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Vivo Z1 Pro review: Offers a 'premium' touch at an affordable price tag

There’s no denying the fact that Vivo, in the past couple of years, has really added quite a few innovations in its smartphones. And we mean this for several aspects including screen, battery, camera and the design - which essentially means all the key buying factors of the smartphone. And like what we have seen with other popular smartphone brands in the market, Vivo has also started bringing the innovation found in its ‘premium’ devices such as Vivo Nex to more affordable handsets - case in point, Vivo Z series.
The Z series, as termed by the Chinese handset maker, is aimed at generation Z. So, keeping this in mind, it has included some premium features to Z1 Pro, which is its first smartphone in the lineup.

The handset is priced at Rs 14,990 (base) and falls in direct competition with two major smartphone series from rival brands - Samsung (Galaxy M series) and Xiaomi (Redmi series). While you already have the Y series smartphones by Vivo, the Z series comes as a breath of fresh air and something new to look forward to for Vivo fans.

Vivo Z1 Pro launched recently and went on sale a few days ago. So, we got our hands on it and used it for quite some time as our daily driver. So what’s the fuss about with Vivo Z1 Pro? Can it really give rivals the sweat? Read our review to find out.



Design

Vivo Z1 Pro‘s weight is definitely not on the heavier side but the device is not light either. At 201grams, the handset has a balanced weight and you won’t always be struggling while handling it. It’s thick at 8.85mm, which is usual for smartphones these days. However, the overall build is more block-like, which delivers a certain level of confidence while holding it and a good grip. You can easily take it out of your pockets and start working without thinking twice of it slipping out of your hands.

The entire front is just the screen with ever so thin bezels at the top and bottom. The only ‘distraction’ you get on the screen is the punch hole at the top left corner. That didn’t really bother us though. There is a speaker grille on top and the usuals at the bottom including a 3.5mm headphone jack, micro-USB charging port and a speaker. What makes the smartphone look good is the back panel, which although is a reflective one, is good to look at. You get the same dual-tone look with a glossy coating, which makes it a fingerprint and smudge magnet. But the simple look and the not-so-loud colour texture looks fine. There’s a triple rear camera setup at the top left corner. Also, you get the good old physical (and reliable) fingerprint sensor at the back instead of those that are embedded under the screen. This comes along with password lock, pattern lock and Face lock tech.

So, the smartphone won’t be a disappointment by any means but may not get your attention right away. The grip, dimensions and the weight are the plus points while the glossy back look could still be a major drawback for many.



Display

On the display side of things, Vivo has been performing well as it has started using better screen panels in handsets while cutting down on bezels. The Vivo Z1 Pro adds to this. It’s a 6.5-inch FHD+ (2340x1080 pixels) display, which is good to look at. The inclusion of an IPS panel with such a resolution is something that’s not new for Vivo and every other smartphone in the particular price segment has this. It’s not a head turner but is still a fairly good screen and the one that’s immersive enough for your streaming services and games. What’s not yet ‘usual’ in smartphone screens is the punch hole design that includes the front-facing camera. The Vivo Z1 Pro has one and we’ve got no complaints from it.

There’s no notch on this one as you get a cutout on the top left corner which, like cutouts in other smartphones, has front camera only. In a closer look you will notice a small chin at the bottom of the screen, something that shouldn’t be an issue and something you may get used to easily. However, since the screen size is on the larger side with 6.53-inches, we often found ourselves fiddling with the handset and adjusting the grip to access several options while using it single handedly. At this point, Vivo appears to have done a good job in bringing most of the operations towards the lower side of the smartphone with the latest FunTouch OS. That’s appreciable but we still had to reach for the top corners in some cases.

What’s good here is the system-wide ‘Dark Mode’ that converts the white areas to Dark Grey across Vivo apps, notifications and more. You can schedule it’s activation as well from the Settings app. Some other software-based usual features include auto-brightness, Eye Protection (Blue light filter), Rotation lock, colour temperature adjustment and third-party app display ratio wherein you can switch between Safe Area Display or Full Screen. Having all these features in a smartphone is nothing new but then the handset covers you pretty well when it comes to key features.

Performance

Performance is Vivo Z1 Pro’s strongest suit and it’s not just because it has a rather new and powerful Qualcomm Snapdragon 712 processor (first phone in India to launch with this processor), but also when it comes to gaming and handling apps in general. Vivo itself has been stressing a lot on the performance aspect of the Z1 Pro. And that makes sense as smartphones from Vivo are now pretty much at par with other premium brands when it comes to battery, display and the camera. So it’s natural to focus on performance this time. Sure, the premium Vivo smartphones come with top-of-the-class SoCs and work way better, but that was something many couldn’t say about the mid-rangers and budget handsets until now.



The Qualcomm Snapdragon 712 in Vivo Z1 Pro has eight cores with Kyro 360 CPU that can clock up to 2.3GHz and is made using 10nm process. This is essentially the same processing power that you get in Snapdragon 710, except for the minor clock speed change of 2.2Ghz. Although the difference is negligible and something end users won’t even notice, we were quite content with the performance of the smartphone. From installing the app to playing it smoothly while having other RAM consuming apps in the background, the overall experience was not as bad as we thought considering it's not per se a premium or even a upper-mid range smartphone.

The user interface is fluid like a hot knife on butter. The animations, stutter-free switching between apps, swiping between different home screens and notification panels, all worked just fine. The only ‘Achilles heel’ here is the FunTouch OS design. It has definitely improved in a lot of ways but still needs some ironing out. The uniqueness still seems to lack and one can still get confused between this and other UIs from brands like Xiaomi, Oppo, Realme and more. Maybe Android Q will bring some major upgrades. Only Vivo has the answer for now.

As for the rest of the features, the smartphone has essentially everything that you need. You do get a lot of bloatware in the form of unwanted apps. But most of them can be removed so that's a non-issue. For gaming, this is not a bad smartphone at all as it has a decent screen and a rather powerful processor with GPU to handle animations and graphics. We didn’t face any lag or frame drops as such while playing.

For reference, Vivo Z1 Pro scored 6776 in PC Mark (Work 2.0) performance, 6492 in web browsing 2.0, 5648 in video editing, 7230 in writing 2.0 and 10847 for photo editing 2.0 tests. While the Work 2.0 test scores were low, the handset received a rather good score in the video editing section. The overall score was almost the same as that of Samsung Galaxy S9’s. If that makes you happy.

Camera

Among other features, Vivo is betting heavy on the camera front as well of its Z1 Pro. The handset has triple rear cameras so naturally one should expect a really good experience while shooting images and videos. At the back there are 16MP + 8MP + 2MP sensors, of which the 16MP sensor with f/1.78 aperture is the main camera, while the 8MP sensor is for the wide-angle shots and 2MP sensor for Bokeh shots. Yes there’s no 48MP camera in this one but that shouldn’t bring your hopes down as the images are still crisp and good.

One of the features touted most is the involvement of ‘AI’ or Artificial Intelligence while clicking. The AI filter did help us out often in changing the shooting mode based on the environment but that’s just a minor tweak. In most cases, we didn’t really see a drastic change when shooting with the AI detection and without it. Nonetheless, the details are preserved to some extent but the colours are not to the mark always. As far as the highlights and shadows go, the Z1 Pro does make certain scenes look bit dramatic by darkening the shadows and blowing the highlights a bit. The camera, however, is consistent in delivering the sharpness.



Clicking from the wide-angle lens is also a decent experience. There’s hardly a shutter lag, which makes the entire process of clicking and previewing the image quick. We did find that the sides in wide-angle camera are not that great when it comes to quality and sharpness. That is the only major distraction in the otherwise good camera mode. Shooting from the 8MP wide-angle camera in daylight will get you the required Blue sky colour and minor shadow details with balanced highlights. However, shooting it in a semi-lit environment will get you more artificial images with blown up brightness and a more prominent focus at the centre of the shot. The quality gets worse as you move towards the sides. We also saw the wide angle mode shooting in a slightly warmer colour tone, which is not as bad as you think and seemed more closer to reality.

As for the bokeh mode, Vivo Z1 Pro does a decent job and nothing that will blow your mind but something that you can still post it on social media. In our tests we still saw the camera struggling to get the hair strands in focus and mixing the subject with the portion of the background in some cases. But then that’s very much expected and of course you won’t get a Pixel-quality shot in a Rs 14,990 smartphone just yet. The is still good though as we’ve seen some cameras performing worse in the past.

The 32MP front camera is another aspect that Vivo is boasting about with Z1 Pro. Here too, you get AI filters along with AR Stickers, which still need a lot of improvement, Portrait Light effects work well but is something that we don’t expect many people using, Live Photo and AI Beauty are just about decent. Although the overall performance of the camera is really well balanced while retaining details with good dynamic range, we found it overdoing the highlights a bit in cases when there’s a selfie taken in a room against a window or a bright source of light. Fortunately, this didn’t mess-up the shadow areas or the colour. Post editing options are plenty enough with some good filters as well.

What we found a bit of an issue was regarding the list of camera modes mentioned besides the shutter button. Vivo has mentioned all of them there, in a scrollable list. However, it doesn’t mention which ones are also available for the front camera. It often happened that we switched to the selfie camera and tapped on a mode thinking that it's a dedicated mode for selfie camera.
However, tapping on that switched us back to the rear camera. This is not a major issue though but is likely to confuse users.



Battery

Vivo Z1 Pro is a battery behemoth no doubt. The 5000mAh battery capacity just rounds off the entire powerhouse and makes the device easily run for hours. During our daily usage, the smartphone ran impressively well as we didn’t feel the need to run for a charger. On an average usage, which includes browsing the web for few hours, playing games, editing, typing and watching videos for a couple of hours, the Z1 Pro ran for around 10 hours straight before giving up. For light users the device should run for 12 hours easily.

We did expect a good performance because of three key reasons: 5000mAh battery, brand new and efficient Qualcomm Snapdragon 712 SoC and LCD display with FHD+ (2340x1080 pixels) resolution so there’s not much power to be pushed every time the screen turns on.

Of course you get a set of basic software features including a Normal mode, on which the device will be by default, Low Power Mode and a Super Power-Saving Mode. The Super Power-Saving Mode cuts off everything and gives access only to the Contacts, Phone, Messages and the Clock app. What should come as a good news for the fans is that they get fast charging tech, which is capped at 18W.



Verdict

Vivo Z1 Pro is not just a powerful smartphone but is also a pretty good alternative for a whole lot of smartphones in the sub-Rs 20,000 price segment. Buyers may not get a lot of firsts here in terms of features but it does get the title of being the first to bring Qualcomm Snapdragon 712 to smartphone in the country. Vivo Z1 Pro seems like a more polished version of the Y series by the company and is clearly the best of what Vivo has to offer in the price range. The punch hole display is clearly a step in the right direction if they have to eliminate the use of pop-up cameras. But that’s again, subjective.

The LCD screen is above average with good off-axis viewing angles, processor works impressively well and the UI, although a single pain point, is still straightforward and not that big of a deal for several users. The cameras work well but there still remains a whole lot of room for improvement, not in terms of specifications but the software and the image processing. Vivo Z1 Pro gets a thumbs up for the front camera and a double thumbs-up for the battery performance. You can quite literally plug out your fully charged smartphone and forget about the battery for the rest of the day. Playing PUBG, browsing the web, streaming music and videos are all good and the battery performance is one of the best you can get right now.

But there have always been competitors and the closest one to Vivo Z1 Pro are Xiaomi’s brand new Redmi K20 and Realme’s Realme X smartphones, both of which appear almost at par on spec sheet. So if you are looking for an affordable premium smartphone, this one from Vivo is surely a good pick. Or else, you know the alternatives.

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