Meet again As England qualified for the final of the Euro 2020 soccer tournament, fans of the beautiful game could hardly have failed to notice advertisements for Vivo that were displayed during matches. The company’s X60 Pro phone is in the game, but is it good?
The register received a device from the company to take photos around Wembley Stadium in London at the recent sporting event and we have since spent the last few weeks living with the phone as a daily driver. The result? The Vivo did not score any own goals.
The X60 Pro is a flagship device and while it doesn’t mind four digits like some other handsets, will set you back £ 749 (at time of writing).
The Qualcomm Snapdragon 870 running the show is a bit below what we’d expect from a flagship device, though the 12GB of RAM should be more than enough to keep a few apps in memory. There’s also 256GB of storage to capture the photos and videos this phone is undoubtedly designed for.
Vivo X60 Pro
While we can forgive the Snapdragon 870, we’re not so sure if wireless charging or waterproofing was omitted.
Aside from, the phone looks good and feels almost unbelievably thin in the hand (with the usual camera bump sticking out from the back). It comes in two colors, midnight black and shimmering blue; we had the latter. The finish is smooth, maybe a little too much, and gave the distinct impression that the device was about to slip from your fingers at any time and its glass back was shattering on the floor. On the plus side, the back thankfully wasn’t too much of a fingerprint magnet.
The 4,200mAh battery is charged from a USB Type-C connector and Vivo includes both a charger and headphones in the box. The 6.56-inch AMOLED display has a resolution of 2378 x 1080 pixels and is pleasing to the eye, with vivid colors, dark blacks, and a high refresh rate.
Vivo’s variant of the Android operating system is called “Funtouch” and seems to us to be pretty close to the original Android, certainly more so than some of the more conspicuous efforts. Support for 5G is also present and correct, and the phone can be secured through various methods including an on-screen fingerprint.
However, it is the camera Vivo is most proud of, and rightly so. The company is making much of its “co-engineering” partnership with Zeiss (an optics supplier for some Nokia phones over the years, including the eventually doomed Lumia 1020).
For your money, you get three rear facing lenses. A 48 MP main camera, a 13 MP wide-angle lens, and a 13 MP portrait snapper. The front camera works at 32MP for those all-important selfies.
Camera enthusiasts will be pleased to note that the 48MP main camera has an impressive f / 1.48 aperture. The star of the show, however, is the 2.0 gimbal stabilization to compensate for camera shake. While the company has shown its smart snappers through the usual medium of canned extreme sports videos, we have found that the technology works just as well for our simpler home video purposes.
There’s an almost confusing array of camera modes, but we found that the 48MP camera’s thick aperture, paired with the stabilization system, made for some impressive shots.
Colors are vibrant, although some smoothing is visible
The other modes didn’t do so well – the company was very proud of the “Pro Sports†burst mode, but we found that there was an incredibly small delay between pressing the button and starting the engagement. That said, other modes, such as Night, worked surprisingly well for a mobile device.
An action shot taken in “Pro Sports” mode
There’s also only 2x optical zoom (and more digital zoom levels), which will disappoint some, but turned out to be perfectly adequate for us.
However, there is no escape from the price. We would have hoped for a more powerful processor, but the Snapdragon 870 is more than enough to keep the X60 Pro running for normal tasks. Wireless charging is sorely lacking, however.
Yet what sets this phone apart is its camera and, most importantly, the stabilization technology. Sure, a few more pounds can fetch a OnePlus 9 Pro, with its Hasselblad and Snapdragon 888 camera tech, but for us a lower price tag and an impressive snapper (even with the other flaws) means the X60 Pro might not. to be abandoned on the sidelines.
And we are very sorry for the references to football. ®
