Gadgetory

who is blue you ask blue is a consumer electronics company founded in 2009 and headquartered in sunny Miami Florida so far the company has reportedly shipped over 10 million blue branded devices newest in its lineup what some are calling the thinnest phone in the States it's thin it's light and it looks a lot like an iPhone 6 beyond first impressions how does the blue vivo air measure up let's jump right in the first thing you're gonna notice is how light and how thin the phone really is 97 grams and 5.1 millimeters it really does feel like a display unit the next thing you'll notice is the bold bright screen it looks fake but it's not though it's made of Gorilla Glass 3 the vivo air comes with a screen protector in the box that you can apply if you want it also comes with a lightweight case as well we opted to go without either and other than a fairly slippery back we're happy with that choice it's a four point eight inch Super AMOLED panel with a resolution of 720p which puts it at a very respectable 306 PPI pixel density colors are hyper bright and a bit oversaturated but blacks are deep and text is crisp video streams tremendously well and watching serenity was more detailed and crisp than we've ever seen whether this is thanks to codec magic it does have an h.265 Ultra HD video supported by the SOC or whether it's because of the Mallee 450 GPU driving the pictures we don't know under the hood you'll find 16 gig of internal storage regrettably there's no SD card expansion and there's only one solitary gig of ram this shows up in everyday use the processor however is a little bit surprising it's a mediatek octa-core clocked at 1.7 gigahertz and it's based on arms cortex a7 no this is not a dual quad core configuration either mediatek describes the mt6592 chip as a true octa-core with all eight cores firing at once the media tech chip powering the vivo air is capable of LTE but blue opted to go with HSPA+ instead and it's calling it 4G both on the box and on the carrier icon in the status bar on the Wi-Fi side only 2.4 gigahertz is supported on 802 11 B G and n no A or AC here and performance was only acceptable when it comes to software the vivo air uses a heavily stylized build of Android 4.4.2 kitkat it'll run all the apps that you're used to and they'll look like they do on any other Android but everything else well it's different from the lockscreen to the launcher which somehow lacks an app drawer it's got an infinite unorganized scrolling homescreen instead blue has an interesting take on Android that's for sure you might love it you might hate it but you've got to give it to blue for going out on a limb the last it looks like the heavy customization is already delaying OS updates with no announced timeframe for when Android 5.0 lollipop will be arriving if at all in everyday use the vive where performs well heavy apps hang up a bit but we'd expect that with only one gig ram benchmarks often didn't want to complete which we suspect is due to incompatibilities with the relatively new media tech tip upload and download speeds were disappointing even for HSPA+ calls on the device are acceptable but not great our callers seem to notice a slight delay which is more than usual for what we've seen on cellular networks but it wasn't a deal-breaker overall audio is strong but the speaker phones muffle the muted thanks to the away facing speaker thin means it doesn't have a huge battery to weigh it down it's just 2100 milliamp hours non-removable what's surprising is just how much time we got between charges after one day and six hours of moderate use we still had 70% left however start watching some streaming video and well you're gonna see that number drop fast unlike smartphones from some other manufacturers blue doesn't cheat by sending their phone is thin then bumping the camera module out the back side the vivo Ayers camera sits flush with the back of the phone sure it's only 8 megapixels but it still shoots video at 1080p using that h.265 Ultra HD video codec that we talked about before pictures taken with the phone were acceptable and video was decent you're not gonna win any photo contest here but those aren't the contest that blue is trying to win with this thin lightweight 8 quart beast visit if you've got an Amazon Prime subscription you can pick up the white edition of the vivo air for just hundred ninety-nine and that's unlocked for a device with these specs as long as you don't live and die by LTE and if you want bragging rights about owning one of the slimmest phones around you just can't go wrong with the blue vivo air check out our additional coverage and thoughts I'm using one of the slimmest smartphones around over at pocketnow.com make sure you hit the thumbs up on this video and subscribe so you don't miss out on any of our upcoming videos of course follow us on your favorite social media networks I'm at Joe Levi we're at pocket now and catch you next time