Vivo is one of the few smartphone manufacturers that release their flagship series towards the end of the year. Its powerful X Series sets the bar for camera performance, throwing the gauntlet to the smartphones that follow it in the following year. Such is the case with the newly released Vivo X100 Pro as well. Launched globally in December 2023, Vivo’s flagship arrived in India earlier this month (priced at Rs 89,999). Excited to check out the exemplary cameras, we used the smartphone as our daily driver for a week. Here is our in-depth review of the Vivo X100 Pro.
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In This Article
Vivo X100 Pro review: Design and Display
Here’s what you get inside the X100 Pro’s retail package.
- Smartphone
- Body-coloured silicon cover
- USB Type-C to Type-C cable
- 120W power adapter (the smartphone supports 100W wired charging)
- SIM ejector tool
- Warranty card
- Quick start guide
The circular camera cutout that made its debut in the Vivo X80 Pro has been perfected on the X100 Pro. Instead of being aligned to the left of the back panel, it is now positioned centrally. The Zeiss branding which was previously found on the side of the camera panel is now positioned within it. A stainless steel ring with a ridged perimeter forms the frame of the two-step cutout, giving the smartphone its distinct ‘camera’ look. This feels like the final form of the camera design, after two steady years of evolution.
We used the Asteroid Black colour variant of the Vivo X100 Pro for this review. The smartphone is also available in Startail Blue and Sunset Orange shades. The matte black finish on our model made it a bit slippery, but on the bright side, there were no fingerprints to be found on the glass back panel. The smartphone weighs 225g, which is pretty standard for flagship devices, but if you’re making the switch from a midrange or budget phone, you will clearly feel the difference.
The aluminium frame has curved edges to accommodate the curved AMOLED display. The volume rocker keys and the power button are positioned on the right edge while the IR blaster and secondary microphone make their way to the top of the phone. The bottom edge houses the SIM tray, primary microphone, USB Type-C port, and speaker grille. The left edge has been left keyless.
Vivo X100 Pro’s 6.78-inch LTPO curved AMOLED display offers a maximum refresh rate of 120Hz and a peak brightness of 3,000 nits. Needless to say, the smartphone is perfectly legible under direct sunlight. The refresh rate is set to ‘Smart Switch’ (adaptable) by default, but you can lock it at 60Hz or 120Hz from device settings. While you’re there, you can also select the ideal colour profile for yourself and regulate the colour temperature of the screen.
Scrolling and navigation on this 120Hz AMOLED display is as smooth as it can get. The display is only slightly curved towards the edges, so the accidental touches are kept to a minimum. We are not super fond of curved panels, but we really enjoyed our time with this one. The overall touch reception is quite snappy. Even the slightest flicks get registered with ease. The bezels around the display have been kept to a minimum, giving you more screen real estate. Up top, the selfie camera lies inside a punch-hole cutout. The under-display optical scanner is positioned a bit lower than we would have liked and isn’t the fastest one around, but it does a good job on the device.
Watching HD movies and videos on this 1,260 x 2,800p display proved to be a remarkable experience. The deep blacks are astonishing and the contrasting vivid colours are punchy and fun. The curved nature of the display does not diminish the viewing angles in any way. You can hold the smartphone in any posture and still get well-composed images that truly ‘pop’. While binge-watching videos, the top-heavy nature of the smartphone can make it fatiguing to hold, but you can easily prop it against a solid surface.
Vivo X100 Pro is rated IP68 for water and dust resistance. This means it can easily survive water splashes and even small dips. Vivo claims the smartphone can remain unscathed after submerging to 1.5m for up to 30 minutes.
Vivo X100 Pro review: Performance and Cameras
The X100 Pro is the first smartphone in India to be powered by the MediaTek Dimensity 9300 SoC. This chipset is a direct rival to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. Interestingly, the latter is found in iQOO 12 (read our review here), which happens to be Vivo’s subsidiary brand. Accompanying the Dimensity 9300 SoC is Vivo’s V3 chip which pulls its weight in photoprocessing and gaming duties. The smartphone is available in a single 16GB RAM + 512GB storage variant.
As soon as we got the Vivo X100 Pro for review, we transferred all our apps to the smartphone and loaded a dozen of them to check its RAM performance. The device did not take any time to load the apps after a period of inactivity. We were able to pick things up right where we left off. Basic tasks like instant messaging, web browsing, video calling, navigation, and media playback present no problems whatsoever. Since this is a camera smartphone, we tried editing the videos we shot on it and were delighted to see how easily it crushed every task.
Vivo X100 Pro is not a gaming smartphone. But when you’re paying Rs 90,000 for a device, you expect a high standard on every front. With that in mind, we played titles like Call of Duty Mobile, Genshin Impact, and Asphalt 9 on the device. Even after an hour of gaming, the internal temperature of the smartphone did not rise to a point where we had to put it down to cool off. The surrounding temperature is also a contributing factor here (we are in the thick of winter, after all), but all things considered, the X100 Pro does a good job of thermal management. The V3 chip is a nice addition to the smartphone, as it does its part in bringing smoothness to the gameplay and handling demanding graphics.
In the Geekbench 6 CPU benchmark, the Vivo X100 Pro scored 2,199 points in the single-core test and 7,301 points in the multi-core test. In comparison, the iQOO 12, powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC, scored 2,219 and 6,696 points respectively.
Moving on to the software, the Android 14-based Functouch 14 OS does a good job on Vivo’s flagship smartphone. We like the extensive set of Dynamic Effects that the Funtouch OS provides for screen transitions, phone unlock, fingerprint icon, charging, USB insertion, and ambient light notifications. The smartphone also has a ‘Simple Mode’, that covers the home screen with tiles for all the essential functions and increases the font size. The bloatware has been kept to a minimum, but it still isn’t a good look on a smartphone that costs Rs 90,000.
Supplying the smartphone with its juice is a 5,400 mAh Li-Ion battery pack. This battery pack is composed of 2 individual cells. A battery capacity of 5,400 mAh is new for flagships, but Vivo X100 Pro is still a one-day phone. This isn’t a complaint by any means, as we got a steady 6-7 hours of screen time out of it until it hit the 20% threshold. On more conservative usage, we were able to push the screen time to more than 10 hours. Vivo ships a 120W charging brick with the X100 Pro even though its wired charging support is capped at 100W. It took a little over half an hour to fully charge the smartphone.
Let’s talk about what the Vivo X100 Pro does best – cameras and photography. The massive camera cutout at the back of the smartphone houses three 50MP sensors for the wide, ultrawide, and floating telephoto lenses. On the left side of the panel lies the Zeiss 1-inch main camera which gets the Sony IMX989 sensor. The ultrawide camera is positioned at the top while the Zeiss APO floating telephoto camera is placed to its right. The new generation of Zeiss T* coating reduces reflectance from the lenses and brings new clarity to the images.
The 1-inch primary shooter is an absolute delight to use. In daylight conditions, the camera captures accurate colours and the V3 chip does a solid job of processing the images. Most of the shots we captured were taken in overcast conditions (you can thank the January winter for that) and the smartphone did well to expose the sky perfectly. The colours were tuned perfectly, doing justice to the scene in front of us.
We were happy with the dynamic range produced in the images. The shadows were detailed and the dimly lit parts of the scene were processed without being overblown by artificial brightness. This is largely due to the 1-inch sensor which captures a lot of light and doesn’t rely too heavily on photoprocessing. A similar performance is replicated in limited lighting, where the Vivo X100 Pro performs brilliantly even without the Night Mode turned on. We were surprised by the sharpness of images taken at night and the way the natural colour of objects was produced in the resulting images.
Photos taken with the 50MP ultrawide sensor are sharp, well-composed, and pack a good amount of details. If you’re tired of most ultrawide sensors taking ‘soft’ pictures, you may want to switch to the X100 Pro. Even at night, this sensor produces great results, with accurate colours and incredible detail. The autofocus skills of this camera are also on point. We wish it could cover a wider field of view, but we would take detailed images over that any day.
The 50MP floating telephoto camera rounds off an already great camera module in style. It offers 4.3x optical zoom and 100mm equivalent focal length. This range comes in very handy while taking portrait shots from a distance. At 4.3x native zoom, the X100 Pro expertly manages to create the ideal depth effect and apply the appropriate background blur. There is a nice separation between the subject and the background as well. Zooming in further to distant objects produces good results, albeit with the help of smart photo processing. To test the limits of the periscope telephoto lens, we zoomed it at a board roughly 300 metres away. Even in foggy conditions, the camera did a stellar job of producing legible results.
Being a camera-centric smartphone, Vivo X100 Pro’s camera app offers a plethora of shooting options. To begin with, you get to choose from 3 shooting profiles – Vivid, Textured, and Zeiss Natural. The Astrophotography Mode is nestled away in the adjacent page along with Zeiss’ landscape and architecture mode. In portrait mode, the camera lets you choose from 5 focal lengths – 24mm, 35mm, 50mm, 85mm, and 100mm. You also get a bunch of bokeh flares and portrait effects for your shots. Super Macro mode is one of the underrated features of the camera setup. The textures we were able to capture in this mode were amazing.
Up front, the 32MP selfie camera does a good job of capturing the appropriate amount of details. It doesn’t mess with the skin tones or textures too much, but there are manual controls which let you control the smoothness of the photos. The downside of this camera is that it can only record 1080p videos. Meanwhile, the main rear sensor can shoot 8K videos at 30fps. The ultrawide and telephoto lens can shoot 4K & 1080p videos at 30 and 60fps.
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Verdict
With the X100 Pro, Vivo has produced one of the best camera smartphones in the flagship category. Of course, there are many more releases yet to come this year, but we can easily see this smartphone holding its own even among the more premium flagships. While camera performance is consistently good across the board, the portrait shots taken with the primary and telephoto lenses are some of the best we’ve seen on any smartphone. Photography chops aside, the smartphone justifies its Rs 90,000 price tag with its high-octane chipset. The supreme benchmark figures are backed up with a rock-solid performance day in and day out. During the week-long review period, the Vivo X100 Pro did not produce a single hiccup. Lastly, the unique camera cutout and glass back bring a lot of flair to the device, making it a very easy device to recommend.
Vivo X100 Pro: Pros
- Incredible camera performance
- Great portrait shots
- Unique design
Vivo X100 Pro: Cons
- OS contains bloatware
I don’t understand, is this a review of the X100 or X90? In the text they are used randomly…