The Vivo V7 is Vivo’s latest offering to its selfie-centric V Series. The new Vivo V7 is quite similar to the V7+ in case of design and specifications. However, some minor cutdowns have been made to the battery capacity, storage, display size and hence the price is also lesser than the Vivo V7+. As per a recent report, Vivo V7+ Sells The Most Among Smartphones Under Rs. 30,000 in India, which was not shocking at all considering the huge offline and online promotions Vivo is carrying out, and now with the Vivo V7, available at a lesser price, Vivo is definitely targeting the price segment of under Rs. 20,000 phones. I have been using the phone for like two weeks and well, here’s my Vivo V7 review so that you know if the Vivo V7 is a compelling offering, compared to the other players in the market.
Vivo V7 Review
Vivo V7 no-nonsense Unboxing in just one-minute@Vivo_India #VivoV7 #UnboxingVideo #VivoSmartphone pic.twitter.com/LgxDA92kYv
— Ankit Chugh 🌪️ (@luckyankit) January 10, 2018
Design and build quality
The Vivo V7 features a 5.7-inch IPS FullView display with 18:9 aspect ratio. This makes this display fit into the footprint of many other phones with smaller displays.
The bezels are cut down up to a great extent and well, even on the top and bottom of the display there are minimum bezels, except for that space required for the earpiece, front camera, and sensors.
The power button and volume rockers are placed on the right and on the left, there is the dual-SIM + microSD card slot, which is again one positive aspect of the Vivo V& as I could add a secondary SIM card along with a microSD card.
Although the phone does not feature a metal body, the V7 has smooth rear panel finish, rounded corners and detailing around the rear fingerprint sensor and antenna bands. The matte plastic back doesn’t attract fingerprint and smudges, however, the rear camera is protruding out a bit, though it doesn’t make the device bump. Below the camera module, there is a fingerprint sensor which can be used to unlock the phone as well as protect apps. Overall it’s a beautifully designed smartphone, especially if you look at the antenna lines at edges, the amount of detail says it all.
Display
The Vivo V7 features a 5.7-inch IPS FullView display, with 18:9 aspect ratio. Although the device doesn’t offer an FHD resolution on display, it does offer a great touch sensitivity on a HD display and the color reproduction are in part with the industry standard.
Viewing angles and the saturation level are good enough and video watching experience is great. The colors are punchy and the display has good brightness levels as well, even under direct sunlight I didn’t have to struggle. Though, it could be really good if the display was a bit sharper. In terms of viewing angles, it doesn’t have any weird tints while you tilt the display a bit.
Performance
The Vivo V7 is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 450 mobile platform, which features eight ARM Cortex-A53 CPU cores and the Adreno 506 GPU. Multitasking experience is quite smooth and the phone didn’t seem to show any random hiccups, given that there is 4GB RAM onboard and well, in terms of gaming, games like Clash Royale, Daddy is a thief and 8 Ball Pool ran butter smooth, without lags.
However, when I tried playing graphics intense games like Need for Speed and Modern Kombat, some FPS drops are visible for sure. However, setting the graphics quality a bit lower helped a bit. During my day to day usage, I used quite a large number of apps (Mostly Gmail, YouTube, Calendar, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Quora mostly) and I frequently keep switching back and forth, but apps ran smoothly, there is no delay while opening any of these apps and the same applies to the games, as I mentioned.
Camera
Just like the V7+, the main USP of the V7 is its front camera. The front-facing came comes with selfie portrait mode and supports HDR. It also captures live photos, which is similar to iPhone.
The 24-megapixel front shooter is quite fast and captures selfies in a blink. The front camera comes with Face Beauty mode, as expected, which offers options for buffing, skin tone correction, and whitening. The Group Selfie feature is quite useful as it takes a picture, quite similar to panorama mode that lets you fit more people into a frame. Hand and voice guide triggers for the camera are good features for sure.
The selfies captured by the Vivo V7 have pretty good detail. Even in low lighting conditions, it captures decent shots. While you’re in quite a dark place, you can use the front flash too for clicking selfies or groupies.
On the rear, the Vivo V7 comes with a 16-megapixel sensor with a f/2.0 aperture just like the selfie camera. There are quite a few shooting modes and slow motion, time-lapse, professional, PPT, and Ultra HD modes are great. The rear camera is also quite fast in terms of focusing and processing photos. In daylight, the photos captured with the Vivo V7 have a good amount of detail, an adequate amount of sharpness and proper saturated levels.
In terms of video, the Vivo V7 is capable of recording full HD videos. The video quality is decent, however, lack of continuous autofocus is kinda bit disappointing. Overall, the Vivo V7 delivers a good package when it comes to camera and Vivo is kind of popular for good camera phones most.
Software
While manufacturers are going toward a close to Stock experience with customization options, like OnePlus or Motorola or Lenovo, Vivo continues to use their custom skin on top. The Vivo V7 runs on Funtouch OS 3.2, which is based on Android 7.1.2 Nougat.
If you’re someone who is used to stock Android, Funtouch OS could take some getting used to. It is quite similar to iOS. Swiping down shows the notifications only and quick toggles have been moved to Control Centre, that can be accessed by swiping up from the bottom of the screen. Not just that, even the app icons are inspired from iOS so basically Vivo wants their users to have a taste of iOS while enjoying the freedom and flexibility of Android.
The software navigation keys can be switched as per user’s preference. In order to maximize the display, these keys can also be disabled permanently and the navigations can be performed using gestures.
https://twitter.com/luckyankit/status/951778458866085888
However, there is no provision to access recent apps this way. Funtouch OS also replaces Android’s native split screen feature and well, it currently supports only Google Play Movies, MX Player, Youtube, Facebook, WhatsApp, and the video, messages, file manager, and calculator.
The V7 also has the face recognition feature, which will let you unlock the phone when you raise it to your face. It works good, but in low lighting conditions, it doesn’t work. There are some very useful customizations (check screenshots above) and utility options like the ability to clone apps, a one-handed mode, and motion gestures and much more. There is some bloatware on the phone pre-installed, though all of them can be uninstalled.
Battery
The Vivo V7 packs a 3000mAh battery. While my usage, which includes checking emails and texting, watching videos sometimes on YouTube and casual gaming, the Vivo V7 easily managed to last a full day. However, at the end of the day when I was left with almost 20% of the battery juice left I used to plug it into a power source.
Although the device doesn’t have any proprietary fast charging technology, the charger included in-box offers 5V-2amp output and the phone gets charged within 1.0-1.5 hrs max from 0 to 100 which is a decent charging speed to have.
Final Verdict
In my experience with the Vivo V7, I must admit that the front camera is really good and it takes good selfies. It offers impressive specs and beautiful design. The phone is very easy to handle with one hand. While the screen resolution and specs could have been higher, the device offers a good user experience. Things in favor of this phone are the beautiful design, superb display quality, great selfie camera, good user experience and smooth OS.
