Vivo X90 Pro Review: Im In Love With The Camera
© Provided by Android PoliceOvershadowed by the launch of the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra and its cheaper siblings, Vivo announced the global launch of the Vivo X90 and X90 Pro in early February. We won't blame you if you don't notice this phone. After all, it's an Android phone that won't be coming to the US like the Xiaomi 13 Pro.
However, there are a few things that make the Vivo X90 Pro special and worth checking out. First, it's one of the few phones to feature Mediatek's top-of-the-line Dimensity 9200 processor, which also comes with its own display and image processor, the Vivo V2. Even more interesting is the sensor used in its main camera, Sony's 1-inch IMX989, the largest available in a smartphone to date.
Combined with the imaging expertise of Vivo and Zeiss, the Vivo X90 Pro is a photography beast that leaves us wanting more IMX989 products. We can only dream that the Google Pixel 8 and 8 Pro will get it at launch.
- SoC: Mediatek Dimension 9200
- Screen: 6.78" 120 Hz OLED, 1260x2800, Q9
- Memory: 12 GB
- Memory: 256 GB
- Battery: 4870 mAh
- Connections: USB Type-C
- Operating system: Funtouch OS 13 (Android 13)
- Front camera: 32 MP
- Rear camera: 50 MP main (OIS, f/1.75), 50 MP portrait (f/1.6), 12 MP wide-angle (f/2.0)
- Connectivity: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.3, 5G
- Dimensions: 164 x 74 x 9 mm
- Colors: Legendary Black Made of vegan leather
- Weight: 215 g
- Charging: 120W wired, 50W wireless
- IP rating: IP68 dust and water resistance
- Amazing main camera
- Beautiful and unique design that fits well in your hands.
- Charge from 0 to 100 in 30 minutes
- faulty software
- The equipment has been reduced compared to the previous one
- Less versatile setup than the camera's predecessor
Price and availability
The biggest limitation of the Vivo X90 Pro is that it's not available in the US unless you want to import it. The X90 Pro is officially only available in Hong Kong, Taiwan, India, Thailand and Malaysia. In Europe, the Vivo X90 Pro will be available in several countries, including Germany, and is expected to be available by the end of March 2023. In Malaysia, the Vivo X90 Pro costs 5,000 Malaysian Ringgit, which is roughly $1,110 or €1,050. right up there with premium offerings from Samsung, Apple and Google.
The model we review here is the global version that you should consider if you plan to import it. According to Kimovil, the X90 Pro supports US carrier ranges, although your carrier may have additional blocks for equipment not officially sold in the US.
design and presentation
The design of the Vivo X90 Pro manages to stand out from the crowd. The back is available in black or red vegan leather, which I wasn't sure was a good idea at first. However, the back definitely has one of the least fingerprints I've ever experienced and feels better than a glass surface. You'll also immediately notice the large circular camera on the top, making the Vivo X90 Pro similar to the flagship Nokia Lumia 1020. (Is it a camera or a smartphone?)
The design features an equally curved front and back with a highly curved display that blows away the rest of the industry. If you're looking for a phone with a big screen that's bright enough to hold in one hand, the X90 Pro isn't necessarily a bad choice. The screen is a 6.78-inch 120Hz OLED display with a resolution of 2800 x 1260 pixels, standard 1080p.
The curved screen is not without its drawbacks. For example, it accepts reflections much more easily than a flat screen and loses color fidelity on the sides when viewed from above. It's also harder to access some UI elements in some apps and websites with buttons pressed on the curved part of the screen.
The hardware design of the Vivo X90 Pro may be beautiful, but there are some elements that I just don't understand. For example, a small glass or plastic divider under the camera bump separates the bottom of the phone from the top. It comes with the catchy slogan "Xtreme Imagination - Vivo Zeiss Co-engineered" in the most terrifying font imaginable. The slogan becomes even more irresistible when you consider that the Zeiss logo appears prominently on the right side of the camera. The divider is also the only space on the back that collects fingerprints like crazy.
Overall, though, the leather-textured back and curved display do what they're designed to do, keep the phone slim and light. This is the least worry I've had about leaving a phone unattended in a long time.
hardware and battery life
Mediatek's Dimensity 9200 processor is undoubtedly at the heart of the Vivo X90 Pro, and it comes with the company's custom V2 graphics chip. The chip is responsible for streamlining Mediatek's processor and display management in the video and photo processing department. There's also 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.
The best feature of the Vivo X90 Pro is probably fast charging, and it offers a compatible charger out of the box. At 120W, the X90 Pro can be fully charged in less than 30 minutes, which we can confirm in our tests. Thanks to its dual battery architecture, which consists of two small batteries, the phone does not overheat. If you're still concerned about longevity, you can turn off fast charging via an optional switch in settings. If you get a compatible wireless charger, you can use up to 50W here too.
The battery lasts a day on a charge, and then a little longer for mixed day-to-day use like playing music and videos, scrolling through messages, and lots of browsing and web browsing. The only thing missing is the relatively low battery life, which is surprising given how aggressively the phone kills background tasks.
Compared to the previous Vivo X80 Pro, there are some drawbacks. Vivo opted for an optical fingerprint sensor instead of Qualcomm's impressive third-generation 3D Sonic Max sensor that the company used in last year's model. In addition to not blinding you from bright lights at night (which optical sensors are supposed to do to identify fingers), the sensor also had a few tricks up its sleeve, like launching user-selectable apps when certain options were tapped. He also offered one-touch registration, which the optical sensor unfortunately doesn't do. However, the optical sensor of the Vivo X90 Pro is not bad at all, it is reliable and fast, which is the most important thing.
Let's just say we're also looking at a drop in pixels, as the Vivo X80 Pro offers a 3200 x 1440 display, while the X90 Pro sticks to 2800 x 1260. Vivo says this drop is a market research error. But to be honest, you can hardly see the difference on such a small screen.
software and performance
Vivo X90 Pro's Funtouch 13 OS (based on Android 13) aggressively kills background tasks when not in use, causing unwanted behavior. It's quite annoying when an article I was reading in Chrome ends and reloads, or when Sync, my favorite Reddit app, takes me back to the beginning of a thread I was following a few minutes ago. Even worse. this also applies to navigation apps. For example, instead of remembering your current route, various navigation apps will restart on the home screens because it knows when to change or where my stop is.
These issues can be resolved by setting apps in the battery system settings to not reduce background power consumption. However, for a phone with 12GB of RAM and a 4,700mAh battery, this is a simple fix that takes 30 minutes to fully charge.
Another annoyance is that Funtouch OS refuses to work with my password manager's auto-fill features. I tried setting up Bitwarden and 1Password Android with native autofill, but after a few minutes the option to use autofill disappeared. After re-enabling autocomplete in settings it worked again but didn't last more than a few minutes. This problem also affected the old version of Bitwarden's auto-access completion, which was necessarily disabled by the system after a few minutes. After Vivo fixed the issue, the company recommended Bitward's Don't limit background power consumption option . After doing that, Android autocomplete and accessibility services worked.
Seriously, you can't expect most of your customers to play with your OS long enough to know something like that. Most people will think that the app or the phone is jailbroken.
A quick look at the Don't Kill My app shows that Vivo isn't the only, or even the worst, culprit when it comes to killing background services. However, I have yet to come across any other phone that completely breaks autofill if you enable a seemingly unrelated option in the settings.
I also had some performance issues. Despite the huge amount of RAM and high-end processor, the phone sometimes became inexplicably slow and barely responded to input. I took a screenshot of one such example where clicking on a link or clicking on an icon would take seconds before the phone would respond. Although the Vivo X90 Pro doesn't suffer from this problem, it is quite fast and responsive. Mediatek's flagship processor and fast refresh rate screen pull it along, but be prepared for those inexplicable slowdowns.
Other than the major issues, Funtouch OS is good. Stuff You provide themes for home screen icons, system interfaces, and apps that every Android 13 phone should need. Not much changes in Android, even if it is different. If you're switching from Samsung or Google, you should have no problem navigating the interface. The user interface is also clear with Oppo's Color OS, since Vivo is part of the same BBK Electronics empire. It makes switching between Vivo, Oppo, OnePlus and iQOO phones easy.
There are also some great additions to Funtouch OS that I'd like to see on more Android phones. For example, you can clone some apps and log into multiple accounts at the same time. there's a handy three-finger gesture to launch split-screen multitasking; and there's a whole host of customization options outside of Material You.
cameras
Let's move on to the most interesting part of this phone, the camera. Vivo and German photography specialist Zeiss collaborated on the development of the camera system. On the back you'll find these cameras: Sony's excellent 50MP IMX989 with a thumb sensor, another 50MP IMX758 lens that offers 2x optical zoom compared to the main 50MP IMX758 lens, and a 12MP wide-angle camera. On the front, there is a 32MP selfie shooter in the hole in the middle. However, unlike the X80 Pro, the phone doesn't offer a periscope camera or a camera that zooms beyond 2x.
When you first start using the camera, you will encounter problems. By default, the software adds a watermark to your shots, so anyone you share pictures with will know you took them with the Vivo X90 Pro. You can disable it in settings, but it should be disabled by default . When you start using portrait mode or selfies, you should also turn off the beauty mode that the camera offers. Otherwise, you'll end up with unrealistic, softer faces that set the wrong standard of beauty. Personally, I'd also turn off mirror selfies in the settings, but that's a matter of taste.
This provides a great camera experience. The best part is Zero Shutter Lag, which does exactly what you want. Unlike many of its competitors, including the Galaxy S23 Ultra, the Vivo X90 Pro is able to take a photo as soon as you press the shutter button, so you can be sure to capture the moment you want to keep. don't miss it! However, it only works when there is sufficient light. For darker scenes, the camera has to capture additional light after pressing the shutter button, which is to be expected.
The basic 1 inch sensor allows you to create some much more professional photos. It has a natural depth of field effect that blurs the background for beautiful images. The portrait camera is also great, but when you use it in portrait mode, it supports software bokeh instead of relying on hardware. Both cameras offer optical image stabilization that is visible to the naked eye. If you move the phone up and down while using the camera, you'll notice that the lens tries to compensate for the movement.
Most importantly, the Vivo X90 Pro is the first smartphone camera that can confidently replace my DSLR for product photography. With a large sensor and natural bokeh, it looks like what you'd expect from Android Police product photography. With a quick mockup of the iPhone 13 and a few more photos I used for the Honor Magic Vs review, you'll hardly notice that they differ from the quality we'd normally like to deliver.
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Night mode is another strong point of Vivo X90 Pro. Just like Google did when it improved the shooting speed between the Google Pixel 6 and Pixel 7, the Vivo X90 captures light at lightning speed in incredibly dark scenes. You can use the phone's dedicated night mode to capture a little more light, or the standard photo option, which offers automatic low-light compensation. In addition, Vivo offers some additional smart features, such as B. Night Sports mode, which prioritizes fast, wash-free shots over excessive noise reduction.
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Portable astrophotography is another exciting feature made possible by the V2 chip, amazing OIS and the Sony IMX989 sensor. Instead of holding the phone up to the subject or using a tripod, you can turn on the star photo mode and take a picture of the night sky, resulting in a usable photo. As a city dweller, it was a bit difficult for me to test it properly due to light pollution, but the images I captured were promising and certainly impossible to quickly replicate on other phones.
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The sky above the city is incredibly clear, a poor example of how good astrophotography can be.
There are also many additional modes that will keep you entertained for a long time. In portrait mode, you can switch between different Zeiss-provided bokeh effects that mimic the physical shapes of different lenses. In normal photo mode, you can blend them with Auto HDR and the Zeiss Natural Color option. The Natural Color option should give you more natural and realistic colors than Vivo's default bright and vivid colors.
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Left. Vivo default color science; Right: Zeiss Color Science
In addition to these options, the excellent built-in Pro mode allows you to manually adjust shutter speed, ISO, focus, white balance, EV and select your preferred lens. You can also use high resolution mode, long exposure mode for different shooting options, tilt lens simulation for thumbnail photos, dual exposure to use the front and rear cameras in one shot, and much more. later on
Given such a good experience, it's a shame the X90 Pro doesn't offer a proper zoom lens beyond the 2x portrait lens. The company tells me that Zooma hasn't done much market research, which I find hard to believe. More often than not, I find myself in a situation where I want to get closer to the subject or subject I'm photographing, and it offers zoom lenses like 5x on the Pixel 7 Pro or 10x on the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra : this variability
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1st and 3rd place: Vivo X80 Pro with 5x zoom; 2nd and 4th places: Vivo X90 Pro with 5x zoom
This is especially unfortunate considering that the Vivo X90 Pro's predecessor, the Vivo X80 Pro, offered a much more capable 5x zoom lens. If you put the images side by side, you will immediately notice the lack of detail on the Vivo X90 Pro's shorts. If Vivo included a zoom lens in this phone, it would be my go-to camera for just about anything. This is even more annoying considering that the China-exclusive Vivo X90 Pro Plus offers a 3.5x periscope zoom camera.
For an in-depth look at the Vivo X90 Pro's camera features, scroll through the gallery below (and yes, you can see the default watermark in the first image, which you shouldn't forget to turn off in the camera settings first). . :
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Capacity:
Unless you want to import the Vivo X90 Pro (which we don't), you're probably wondering what's in store for the US. Unfortunately, the Sony IMX989, which I am very excited about, is not available. on any phone in the country... So if you're looking for an exact hardware configuration, you're out of luck.
There are still comparable flagship phones to consider for great photos. The first thing that comes to mind is the Google Pixel 7 Pro, with which I have already compared the Vivo X90 Pro. Շնորհիվ Google-ի հետմշակման գերազանց ալգորիթմի և ոսպնյակների բազմակողմանի տեղադրման՝ զուգորդված բարձր հզորության հիմնական ոսպնյակի և հիանալի լայնանկյուն և 5x հեռաֆոտո տեսախցիկի հետ, դուք պետք է կարողանաք հեշտությամբ ուղղել և նկարել գրեթե ցանկացած իրավիճակում: Pixel 7 Pro-ն չի առաջարկում Pro ռեժիմ, այնպես որ դուք այնքան էլ մեծ վերահսկողություն չունեք տեսողական պատկերների վրա, պայծառության և գույնի ջերմաստիճանի սահիչից դուրս:
Եթե դուք փնտրում եք տեսախցիկի համակարգ, որը բազմակողմանի է, բայց ունի ավելի շատ ձեռքով կառավարում, ապա Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra-ն կարող է լավ այլընտրանք լինել: Այն ունի հարթ տեսախցիկի կարգավորում, որը բաղկացած է 200MP հիմնական ոսպնյակից, 12MP լայնանկյուն ոսպնյակից, 10MP 3x խոշորացման ոսպնյակից և 10MP 10x խոշորացման ոսպնյակից: Սա ձեզ հիանալի տեսախցիկ է տալիս շատ իրավիճակներում, և Samsung-ի նոր տեսախցիկի օգնականի շնորհիվ կարող եք կարգավորել ձեր պատկերները նկարահանելիս:
Xiaomi 13 Pro-ն ավելի մոտ է Vivo X90 Pro-ին տեսախցիկի առումով (այն ունի IMX989 սենսոր), բայց դա ևս մեկն է այն հիանալի Android հեռախոսներից, որոնք դուք չեք կարող ստանալ ԱՄՆ-ում:
դուք պետք է գնեք
Դուք պետք է գնեք Vivo X90 Pro-ն, եթե գնահատում եք լավ տեսախցիկը (և եթե չեք ապրում ԱՄՆ-ում՝ ներմուծումից խուսափելու համար): Sony IMX989-ի, Vivo-ի և Zeiss-ի հետմշակումն աշխատում է հմայքի պես՝ ստեղծելով բնական բոկեի պատկերներ , որոնք գրեթե նման են DSLR տեսախցիկներին : Իհարկե, դեռևս կան ֆիզիկական սահմանափակումներ, որոնք դժվար է հաղթահարել, սակայն պատկերներն այժմ հնարավորինս մոտ են ցանկացած բջջային հեռախոսի:
Ցավոք, Vivo X90 Pro-ն թույլ է տալիս նույն սխալները, ինչ իր նախորդները և Oppo-ի այլ ենթաբրենդի արտադրանքները: Ագրեսիվ ծրագրաշարը շատ արագ է սպանում ֆոնային առաջադրանքները, եթե դուք թույլ չեք տալիս բացառություններ յուրաքանչյուր հավելվածի համար, ինչը ինձ ստիպում է զարմանալ, թե ինչու է անհրաժեշտ 12 ԳԲ RAM այս հեռախոսին: Դա չի գերազանցում մարտկոցի անհավանական կյանքը, որը ես գտա բավականին լավ: Այնուամենայնիվ, դուք շատ արագ եք ընտելանում 120 Վտ լիցքավորման արագությանը, այնպես որ ես կարող եմ այն ամբողջությամբ լիցքավորել ամեն առավոտ նախաճաշի հետ միասին:
Եթե ցանկանում եք հիանալի դրոշակակիր հիանալի տեսախցիկով, որը լիցքավորվում է անհեթեթ արագությամբ, և դուք լավ եք վերաբերվում ծրագրային ապահովման բոլոր սխալներին, որոնք ես անդրադարձել եմ, Vivo X90 Pro-ն հիանալի ընտրություն է:
