Gadgetory

this is the vivo v9 it's vivos flagship smartphone and if you think it looks like an iPhone you wouldn't be wrong it has vertical dual cameras on the back and not surprisingly there's a notch at the top of the display there's a ton of iPhone 10 look-alikes coming out this year and despite the v9 similarities to the iPhone 10 I didn't really mind it all that much it's being powered by a Snapdragon 626 processor and four gigabytes of RAM so even though this is vivos flagship phone it's more of a mid-range device and isn't what we usually think of when we hear the word flagship performance however is perfectly fine the phone was quick to launch apps scrolling and swiping was smooth and responsive and I didn't run into any issues with lag or dropped frames when multitasking or playing games the v9 uses polycarbonate or plastic for its design so it doesn't feel quite as nice as a phone made of glass or metal but it still feels very sturdy it's super lightweight because of the plastic and the rounded corners and curved backside makes it feel pretty comfortable to hold the only thing I don't like is the glossy finish which makes it really tough to keep clean from fingerprints it's got a large 6.3 inch display with very thin bezels all around giving the v9 an impressive 90% screen to body ratio it's an LCD panel with 1080p resolution and an aspect ratio of 19 by 9 so it's slightly taller than the 18 by 9 screens that we're used to seeing but it's not something you'll really notice all that much even though it's an LCD and the black levels and contrast aren't quite as good as an OLED panel it's still a gorgeous looking screen its colorful vibrant has excellent viewing angles and it's pretty bright so I didn't have any problems using it in direct sunlight the notch at the top is smaller than the one on the iPhone since it's only housing your basic sensors the earpiece and a front-facing camera and it doesn't interfere with how apps appear on the display or change any interaction with the phone pretty much every application works as it normally would on any other Android smartphone but the notification bar does color match itself to the respective application to give the illusion that the app runs underneath the notch the only exception is videos and games since most of the videos we watch and games that we play aren't usually in nineteen by nine so this does result in pillarboxing the pillarboxing does sort of make the knotch disappear but if you want a more full screen experience vivo software unless you rescale applications to build the entire display at the expense of a slightly cropped image now as modern as the v9 looks and feels I thought it was really weird that Devo chose to go with a micro USB port instead of USB type-c it just feels a little backwards compared to the rest of the phone on the plus side it does have a headphone jack which we don't see a lot of anymore and the fingerprint sensor that's on the back is really fast which I didn't expect it's practically instantaneous and unlocks the second I rest my finger on the sensor it's probably one of the fastest fingerprint sensors I've used on any recent Android smartphone the v9 also comes with face unlock which feels equally as fast but it isn't very reliable in low-light vivo says that the face unlock uses AI to detect if you're looking at the display before it will actually unlock and it does work but I don't know if I buy that there's any real AI happening here another area that vivo uses AI is in the front facing camera the v9 has a very high resolution 24 megapixel selfie camera that is supposed to give you the quote-unquote perfect selfie where the AI comes into play is with the beauty mode it's supposed to be able to detect your age sex skin tone and texture to give you a better looking selfie and that sounds great and all but I didn't really notice much of a difference between an AI Beauty selfie and a normal selfie other than its softening some of the details in my face the qualities of the selfies though are pretty good with nice detail and natural skin tones and there's a portrait mode if you want to add some extra background blur the primary rear camera comes in at 16 megapixels with a secondary 5 megapixel depth sensor which means you have portrait mode on the rear camera as well but because of the depth sensor it's a little bit more advanced you have the ability to simulate an aperture ranging from as wide as at point 9 5 to us small as f-16 and the point of focus can be adjusted after the fact which is something you can't do with the front camera it's pretty similar to the wide aperture mode that we see on huawei or on ER phones and I like this feature because you're able to tweak the image to how you want it to look image quality from the 16 megapixel camera is fairly decent when you're in good lighting colors are pleasant with good details and sharpness but it does struggle a bit in high contrast situations you either wind up with the photo that's too dark or too bright and it never seems to be able to get the exposure quite right the camera falls apart pretty quickly in low-light with muddy details washed out colors and overblown highlights but this didn't really surprise me all that much since the camera doesn't have oh is and it also doesn't have the brightest aperture at F 2.0 now before I talk about battery life I want to throw out a quick disclaimer my usage with the vivo b9 was purely on Wi-Fi as I was unable to get mobile data to work on this phone I tried a couple different SIM cards rebooted the phone and made sure my APN settings were correct but nothing seemed to work for what it's worth I was able to get through a full day very comfortably even with a lot of YouTube watching and gaming I would show you screen on time numbers but vivo software for some reason doesn't show you a total amount of screen on time and instead breaks it down on a per app basis speaking of software the v9 is running Android 8.1 Oreo with a custom skin that vivo calls fun touch OS like many other parts of the b9 fun touch OS is very heavily inspired by Apple there's no app drawer and a lot of icons look almost identical to iOS you can swipe down for a spotlight search feature and swipe up for control center and the v9 even has an option for iPhone 10 like swipe gestures that let you swipe up for home swipe up and hold for the app switcher and swipe left or right along the bottom to quickly switch between recent applications despite feeling like an iOS clone it does have some pretty useful features like the game mode that can auto reject phone calls while you're gaming and let you answer messages without having to leave the game there's also a motorbike mode that prioritizes your safety when it comes to phone calls and messages and an app cloning feature that lets you run multiple instances of the same app which can come in handy for apps that don't support multiple accounts as of right now the vivo b9 is only available in India so I would not recommend picking one of these up if you're in the US if you are interested the price converts to roughly three hundred and sixty US dollars but you'll most likely be paying much more than that to import one if you're in the US you have some other options like the honor 7x which is very comparable to the b9 in terms of hardware and features and will be significantly cheaper at $200 the V 9 is a great option if you're able to easily get your hands on one but for the rest of us Devo has shown us more exciting stuff in the past several months that is worth waiting for so that about wraps up this review for the VEVO b9 hopefully you guys enjoyed it and if you did please give it a thumbs up down below we definitely appreciate it and subscribe to the channel which is also down below if you haven't already hit that notification bell so you don't miss out on future videos and of course check us out on social media instagram twitter snapchat google+ 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