Vivo V17 Pro Review

Introduction

Being one of the first to pack an elevating selfie camera in their devices, Vivo continues to push the envelope of smartphone innovation with each iteration, with an aim of bringing a new and improved experience to its customers.

The V17 Pro is the company’s mid-range contender, and aims to challenge the reign of its predecessor as one of the best in the selfie department, while bringing more to the table. Heading the list – a new design, a high-capacity battery, a quad-camera system, and not one, but two snappers up front, in an motorized pop-up module.

Specifications

Design

Vivo threw in everything it could to make the V17 Pro as premium as it gets when it comes to looks. It sports a glossy back panel with the usual branding and a seamless design that gets rid of protrusions. This results to a more comfortable feel when holding the phone.

It does have a fairly large footprint, so those with smaller usual hands may find handling a bit cumbersome.

Both the power button and volume rocker are placed on the right side, while the left houses a dedicated button for the Google Assistant. At the bottom – a USB-C port, a speaker grille, and a microphone.

Oh, don’t worry, this one still has a headphone jack up top.

While the case that comes with the phone certainly looks better than usual, it’s a complete pain to put on and remove.

The V17 Pro’s 6.44-inch Super AMOLED display really shines – colors ooze with punchiness, text is sharp, and the things on the screen look pretty detailed, fun, and lively.

Performance

While it still performs great in typical day-to-day scenarios, it bugs me as to why Vivo did not opt to upgrade the processor in this device, which still uses the Snapdragon 675.

Sure, it has 8GB of RAM – more than enough even for heavy multi-tasking, and 128GB of storage, which should also be ample for your apps, video or music collection, but I feel like they fell a bit short here, especially when you consider that more powerful chips such as the Snapdragon 730 are already out.

Gaming performance was only average at best. Sure, it can play CoD Mobile at High + Max FPS, but the experience isn’t as smooth as you’d expect. Don’t get me wrong, the game is very much playable, but don’t expect too much.

Camera

V17 Pro pack a quad-camera system at the rear. It’s composed of a 48MP main sensor, an 8MP wide-angle shooter, and a pair of 2MP sensors for depth and macro photography.

As far as quality goes, the main camera is able to capture photos with good detail, dynamic range, while also demonstrating decent control on processing and exposure.

Depth of field shots also look well-refined, with good subject and background separation, and decent edge-detection.The 2MP macro camera is nothing short of disappointing, as photo look extremely lacking in detail, with a ton of noise.

Using the dedicated Night Mode yields some pretty decent captures. There’s a bit of over sharpening here and there, but the general results are still more than enough, in case you want to impress people in social media.

V17-Pro-Selfie-1

V17-Pro-Selfie-2

As far as selfies are concerned, the V17 Pro’s main selfie snapper delivers a fantastic job of capturing details and texture, also with good exposure control.

Wide-angle selfies showcase less detail, but better coverage. There’s also just a slight hint of barrel distortion, but not enough to be a deal-breaker.

Software

Vivo V17 Pro runs on Funtouch OS 9.1 on top of Android 9 Pie. As far as UI performance is concerned, it runs smooth and fluid most of the time, that’s whether you’re switching from one app to another, navigating menus, navigating the home screen, etc.

One notable features of this UI, is its system-wide Dark Mode. That means it also affects Facebook, if you do fancy that sort of thing.

S-Capture is also another very useful feature, as it allows you to take screenshots, and record what’s happening on screen. Very useful if say you want to record gameplay and upload it to social media later.

Ultra Game Mode optimizes the device’s resources for gaming, while also allowing you to adjust a bunch of settings to improve the overall experience, such as blocking notifications. There’s also a Game Assistant available, which lets you control these settings in-game.

Vivo gives you an almost complete suite of security options. Apart from the traditional PIN, and Pattern, it also sports an in-display fingerprint scanner, which performs fast enough.

Oddly, the company has opted not to equip the V17 Pro with a Face Unlock feature, which is honestly, a big let down for me.

Battery

On a single charge, the V17 Pro’s 4,100mAh battery should get you through a whole day of light to moderate use without problems.

It also boasts Dual-Engine Fast-Charging, which can recharge the power pack to full at 1.5 to 2 hours.

Emman Tortoza

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Emman has been writing technical and feature articles since 2010. Prior to this, he became one of the instructors at Asia Pacific College in 2008, and eventually landed a job as Business Analyst and Technical Writer at Integrated Open Source Solutions for almost 3 years.