Gadgetory

hello my name is Gary Sims and this is the vivo V 15 pro with this elevating front-facing camera so the first thing you'll notice about the V 15 pro is this ultra View display which means that there's no bar at the top normally where the earpiece would go in the front-facing camera there's no chin at the bottom it's got this display that literally does go edge to edge we're talking about a couple of millimeters of bezels around the outside and the way they've done that is by using this elevating front-facing camera so they don't need a space for it they're up at the top and also there is an under display a fingerprint reader so when you put all that together you've got this nice full view display and I must say in the time I've been using this phone it really is nice particularly I'm showing photos to people and it takes up that whole display and it really is a good viewing experience that you have in your hand on top of that it's a Super AMOLED display so the colors are nice and vibrant and those blacks are nice and dark and it's got full HD plus resolution which translates to 1080 by 2340 pixels so that's what's happening on the front of the device what happens when you flip it over well when you do look at the rack of the device you see this lovely color scheme they've got going on here here got this nice blue one but more importantly got this triple camera system has a 48 megapixel sensor for normal photos an 8 megapixel sensor for wide shots and a 5 megapixel sensor for depth information now we will talk more about the camera in a little bit but it does certainly take pride in place here on the back of that device unfortunately there is a camera bump which means if you do type with the phone on a flat surface then it will rock as you're typing something personally I am NOT very keen about in the past when I've talked about phones with camera bumped people have said well of course if you put a case on it that will solve the problem now you do get a free case with this phone but ironically it also has a camera bump so it doesn't actually solve the wobbling problem when you are tired also the box you get a fast charger that can do 18 watts as two amps at nine volts you get a pair of headphones and you get a USB cable and I'm sad to say this phone uses a microUSB port so if you've made a switch over to USB type-c then this really is going to be a legacy device for you taking a quick look round the edges of the phone at the very top of course you've got that elevating selfie camera I'm pleased to say there is a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack on the right hand side you've got the power button and the volume keys on the very bottom you've got that micro USB port as I mentioned a moment ago you've got a SIM tray that can also take an micro SD card you have a single speaker grille on the left hand side you have a dedicated ai button which I talked more about in a minute and you have a second SIM tray so this seems to be one of those rare phones where you can actually use two Sims and you can actually use a micro SD card all at the same time although I must say I haven't actually tried that let's talk about the camera for a little bit now of course that main sense is a 48 megapixel sensor however if you read the small print you'll see that actually it only produces 12 megapixel photos and that's because four pixels are used together in a kind of a super sampling way to actually just produce one pixel on the actual photo so it isn't really a 48 megapixel camera it actually effectively a 12 megapixel camera and that can actually drop as low as 8 megapixels depending on the ratio that you're using while you take the photo overall I was very impressed by the quality of the photos that came out of the vivo v15 Pro particularly the nighttime mode which actually used quite a lot because I really was quite impressed by the photos and the way it works is if you take a photo in the night shot mode then it will take a much longer exposure maybe 5 seconds and it will then Stitch all that information together to bring out the extra light in those photos they're kind of like HDR for daytime but actually using it at nighttime but the caveat is you do have to keep the phone very very still so I found the best results are when you're kind of leaning up against something maybe a window frame or kind of you know a pillar or post or that kind of thing it works very well you don't necessarily need to use a tripod but you sir they do need to keep it still but when you do that those nighttime shots can actually look pretty good as I think there is this wide-angle shot and that actually is very nice it's actually not too wide you get any kind of barrel distortion but it is good you can kind of get a much bigger scene of what you're taking particularly when you're taking pictures of landscapes and be able to really get the edges of that photo so using the wide-angle shot was also I was pleased with the results and unfortunately I can't say the same about the front-facing camera although that nice pop up camera is very very nice to watch is very very nice to see in action and it says it's 32 megapixels actually again they're using some kind of super sampling here and you actually get 8 megapixels photos out of it and actually when you do a bit of pixel peeping on them you'll find the quality isn't that good at all now as for the depth sensor that's there so you can have that artificial bokeh effect applied in post-processing basically it's there to kind of gauge how far away the subject is and then you can see what's beyond that and kind of a blot apply the blurring unlike most of these systems when it gets it right it's okay and when it gets it wrong it just basically gets it wrong as you can see from some of these photos here even this picture of me which it should be able to detect me wearing a hat but even the hat there is blurred when it shouldn't be there's some stuff over my shoulder there that's blurred that shouldn't be and again the same when you apply this to objects rather than people you can get mistakes in the processing so when it works it will work well but it can't be guaranteed to come out as you expect the good news is that actually this is something you can do in post Pro so you can change the depth so if you find it's actually focusing things and it shouldn't be or things right a focus it shouldn't be you can actually just drop down that bokeh effect and maybe bring some things back into focus and kind of save the picture the camera also includes the jovi image recognition system which allows you to take a photograph of something or point the camera at something and it will kind of use some image recognition software to tell you what's in that photo and it looks like it brings up links for shopping site so you can buy something similar now sometimes it worked and brought up links and for me even though I'm in Europe it was bringing up links for shops in Malaysia and sometimes it would just say please connect to the Internet and it doesn't didn't give you any results even though I was connected to the insect so it seems to be a bit hit and miss and I'm not really sure of its actual value really and that jovi image recognition system can be activated either when you're inside the camera or actually by double tapping on the hey I key on the left hand side of the phone if you single tap on it or long press on it you'll get Google assistance so it's actually a nice way of getting very quickly into Google er system the good news is it can be remapped in the settings let's talk a few minutes about the internals of this device it comes with the snapdragon 675 that's a very very recent processor from coal comb and it uses to court it's a 76 cores and then six cortex a 55 cores and it will be interesting to see how it compares with the other high-end devices in the 600 range and of course in the 700 range it also has the Adreno 6 1/2 GPU so actually it will be able to play good games on it I've been able to play things like Need for Speed without any worries whatsoever however course you're not going to get the same GPU performance that you would get from let's say a flagship device using a Snapdragon 800 series processor let's have a quick look at the benchmarks for Geekbench single core there's a score of 2388 which actually makes this phone faster a quinta geek and the snapdragon 835 may be something you'll find in a pixel 2 for the multi-core score it's actually 5535 it's actually slightly less than what you're getting a snapdragon 835 and then a test like an-22 which also includes GPU and CPU will give you a score of 170,000 102 which again is greater than something like the pixel to the phone comes in several different versions some have got 8 gigabytes of RAM some we've got 6 gigabytes of RAM the one I was using has 6 gigabytes of RAM and 128 megabytes of internal storage now Norway at this point I'd want to run speed test G on this device to see how it unfortunately speedtest G won't run one of the test crashes and I can't find out why any actually works on every other phone that I've tried except for this VEVO V 15 Pro and talking to one of my colleagues they also found another benchmark tool that won't run on this device so that's a bit sad particularly since this has the snapdragon 675 in it and I really would like to see how it performs under speed test G but that does lead me into the whole area of the software the V 15 Pro does not use stock Android it uses fun touch OS which while based on Android 9.0 really is a heavy skinned lots of things have been changed including of course things that there's no app draw all the settings have been changed all the apps that are in there are not any of the standard Android stock apps they all come from fun touch OS while you do get Google Play and a lot of the Google apps pre-installed most of the standard apps are actually from this fun touch OS on top of that in the first few days of using I really was getting bombarded by a permission requests even for the most simplest of things the keyboard and the the kind of the album min of the gallery and every single app almost seemed to be asking me for permissions and I thought permissions that really weren't kind of appropriate for what they were doing why on earth is the gallery need these permissions so that also secondly did kind of alarm me slightly having said that I haven't had any major crashes or unexpected reboots however fun touch OS really does need some extra polish and some refinement to bring up to the level of software that we see today in stock Android and from the other major OEMs and finally let's talk about battery life it has a three thousand seven hundred million power battery which should be ample to get you through a normal day of usage however I have found that if you are a heavy game player actually the battery drain can be greater than you might assume for example just playing gaming's you'll find that the whole battery can be drained in just about three and a half hours which actually is that expected from a battery of this size however if you stay away from 3d gaming or you don't play it very much then you should be able to get through the day without any problem even if you do need to recharge the good news is though that fast charging works very well on this device so what does that mean overall well there's a nice hardware package here the display the ultra view display is excellent the in display fingerprint reader worked flawlessly you've got nice colors you've got nice blacks you've got a nice processor in there the Snapdragon 6mm 5 good amount of memory an internal storage the camera system on the back is ok and does produce some reasonable photos however the package is let down overall by the software and that elevating camera although it looks nice when you see it going up and down actually it doesn't produce the kind of quality of selfie photos that I would be expecting from this camera ok my name is Gary Sims this is Andrew Authority I really hope you enjoyed the video if you did please do give it a thumbs up also do check out the written review which goes along with this video and you'll find that on the Android or thority website ok that's about it I see in the next one