Vivo V3 review

Vivo launched V3 and V3 Max (Review) smartphones in April. Since then, after the price cut of V3, it has taken its place among the brands in the sub-Rs 15,000 category. However, now the competition is tougher than before. Is Vivo V3 an attractive phone even after the price cut? Know the merits and demerits of this phone in the review.

Design and design
Vivo V3 looks exactly like its bigger variant. The design of Vivo V3 Max is also not very good. If there was no Vivo branding on the front of the phone, one could easily mistake it for the Oppo F1. The V3 has non-backlit capacitive navigation buttons and curved glass edges. However, there is nothing clear about scratch protection in this phone but according to Vivo, the smartphone is equipped with Gorilla Glass protection. A screen guard comes pre-installed with the phone.

We liked the 5 inch display of this phone and it is convenient to hold the phone with one hand and is also easy to use. The IPS display provides good color reproduction and viewing angles but its HD resolution is only (720×1280) pixels. There is no problem with the display in viewing text and icons. But in a phone of this price, a full HD display is necessary and the display could have been made sharper.

The metal frame of the V3 is quite strong and the buttons are given in an ergonomic manner. There is a dual SIM tray on the left side and a separate microSD card slot (up to 128 GB) is provided on the top. There is also a headphone socket near it. The V3 has a powerful speaker that comes with a dedicated amplifier chip. The speaker works well. Music tracks and videos sound good and sound great outdoors too. The speakers could have been better with stereo speakers but this is also good.

The texture given on the rear of the phone does not provide very good grip, hence the phone is a bit slippery. But the silicone case that comes with the phone makes it convenient to hold the phone. Apart from this, a headset, a charger, a data cable, a SIM ejector tool and an Airtel SIM are available in the box. With this SIM you can upgrade your Airtel connection to 4G. The power adapter is larger than necessary and the phone also does not support fast charging.

Specifications and features
Vivo V3 has Qualcomm Snapdragon 616 octa-core processor. The phone has 3 GB RAM and 32 GB storage. Once again it can be said that the phone does not have such specifications which attract much. We have seen these specifications even in phones priced lower than this. The phone supports dual-band Wi-Fi b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0, GPS, FM radio, USB OTG, and 4G LTE bands 1, 3, 5, and 40.

The fingerprint sensor is given on the rear and works quite well. It can also be used as a camera shutter. Apart from this, it can also be used to lock personal files and apps. The V3 runs on Funtouch OS 2.5, which is a custom fork of Android Lollipop. But the absence of Marshmallow in the phone yet is disappointing.

Like Oppo’s ColorOS 3.0, the interface and functions of the V3 are very similar to Apple’s iOS. However, if you are already using a stock Android phone, it will take some time to get used to it. The Recent Apps button works like a menu button and tapping on it on the homescreen will provide options like widgets, transition effects and hiding apps. A long press or swiping from top to bottom will open the app switcher and toggle between Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, etc.

Vivo’s apps like Eye Theme for visual customization, Data Monitor and Eye Manager to manage apps and their permissions, file transfer using Wi-Fi Direct come pre-installed. Apart from this, there is also Vivo Cloud option for your bookmarks, messages, contacts and notes. WhatsApp, WeChat, Facebook and WPS Office come pre-installed in the phone.

The Settings app also has all the new controls like gestures, air operation which gets activated when the phone comes in the palm. When you receive an alert from Smart Multi Screen, you get a floating notification and when opened, it appears on half the screen. This works only if you are watching a video through the stock player or Google Play Movies and YouTube in full screen mode.

performance
The phone’s interface looks a bit confusing when you see it for the first time but it does the job easily. Multi-tasking is easy and the phone runs heavy apps and games smoothly without any issues. In the benchmark test, we got decent figures from the phone. 4G works well on both SIM slots and the earpiece provides good sound during calls. Vivo V3 is comfortable to hold and easy to use due to its small size. Apart from a little heating while playing games, we did not face any overheating problem with the phone.

V3 to 4K video can be played but 1080 pixel video is also not a problem. Our high bitrate files also play easily on the phone. The music player supports FLAC and the audio quality from the speaker is also good. The headset that comes with the phone is not of very good quality.

The 13-megapixel rear camera comes with Phase Detection Autofocus (PDAF) which helps in locking the subject easily. Photos come out well in daylight and look beautiful on the phone’s display. But they get scattered a bit when zoomed. The same problem was seen in macro photos and lack of sharpness is also visible in the focused subjects. To prevent standard photos from looking dull, it is better to use HDR mode. The 8 megapixel front camera provided in the phone is good for taking selfies.

The phone can record up to 1080 pixels but the quality is only average. Videos and photos are very poor in low light. The camera app is well designed and has options like filters, watermarks, and touch or voice triggered capture. The rear camera has multiple shooting modes like HDR, Panorama, Night, Professional, Slow-motion Video and Hyper Lapse Video.

The 2550 mAh battery provided in the phone does not seem very big but due to low screen resolution and not very powerful processor, it lasted for 11 hours 31 minutes in our video playback. Whereas during normal use, after charging once, we were able to use it for more than a day. This phone does not support fast charging but the low capacity battery does not take very long to charge.

our decision
Vivo V3 is a great product but the problem is that there are many other smartphones lining up to compete with it easily. The Moto G4 Plus (Review), Redmi Note 3 (Review) and LeEco Le 2 (Review) have better specifications and are much better than the V3 in terms of display quality, camera and CPU performance. The V3 feels a bit dated today and doesn’t appeal despite its new price of Rs 14,980. Additionally, we’re also not fans of Vivo’s confusing custom Android fork.

However, the battery life of the phone is good and we also liked the size of the phone. The audio performance in the phone is good from both speakers and headphones.