Gadgetory

hey what is going on guys lon here from Android authority and blue if you haven't heard of them is a smartphone manufacturer based out of Miami and for the last couple of years or so they've been creating some really compelling and easily accessible unlocked smartphones one of their latest offerings is the thinnest smartphone you can buy in the US and it comes in at a very affordable price let's go ahead and take a look at the blue vivo air when it comes to affordable or budget smartphones you usually don't expect to be overly excited by the design or build quality but I have to admit I was quite impressed with the vivo air while it might look like it heavily borrows from Apple's iPhone design that isn't necessarily a bad thing the vivo air is made from a combination of Gorilla Glass 3 on the front and back with a solid aluminum frame sandwiched in between combine that with the fact that the vivo air comes in at only 5.1 millimeters thick you get a phone that feels very solid sleek and lightweight with the somewhat curved metal sides and the glass back you might think that this phone would feel slippery in the hand but that is actually not the case the four point eight inch screen then side bezels and the overall thinness of this device gives off a very small footprint making the phone very easy to grip and comfortably use in one hand which is a very refreshing feeling when most smartphones nowadays have become quite large the rest of the hardware has been kept to a minimum with only 16 gigabytes of on-board storage with no room for expansion min you either have to rely on the cloud or stray from downloading too many large apps connectivity is also limited to HSPA+ but in my experience it was still plenty fast for everyday tasks including watching YouTube so I didn't really find myself missing LTE all that much the top of the phone has been kept clean of any buttons or ports while the right side houses the SIM card slot and the bottom is where you'll find the microUSB and 3.5 millimeter headset jack the volume and power keys are located on the left side and they protrude a good amount from the body of the phone so they're pretty easy to find and also very tactile normally I prefer the power button to be on the right side but the left mounted power button was still easy to reach as it naturally sat right under my index finger every time I picked the phone up so it didn't take very long to get used to as I had initially thought standard capacitive keys can be found on the front below the display and the single speaker can be located on the back side in the bottom right corner the speaker is of pretty average quality and it's fairly easy to cover up by a single finger or when resting it flat on a table it won't get the job done just fine but you shouldn't expect anything spectacular from a back facing single speaker as mentioned earlier the display on the front comes in at 4.8 inches and it's an AMOLED panel with 720p resolution we all know that everybody wants 1080p and quad HD nowadays but 720p works perfectly fine on a 4.8 inch screen viewing angles and brightness are not an issue and since its AMOLED you're going to get all the characteristics that make AMOLED so great like the deep blacks saturated colors and high contrast ratios it's obviously not the sharpest display out there but in everyday use I really had no complaints and the display still provided for a very solid experience when watching videos or playing games inside of the vivo air is a fairly standard processing package that you can expect to find for a phone in this price range you're looking at an octa-core MediaTek processor with one gigabyte of ram mediatek processors historically have not exactly been known to deliver great performance especially when you compare them to their Snapdragon counterparts and the story is pretty much the same here with the vivo air while tasks like loading apps and gaming seem to perform just fine it's in everyday general use that I noticed some performance hiccups swiping through home screens and social media feeds often resulted in some choppiness and dropped frames it doesn't happen all the time but often enough that it becomes pretty noticeable it is possible that some of these hiccups could be due to a lack of software optimization but regardless of the cause it's not going to necessarily slow you down from getting to point A to point B it's just not going to be very aesthetically pleasing to the eye taking a look at the camera on the vivo air you'll find an 8 megapixel sensor with LED flash and starting with the camera application the vivo air actually features two camera apps but we'll talk about the main camera app first it's a very basic camera app with just the essential features like HDR panorama and a few other additional settings while the experience is pretty straightforward the only gripe I really had with the app is these settings which do not rotate to landscape anytime I wanted to make a change in the camera settings like turning on HDR I would have to rotate the phone back to portrait to do so and it got pretty annoying over time the secondary camera app is called the Charm cam and this can be accessed through the main camera app or directly from the home screen the Tron camp allows for more customization so you can have a little more fun with your photos features include things like beauty mode to make yourself look better by softening the details in your face in a makeup mode to give you the appearance of wearing makeup you can also apply live filters stamps to images and then there's my personal favorite called PPT with PBT the camera will focus on PowerPoint presentations whiteboards books or anything with text really and it basically crop out everything from the image except the area with text the cool thing is you can group all the images together into a single PDF file for easy printing which could be extremely useful if you're a high school or college student as far as actual image quality is concerned the images look quite good on the 4.8 inch AMOLED screen but it's a whole other story when you blow them up on a computer the focus tends to be very hit or miss with colors appearing flat and details lacking the sharpness that you would want in a photo HDR also doesn't help out as much as I expected images are brighter with a little bit more detail but colors still appear very muted even more so than without HDR and the HDR image processing seems to lean more towards overexposing then creating a well-balanced image and low-light the camera doesn't fare much better the increase in noise levels is to be expected but the slow autofocus and shutter speed times make the camera pretty unreliable in night situations because the blue vivo air is so thin there's not a whole lot of space inside to fit a large battery so what you're looking at is a 2100 milliamp hour battery and the battery life is good enough to get you through a full day if you stick to things like texting reading social media feeds and some light web browsing while keeping YouTube and gaming to a minimum anything heavier than that and you will have to recharge midway through the day and usually when I got down to my last 10% or so I wound it with about 12 to 15 hours off the charger with between 4 to 5 hours of screen on time when it was all said and done a CPU power saving mode is included in the settings to help you get the most out of your battery but something to keep in mind is that this does limit CPU performance in favor of better battery life so it's best to only use it when you need it on the software side the vivo air is running on 4.4 kitkat with blues custom skin it's not an overly intrusive skin but it does provide for a very different experience from stock Android for starters swiping left on the lockscreen will give you access to the camera sound recorder and flashlight all without unlocking the phone you can even fake a phone call to get you out of a predicament which I actually thought was a pretty hilarious feature but I could see a lot of people using it diving in further blue ditches the traditional app drawer meaning all your apps will reside on your home screens but since its Android you can always download a third-party launcher for a more standard homescreen experience blues overlay also brings some customization to the table like themes although you're only limited to a few at the moment and fancy homescreen animations you'll also find a series of smart gestures like smart dial smart answer double tap to wake and gestures to quickly open apps without waking up to display they're all features we've seen before in some other phones so it's not exactly anything groundbreaking but they're still really useful nonetheless the blue vivo air is available now directly through Amazon for $200 unlocked and it comes in this white and gold version that you see here but if you want something a little bit more tamed it also comes in a black and gunmetal version and also since it's unlocked it'll work on pretty much any GSM carrier including t-mobile and AT&T in the US for $200 the vivo air is going to be pretty hard to beat especially in the budget category there are some other options out there like the Moto G for example which can be had for twenty dollars cheaper comes with stock Android but with arguably lesser build quality it's still pretty early in 2015 so you can expect a lot more competition in this particular price point that might offer a better bang for your buck ratio if you're willing to wait but that is going to do it for the blue vivo air for $200 you're getting a phone with really great build quality in a very thin and sleek package and you're probably not going to find another phone that says good looking as the vivo air in this particular price range it does have a few shortcomings like the lack of LTE connectivity a pretty underwhelming camera and a few performance hiccups here and there but for $200 you can't really expect perfection what you can expect though is a phone that will provide a pretty good overall experience for the budget-conscious as always guys thank you so much for watching this review if you did enjoy it please give it a thumbs up down below we definitely appreciate that and also subscribe to the channel which is also down below if you haven't already and don't forget to check out the website and Georgia thority com for more in depth coverage because we are your source for all things Android