China’s Vivo is on a roll.
The phone maker broke ground with its Vivo Apex, a concept phone that featured a pop-up selfie camera and underscreen fingerprint sensor. It then brought those features to retail in the beautiful Vivo Nex.
The latest V11 phone, a midrange wonder, doesn’t feature the same pop-up camera, but it does sport an underscreen fingerprint scanner. Like the Oppo R17, it’s in the first wave of midrange phones sporting the tech — no surprise, given Oppo and Vivo’s close industry relationships. Both companies are owned by Chinese electronics giant, BKK Electronics, which also owns OnePlus.
Bearing striking similarity to the Oppo R17, the Vivo V11 comes sporting a full HD AMOLED display with barely any bezels. It has a 91.2 percent screen-to-body ratio, and features the same water drop inspired notch design. Vivo calls it Halo FullView, and the bezels are just 1.76 millimetres thick.
Here’s a closer look at the tiny notch of the V11.
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The screen is bright even under the sun, and to keep your new phone scratch free, both the front and back already come with film protectors installed. I’m not a big fan of this since it gives the phone a plasticky feel, especially on the rear.
Like the Vivo Nex and the Oppo R17, the V11 comes with an underscreen fingerprint scanner. It’s fast enough that I don’t mind the lack of a physical scanner, and because it has a front 25-megapixel selfie camera, it can also do face unlocking, and uses either method to unlock your phone.
Quick specs
- Processor: Qualcomm Snapdragon 660
- Memory: 6GB RAM, 128GB onboard storage
- Display: 6.41-inch AMOLED full HD plus (2,340×1,080 pixels)
- Battery: 3,400mAh
- OS: Android 8.1 with Funtouch OS 4.5 skin
At the back are two cameras, a 12-megapixel and a 5-megapixel, that work together to let you shoot pictures in a wide variety of styles. They also use the onboard AI to do scene recognition. Backlit shots aren’t a problem — the AI will recognise the scenario and take multiple shots at different exposures and combine them into a single image for a more accurate picture. There’s also an AI assistant to help you frame portrait shots, guiding you to position the camera to the best spot for taking a picture.
Here’s another look at the pretty colors of the V11.
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The camera works as advertised, and it even does a pretty decent job in dim conditions. Outdoor shots are fantastically sharp. The AI assistant for portrait mode tends to position the person in the center, though if someone is lying down it does adjust accordingly. I’m not too big a fan of the beauty mode, but it’s a standard feature popular in Asia. The camera can flatten your cheeks, make your eyes look bigger and even slim down your nose in real time.
Vivo has not yet revealed pricing and availability, but it will launch the phone in China first, before rolling it out to other markets in Asia, such as Singapore and Hong Kong. We will update this hands-on when we find out more.