Over the past couple of years, Vivo has gained popularity with their selfie-centric phones. These phones click high-resolution photos with their cameras. The Vivo V9 was the recent addition to Vivo V-series of smartphones. On its launch, it was not just its front camera, but its design that attracted people. Most smartphone manufacturers take inspirations of Apple design. There are several phones designed to look like iPhones or have software interfaces similar to iOS.
Soon after Apple launched its flagship model, the iPhone X, most brands launched devices with the top-notch display design. Vivo doesn’t want to be behind the competition. The V9 was designed with some inspiration. This phone comes with a notch display, a larger screen, a massive 24MP front camera and powerful hardware. All these sound interesting, but let’s see if the performance makes it a serious contender, especially with its price of Rs. 20,990*
Design and Build
The first time we saw the Vivo V9, it’s the notch display that impressed us. The front of the phone is equipped with a massive 6.3-inch screen, which has a very thin bezel. Vivo touts it as a FullView display. There is an earpiece and a camera placed at the top of the screen, between the notch. The V9 didn’t have a front LED flash, which is found in most V-series smartphones. Vivo calls it a Moonlight Glow Flash.
There is a SIM slot on the left, while the power and volume rocker buttons are on the right. The back panel has a vertically aligned camera along with a LED flash below it. There is a slight bump for the cameras, since there is a thin metal ring around the dual-camera setup. The fingerprint sensor and the Vivo branding is at the center. The rear panel is built using hard plastic and isn’t slippery. The phone that we reviewed was the Champagne Gold variant. There are three other colour variants available – Pearl Black, Sapphire Blue and Pearl Black with Gold.
The Vivo V9 measures 7.8 mm in thickness and weighs 150g. It is slim, is pretty lightweight and can easily fit into a pocket or purse. A small speaker grill and the connectivity ports consisting of the microUSB and 3.5mm headphone jack are placed at the bottom of the phone.
Features
The V9 is one of the latest entrants in the Vivo V-series of smartphones. The major highlight of this phone is its notch display. The Vivo V9 has a 6.3-inch full HD+ display, sporting a resolution of 1080 x 2280. Having a large screen has benefits if you prefer reading a lot on your phone and playing games. Besides this, the V9 is powered with decent hardware. It runs on 2.2 GHz Snapdragon 626 octa-core processor and 4 GB of RAM. Though it is not the fastest, the V9 should ensure good performance.
Talking about storage, the V9 comes with 64GB of internal storage, which is expandable up to 256 GB using a microSD card. The internal storage is enough to store plenty of movies, music and videos. The Vivo V9 runs on FunTouch OS 4.0 based on Android 8.1, out of the box. This version looks similar to older versions found on other Vivo phones.
Most Vivo phones are selfie-centric and the V9 is not an exception. There is a 24MP front-facing camera with AI face beauty mode for clicking selfies. At the back is a 16MP + 5MP dual-camera setup, which should help click better photos. Besides the addition of AR stickers, there aren’t any major changes to the camera app. Besides this, the V9 supports face and fingerprint unlocking. Instead of using an old-styled pin and password to unlock the phone, you can register your fingerprints and even your face on the V9. The fingerprint sensor is placed at the back, in reach of your index finger, when you hold the phone in one hand. The phone is equipped with a 3,260 mAh non-removable battery, which should easily last a day on continuous usage.
Connectivity options include a microUSB port, GPS, FM Radio, Wi-Fi 802.11ac and Bluetooth v4.2. The phone also has OTG support, which means you can connect a game pad, pen drive, keyboard or a mouse to the phone. Unlike other Vivo phones, the V9 supports two nano SIMs and a dedicated microSD card slot. This means you can use two SIM cards at a time and if you needed, you can insert a SD card for more storage. The phone supports 4G VoLTE, but only the first SIM supports 4G, whereas the second one is restricted to 3G.
Other features include gesture navigation for easy access. With the help of this feature, you can choose to hide navigation buttons and use gestures to access apps or switch between them. Several other smart features such as One-handed mode, App clone, Smart call and others are pretty much the same as on all Vivo phones.
Performance
We used the Vivo V9 for several hours and found the overall performance was pretty good. The notch-display makes this phone unique, since it’s the first Android phone to sport it. Although, we noticed that there are several apps not optimized to use a notch display. Apps like Google Play Store, Maps, Google Search didn’t utilize the notch area on the phone. The V9 comes with a large 6.3-inch screen, which gives you a large workplace when playing games, reading and more. The phone has decent viewing angles, but we found that the screen is reflective under bright lights. Talking about the interface, it is simple to use, fast and smooth. It doesn't take time to load. There is no app drawer on this phone, in fact all the installed apps appear on the home screen. We didn’t notice any lag or crashing while using the pre-installed apps.
To check the performance of the Vivo V9, we ran different benchmarks on it. The V9 earned a decent AnTuTu score of 89,179. This benchmark runs different tests on the phone for the CPU, GPU, memory and storage. To check the gaming capability of the phone, we ran the 3D Mark Sling Shot Extreme gaming benchmark. The phone threw a CPU score of 419 and GPU score of 341, which is pretty decent. Similarly, to check the CPU performance, we ran Geekbench. This benchmark puts load on the CPU and the overall result was a single-core of 944 and multi-core score of 4632.
Apart from the phone’s CPU and GPU performance, we tested the Vivo V9’s 24MP front-facing camera. It clicked decent photos. The V9 has the AI Face Beauty mode, which Vivo claims can click better images since it detects lighting conditions, surrounding, gender, age and the skin tone of a person clicking a selfie. To check this out, we launched the camera app. There were different camera modes such as AR Stickers, Videos, Face Beauty, Panorama and Professional. AR filters was a newly added feature with different AR Emojis and AR Avatars. The pictures were bright and had natural looking colours. Focusing on an object wasn't a problem - it was really very fast and accurate.
Within the range of Vivo smartphones, the V9 is the first to have a vertically aligned dual-camera setup. There are different modes such as portrait, live mode, professional mode and HDR. The Portrait mode is also available on the front camera. There are different filters within it - Monochrome, 3D light, Studio light and Natural. One interesting camera feature added by Vivo is Refocus. This feature helps change the focus even after the photo is clicked. We clicked photos under store lighting, which was very bright. The Vivo V9 was able to deliver decent output. Although, when we clicked several photos in a low light scene, they were not clear and had some noise. Besides this, the Vivo V9 can shoot HD, full HD and 4K videos with its 24MP front camera. The videos clicked were of good quality, with decent playback support.
Fingerprint and face unlock were two interesting features. We registered our faces to unlock the phone and it was amazingly fast and responsive. We didn't face any problem unlocking the Vivo V9 using a fingerprint. It was accurate and responsive. In addition to this, Vivo also lets you unlock phone using smart motions. This feature supports air operations, which means you can unlock the phone by simply waving your hand. The Vivo V9 has a picture-in-picture feature, which is useful when you want to reply to Whatsapp messages while playing games. Just swipe down with three fingers and the Whatsapp interface appears on the screen.
We played different games such as Asphalt 8 and Subway Surfer to check the gaming performance. We noticed that the phone heats up slightly, with continuous gaming for more than half an hour. Overall the gaming experience was really good. We didn’t notice any lagging or stuttering.
There are some other features like one-handed mode, game mode, app cloning and smart motion gestures. It’s something we have also seen on the Vivo’s rival, the Oppo F7. Some of these features are really interesting to try out.
Verdict
The V9 phone inspired by the iPhone X design, also turns out to be good in performance. The V9 is slim in design, and has an impressive display. The phone has really fast and accurate face and fingerprint unlocking feature. Combined with the performance of the front and the back camera, the phone clicks decent pictures and is up to the mark. Besides the notch-display, Vivo hasn’t made any other major changes in terms of its design. The price at which the V9 is offered, it comes packed with a mid-range processor. If it were any faster, this would be a flagship device.
