Vivo V15 Pro review: Closing in on greatness

Note: This article was first published on 19 July 2019.

Faithful followers of HWZ will remember that my past interactions with the Vivo brand have not been positive, to say the least. The V9+ was considered too expensive for a Snapdragon 400-series phone, while the X21 likewise tried to hide average tech under a headline feature - the world’s first in-display fingerprint sensor - that failed to work more often than not.

But Vivo appears to have turned a corner in the V15 Pro, which, for S$699, packs pretty competitive features like a triple-camera setup that includes 48-megapixel and wide-angle units, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 675 processor, and a notchless 6.39-inch Super AMOLED display courtesy of a pop-up camera that packs 32 megapixels. Will we now see a promise kept, or pipe dreams reprised?

Design (and pop-up camera)

Well, being very easy on the eye indeed is a good start.

Our review unit was supplied in an extremely fetching Coral Red, whose magenta-to-coral gradient is set off by subtle wave accents, all of it almost glowing in the morning sun.

The markings on the rear are also pleasantly minimal: just the Vivo logo and "48MP Triple Camera". One of my pet design peeves on today’s phones is the completely pointless "Designed by __(the manufacturer’s name)__" line. Nothing like that on the V15 Pro, hallelujah.

However, the back material is plastic, not glass, and despite being framed in metal, the V15 Pro still feels somewhat toy-like in the hand. Moreover, a case is mandatory if you wish to keep those good looks. Commendably, Vivo has chosen to provide a thick but very rugged one in the box.

Pop-up cameras like the one on the V15 Pro need a rethink in terms of design, in my opinion. Most are just ugly, uninspired blocks that stick out like a kid's first tooth. More than that, I have this constant fear that striking a table edge, railing, or some other object with the camera open could lop the whole thing clean off the phone. At least the "wedges" on fellow BBK stablemate Oppo Reno are less fragile and look unique, while the Oppo Find X's slider design avoids these issues totally.

Display and fingerprint sensor

The Vivo V15 Pro’s gorgeous display is a visual treat. Super AMOLED panels are always appreciated in a smartphone, and when they're 6.39 inches and notchless, the wow factor kicks up another… notch. (I'll show myself out.)

While it performs well under bright sunlight, it only has mediocre color accuracy. It’s over-saturated, and the whites tend to have a bluish tinge, which is not uncommon for mid-range Chinese devices. But I'm willing to overlook these shortcomings because it has no notch. If you can't tell by now, I have little patience for notched displays.

The Vivo V15 Pro has an in-display fingerprint sensor, apparently supplied by Goodix, whose tech prowess in this area has thankfully now matured. Despite being a bit slower than the best examples of this kind, such as the Huawei P30 Pro or my personal OnePlus 7 Pro, I had very little trouble unlocking with my calloused fingers on the first try.

Atop the phone, you’ll find a headphone jack (not the best place to put it, if I'm honest) at the opposite end of the pop-up camera.

Sadly, the mono speaker on the bottom doesn’t do the huge screen justice. It plenty loud but it is devoid of bass and not up to par with the competition in overall audio fidelity.

And oh, that silly microUSB 2.0 socket. Clearly a result of Vivo’s decision to maintain compatibility with accessories and cables that folks in developing countries might be hanging on to - but there’s no defending its use on a S$699 phone. It's 2019, bring on USB-C, please.

So the V15 Pro is doing well in our books so far. Then we come to Vivo’s Achilles heel: its Funtouch OS skin.

Let's get the good out of the way first. The underlying Android version is 9.0, there isn’t a ton of bloat, and the software is quite fast and smooth. Sadly, that's where it stops. In terms of design, Funtouch OS is not what I would call “matured”. Its kiddish visual language, haphazard design elements, and janky English will embarrass you to anyone who knows that you paid S$699 for this phone.

What's more, Vivo tries to foist its own AI assistant, Jovi, onto the user in a way that feels intrusive among the current crop of smart assistants. For example, while Samsung phones have a dedicated Bixby button and Bixby Home, there’s a way to remap the button and keep Bixby out of sight. Huawei's HiBoard and HiVision can be disabled completely if you know where to look. Even Google never forces Assistant on you until you tap the microphone icon in the search bar.

On the other hand, Jovi’s icon (reminiscent of an inverted Sony Walkman logo) is always in your face when you pull down the notification shade - as if removing the toggles wasn’t enough. And if you are wondering where the toggles went, read on.

Even more strangely, Jovi has a confusing co-existence with Google Assistant on the V15 Pro. The “Smart Button” key on the left edge of the phone, opposite the power and volume keys, is configured to bring up either Google Assistant functions or Jovi ones, depending on whether you press it once or twice.

And if you need more evidence of how confused Vivo’s software engineers are, just look at the screenshot above. The "Smart Button" key is referred to both as the “Smart Button” and the “AI button” within the same screen!

Jovi’s AI engine includes an Image Recogniser, which is best described as serviceable. It had no trouble with common objects, such as this fire extinguisher. Unfortunately, more complex ones, such as this duster, could not be recognized - Google Lens was far superior in this regard.

All of this illustrates how Funtouch OS tries to do what no one asked for. But wait - here’s its biggest sin yet. Instead of putting toggles in the notification shade like everyone else in Android land, Vivo just had to go and ape iOS's Control Center in a bad way. Firstly, it looks visually cluttered, with two sliders bunched up against toggles in a space only half the screen length. But even worse, it rarely manages to appear on the first try - you need to swipe up almost exactly from a corner of the screen. Puzzling design choices like these might be acceptable on phones costing $300, but the V15 Pro is playing in the $700 leagues, way too close to the street prices of more polished "sub-flagships" like the Samsung Galaxy S10e and Google's heavy-hitting, pure-Android Pixel 3A XL.

Perhaps all this works for Vivo because emerging markets aren't as finicky as I am about things like awkward UI and UX and kiddish design. But to take this brand upmarket, Vivo will need more mature software, which folks like Nokia and even Samsung have been pursuing for their low-end products.

I've said it before and will say it again: I'll wager that Android One versions of Vivo phones would sell like hot cakes in the company’s key markets. Do less, achieve more. Your call, Vivo.

Performance analysis

The Vivo V15 Pro packs a Snapdragon 675 allied to 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. This mid-range combo serves up the goods when it comes to user experience, with barely any noticeable slowdown or lag.

Naturally, comparisons will come up against the similarly-priced Google Pixel 3a XL, which for S$79 more (RRP) is slightly slower in the brains department with a Snapdragon 670. We’ve also thrown in last year’s OnePlus 6T - which at about S$650 on the street remains a very good value - and the similarly-priced 6GB/128GB version of the Honor View 20, which has a similar camera setup and screen size, and trades a decidedly less appealing LCD display for a more powerful Kirin 980 processor.

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JetStream 2

For web browsing, we’re switching over to the Jetstream 2 benchmark, which measures browsing performance more accurately than SunSpider over a number of more modern scenarios. To that end, we were only able to draw a comparison versus the Pixel 3a XL, which isn’t a bad thing, since both phones have similar processors. I’ve also thrown my personal OnePlus 7 Pro, a Snapdragon 855 device, into the ring for comparison.

Shocker! Despite having in theory newer cores (Kryo 460 versus Kryo 360) than the Pixel 3a XL, the V15 Pro trails it by a considerable amount, which clearly can be put down to software optimisation. In fact, when we tried this benchmark on the stock browser instead of Chrome, it would frequently seize up and refuse to run.

Geekbench & Antutu

Still, better cores are better cores, and the V15 Pro edges out the Pixel 3A XL in Geekbench and Antutu, but obviously loses against the Snapdragon 845 in the OnePlus 6T - or the barnstorming Kirin 980 in the Honor phone.

3DMark

In the graphics department, we see a reversal of fortunes. Despite the Vivo V15 Pro being equipped with newer Cortex-A76 derived Kryo 460 cores, the Snapdragon 675’s Adreno 612 GPU is actually slower than the Adreno 615 on the Snapdragon 670 powering the Google Pixel 3a XL.

Battery life

Our standard battery test for mobile phones has the following parameters:

• Looping a 720p video with screen brightness and volume at 100%
• Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity turned on
• Constant data streaming through email and Twitter

The V15 Pro and the Pixel 3A XL have identical 3,700mAh battery capacities, but in our video-looping test, the Pixel 3A XL kept going for 2 more hours before it died. See, Vivo, I told you Android One would be good for you.

When all is said and done, you should still get a whole day of moderate use out of this phone if you keep screen brightness at sane levels and avoid working the camera too hard. Just remember that it doesn’t charge in a jiffy. Qualcomm Quick Charge 3.0 is present, but it took ages to fill up the battery.

Camera & imaging

The V15 Pro's tri-camera setup is par for the mid-range course: a 48MP main sensor, an 8MP sensor for telephoto shots, and a 5MP depth sensor.

The 48MP unit comprises 0.8um pixels that can be "binned" in low light, effectively becoming 1.6um "super-pixels", at the cost of a drop to 12MP in output resolution. The sensor sits behind an f/1.8 lens.

In daylight, the V15 Pro turned in a brilliant performance. With bags of detail, excellent dynamic range, and faithful color reproduction, there was little to complain about.

There’s more of the same when the sun goes down with decent night shots, though not the most detailed in the business.

If you want to impress someone with a 48MP photo, the V15 Pro provides this option but it simply outputs the full sensor resolution without processing, which causes detail to drop off severely, no thanks to the noise from those 0.8um pixels. Honor/Huawei's AI Ultra Clarity mode is still the only processing we've seen that actually works for 48MP shots.

The 8MP ultra-wide makes do with an f2.2 aperture - and correspondingly, as with most of these types of camera, the output is great as long as there’s a lot of light.

The pop-up selfie camera is a 32-megapixel unit with an f/2 aperture, also featuring pixel binning. Not that 32 megapixels of detail are available since Vivo's Asian-friendly beauty processing will gladly blur any of your perceived facial imperfections.

Video recording on the V15 Pro is hardly worth mentioning for a phone of this class - 4K at 30fps, 1080p at 30 or 60fps, both with ho-hum colors, detail levels, and sound quality. It’s worth noting that while 1080p video clearly had electronic image stabilization applied to it, 4K video did not appear to be stabilized.

Going up against the Pixel 3A

The Vivo V15 Pro is easily compared against the Google Pixel 3A XL because of their similar price points, so we've taken the liberty of shooting a couple of comparisons in different situations.

In good light, both cameras are capable of producing very detailed images with low noise. However, low-light situations unsurprisingly see the Pixel 3A XL pulling ahead of the V15 Pro thanks to Google’s awesome Night Sight processing.

(Note: We’ve captioned each image, but for ease of reference, the Vivo shot will always be shown before that from the Pixel.)

Scene 1

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Scene 5

To me, the difference between the Pixel 3A XL and the V15 Pro’s cameras is an indication of cultural trends in photography, rather than technological progress. Google has chosen to stick with natural-looking images, but the V15 Pro’s output would do better on social media. You’ll have to decide whether you’re a photographer for photography’s sake, or if you live and shoot for the ‘gram. Either way, you won’t go wrong.

Final thoughts

The V15 Pro reflects the unstinting progress of Chinese engineering and, in particular, that of parent company BBK, also the owner of the Oppo and OnePlus brands. For S$699, it ticks all the boxes for what we've come to expect from mid-range Chinese smartphones: a gorgeous, notch-free AMOLED display, a fluid user experience, a powerful camera, and decent battery life.

Really, it's only its software that keeps the V15 Pro from true greatness. Funtouch OS needs a complete rethink. Samsung’s new One UI is clean and elegant, MIUI and Huawei’s EMUI have both gained more coherent design over the years, and even Oppo's own ColorOS now looks less cluttered. The V15 Pro is much better armed than its predecessors on the hardware front, but when it comes to software, we shouldn't have to endure something like Funtouch OS on upper mid-range devices in 2019 - and especially not when an increasing number of more polished Android skins are holding their own against the iPhone.

Finally, we have a Vivo I like and would give a nod to. But consider this: Android One on the V15 Pro could be a beautiful thing.

Think about it, Vivo. For the last time, I hope.