Vivo has been working hard to keep up with the competition and has been pretty successful in it. The brand is continuously innovating and catering to the needs of the market, Vivo was the first brand to offer in-display fingerprint technology under Rs. 30,000 with the V11 Pro. The brand also introduced the pop-up camera to the mass market with the Vivo V15 Pro, the brand keeps pushing the V series line-up of devices to the limit to offer new experiences ahead of the market. The V17 Pro comes with a dual selfie camera inside the pop-up module and a Quad camera setup on the rear.
We’ve used the Vivo V17 Pro extensively over the last couple weeks and we feel that it has one of the best performing cameras under Rs. 30,000. The smartphone comes with a total of six cameras, four of them are vertically aligned while two are in the pop-up module for selfies. We take an in-depth look into the smartphone to evaluate the different aspects like the design, performance, and camera.
Design and Display
In the decent times most Vivo, phones have had a pretty good design, and the Vivo V17 Pro sticks to the trend. The Vivo V17 Pro is a very good-looking smartphone and perhaps one of the best in its price segment. The smartphone comes in two color variants, Midnight Ocean and Glacier Ice. The smartphone comes with Gorilla Glass 6 protection on the back panel and the all-glass body adds to the aesthetics of the device. The rear of the smartphone is neatly laid out and despite sporting a Quad camera module, the design doesn’t look very cluttered. The Vivo V17 Pro does feel a little bulky to hold in the hand and the heft is evident.
Most of the front of the device is covered by the display as the camera module has been moved to the pop-up module. The fingerprint sensor on the device is of in-display format and is fast. While most smartphones with a pop-up module for the camera have only housed one camera, the Vivo V17 Pro pop-up module houses two selfie cameras and an LED flash too. The smartphone comes with a 6.44-inch Super AMOLED display with a resolution of 2400 x 1080 and has an aspect ratio of 20:9. The display gets pretty bright and is usable in all lighting conditions.
The Vivo V17 Pro also comes with always-on display mode similar to what we’ve seen on Samsung smartphones. The display is very vivid, bright enough for most situations and offers a good experience for watching Netflix videos and YouTube streams.
Performance and Software
The Vivo V17 Pro is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 675 chipset, while this is an upgrade from what we’ve seen on the Vivo V15 Pro, it is much weaker than what most other smartphones offer in this price segment. Surprisingly, the Vivo Z1 Pro and the Z1X from the brand cost lesser while being paired with a newer Snapdragon 712 chipset. In terms of real-world performance, the Snapdragon 675 is a decent chipset and offers smooth performance in most instances. We tried a couple of games and the smartphone handled it pretty decently without major lags in the default settings.
While testing out Asphalt 9, we found no issues and the game played very smoothly, in PUBG, the game performed well in the default settings but started showing occasional lag when we cranked up some of the settings. Coming to the daily tasks, the smartphone was able to handle it very smoothly. Switching between applications, browsing the internet and other everyday tasks were handled smoothly without any issues. We were able to launch multiple applications and smoothly shift between them without the applications being dropped from memory.
The Software on the Vivo V17 Pro is yet another area with scope for improvement, the software is similar to most Vivo Phones and we don’t seem to like it very much. The FunTouch OS feels a bit cluttered and brings in too many third-party applications. The best part about the latest FunTouch OS 9 over its predecessors was the inclusion of the system-wide dark mode.
The Vivo V17 Pro offered pretty good battery life given the 4,100mAh battery, the device also supports 18W fast charging to boost the battery quickly. While using the Vivo V17 Pro as my primary device through my trip to Goa, despite heavy usage consisting of Chatting applications, Social Media, Calls, Camera and a little bit of gaming, the smartphone lasted over a day of usage. To juice the device back up, the bundled charger took about an hour and a half to bring the smartphone to a 100-percent battery state.
Camera
The Vivo V17 Pro is one of the best camera smartphones under Rs 30,000. The rear camera setup consists of a 48MP Sony sensor, 13MP telephoto lens, 8MP wide-angle lens and a 2MP depth sensor for the portrait. The front camera module is a combination of a 32MP primary sensor and an 8MP wide-angle lens. The Vivo V17 Pro captures some excellent shots in good lighting conditions. The details are good and the colors are natural. The dynamic range on the images was good as well and in most conditions the images were crisp and had good detail.
The images clicked on the ultra-wide-angle lens also returned pretty good results, there was little fish eye effect noticeable in some images, however, the colors were pretty accurate even in the super wide-angle mode and the images returned sharp and crisp. There is also a super macro mode in the smartphone that allows you to get extremely close to the objects while capturing the images while still retaining the details and accuracy. The Vivo V17 Pro produces amazing results in good lighting conditions, in low lighting conditions the image quality does reduce to an extent but still holds up decently. In some occasions, the images captured in the night had reduced details and colors, switching to night mode in the camera application does improve the performance by a considerable amount.
The Vivo V17 Pro does pretty good with the selfies too and captured accurate details of the face, the camera applications do soften the selfie by a lot sometimes and the results look very artificial. Low light performance in the front camera is just average but turning on the Night mode does make the results a little better. The selfie flash comes in very handy and can be easily turned on from the camera application to get a better selfie even in badly lit conditions. The ultra-wide-angle selfie camera comes very handy while trying to take a group selfie.
For full resolution samples, click here.
Final Verdict
The Viv V17 Pro is a little on the expensive side, especially considering the performance being offered. However, if you are a mobile photography enthusiast without much desire for gaming, then the Vivo V17 Pro is one of the best smartphones in the price segment. This smartphone is a tough sell with the Redmi K20 Pro offered amazing performance, good cameras and better software experience at a very similar price point. The dual camera in the pop-up module is the most unique thing about the smartphone and works pretty well.
