Vivo V3 Review

Vivo has fast grown into one of the top-five smartphone vendors in the world. The manufacturer has made its presence felt by opening its manufacturing plant and also sponsoring this year’s Indian Premier League (IPL). Vivo’s newest launches are the V3 and V3Max, priced at INR 17,980 and INR 23,980 respectively. The Vivo V3 is a simpler, cost-effective phone that offers decent performance and specifications. We have been using the Vivo V3 as our primary smartphone for a few weeks and here’s our review.

Design

The Vivo V3 is a small and compact phone by all means having a sleek metal body and curved edges. The one we got for the review was golden colour with matte finishing and shiny golden parallel borders on the sides. On the right side of the device we have the power and volume buttons. Audio jack, secondary mic and micro SD card slot are resident on the top. Dual SIM tray is on the left side and at the bottom there is primary mic, micro USB port and speaker. The device is great for one-handed usage, and a treat for people with small hands, all thanks to the compact 5-inch display. The metal and glass combination though make the device quite slippery, and we would advise you to use the transparent cover provided in the box.

Hardware and Performance

The Vivo V3 flaunts a 5-inch HD (1280×720 pixels) IPS LCD display and is powered by an octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 616 SoC coupled with 3GB of RAM. The smartphone bears a 13-megapixel rear camera and an 8-megapixel front-facing camera. It sports 32GB of inbuilt storage that’s expandable via microSD card (up to 128GB). It offers the standard connectivity features, including 4G LTE support in India. All this combination is good enough to ensure a smooth performance even with multiple apps running in the background. With basic social networking and a bit of gaming and music does not heat up the device and stays cool most of the times. We didn’t face any major lags during our usage and graphic-intensive games like Marvel Future Fight and Riptide GP2 were handled with relative ease by the GPU. The Vivo V3 is powered by a 2,550 mAh battery with a dual-engine charging technology, which is its version of fast charging. But charging this device using the provided charger takes around 165 minutes from 0-100%.
With Most of the days we only needed to charge the battery once in office and it would survive till the next morning.

Software

Vivo V3 runs on Android 5.1.1 Lollipop operating system with company’s Funtouch OS_2.5 out of the box, but it will get an update to Android 6.0 Marshmallow soon. The Funtouch OS 2.5 generally runs smooth but there were some instances where we felt that the phone should have been more snappy. Just like other Chinese manufacturer’s custom build Android skin the Funtouch OS 2.5 does not have an app drawer and has all the icons on the home screen. Also there is no quick-setting in the notification panel and all these quick shortcuts can be found by swiping the screen up just like LeEco’s eUI skin. This menu includes the apps running in the background, display brightness, volume slider, and toggle buttons for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, flashlight, screenshot, airplane mode, and mobile data among others. The Vivo V3 comes with a lot of pre-installed apps such as WPS Office, WeChat, vivoCloud (online cloud backup tool) and Easy Share (File sharing Tool).

Benchmarks

• Antutu (64 bit) – 40877
• Geekbench 3 – 698 (Single-Core) | 2887 (Multi-core)
• Internal storage Speed – Read (142MB/s), Write (76MB/s)
• Quadrant Standard – 18998

Camera

In the photography department, the Vivo V3 is equipped with a 13-megapixel primary camera and an 8-megapixel selfie camera up front. The photos we clicked with the rear camera in bright natural light were fairly bright with excellent levels of details and contrast. Even in low light conditions the camera was able to capture good photos without a lot of noise. Overall the camera is decent enough to capture amazing shots in daylight. Even though the camera is equipped with PDAF we faced some issues while focusing moving objects. Talking about the camera UI which is very similar to iOS camera app with some additional modes and features like ability to add a watermark to your photos, gender detection, professional mode, filters to name a few.

Fingerprint Sensor and Hi-Fi audio chip

Vivo V3 houses a rear fingerprint sensor which the manufacturer claimed is the most accurate and fastest sensor in this segment. The fingerprint scanner doesn’t take long to configure and it unlocks the device quickly and accurately. Fingerprint scanner can take in around 5 fingerprints and unlocking was quick with the fingerprint scanner. We even tried unlocking the device with mildly oily fingers and slightly moist fingers, and it worked fine. The senor recognizes the fingerprint almost every time having an accuracy of 95%.
Vivo has also installed an onboard Hi-Fi audio chip to differentiate the V3 from its competitor. Vivo’s AK4375 Hi-Fi audio chip ensures that audio output is loud as well as clear.

Verdict

The Vivo V3 then is a good-looking device with excellent build quality and accurate form factor. The display on this device is excellent and is on off the best in the segment. The biggest downside of this device is its price which keeps us from recommending the Vivo V3 to anyone. Despite all the pros, INR 17,980 doesn’t feel justifiable at all especially when you consider the specifications on board. Having devices like Xiaomi Redmi Note3, Zuk Z1, Moto G4 Plus and Oneplus X that offer similar features at a much lower price tag makes the survival of Vivo V3 almost impossible.