albeit with lower battery life.

In addition, the 4GB internal storage will haunt you if you download a lot of apps onto your phone and a micro-SD card is a must.