Introduction:
We want more phones like the Vivo V30 - a svelte phone that doesn't compromise camera quality, packs decent hardware aan immersive screen. It comes in a variety of interesting colors, features a big battery and an aggressive charger. What's not to like?
Let's rewind a bit, though. The vivo V30 is the first of a new midrange series by its parent company - the vivo bunch. So you will have the V30, followed by a Zeiss supported Pro model with perhaps better specs and lastly this cool looking low-end 5G phone known as the Lite variant.
The rom vivo V30 is an IP54-rated smartphone with a dual-glass curved design, and a thin and lightweight body The V30 is 7mm thin and features a top of the line 6.78-inch AMOLED (1260p, 10-bit color depth / HDR and refresh rate at120Hz) coupled with massive battery capacity -5,000mAh (>80W fast charging).
While still not as powerful, the vivo V30 appears to pack a Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 chipset that should do fine for class-leading gaming performance. The phone can be purchased with either 8GB or 12GB RAM and storage options include are 128GB,256GB and512 GB which also UFS2.2
vivo has a Rosetta with the cameras and V30 is not an exception. The back gets a dual camera kit with 50MP OIS primary and the same for ultrawide, which is coupled to AF. On the front, it has a wide-angle 50MP camera of AF.
The only thing we think vivo has truly missed in the Vivo V30 is a feature that's been surprisingly missing for most entries in its mid-range v-series years ago. What will be a stereo speakers, yes we are in the range of talking about macros here One bottom-firing speaker on V30 Let us in anticipation hope that it is atleast a little bombastic.
Vivo V30 Unboxing Review:
Contents: vivo V30 80W charging adapter USB-A-to-C cable Clear silicone case
The front and rear are both coated in glass, the display comes with a thin layer of protective film (which may or may not be worth keeping as it's an absolute smudge magnet), but enough about that.
Vivo V30 Design:
The vivo V30 will come with a stylish looking curved body designed look and slim profile along the exciting mysterious colors which brands typically tend to use. The phone itself is rated IP54 for dust- and heavy splash-resistance.
vivo V30 back vivo V30 sides and bottom However, this is not as straight-forward. Sitting on the front is a sheet of Schott Alpha glass, while at back are similarly curved multi-layered tempered glasses with some nice-looking textures. Despite being plastic, the thin glossy frame has reinforced corners of aluminum alloy.
Enormous, cause it houses the cameras and flash. The top square is home to dual 50MP primary cameras, and the second one houses LED flash with aura light surrounding it which vivo calls View Catcher. As you can see, the square does glow... quite a bit and can be steadily changed from white to yellow all the way until pure orange/red.
On color vivo sends out the V30 four different finishes The Bloom White version features a 3D Petal Pattern, the Waving Aqua is finished with Rippling Magnetic Particle effect while Lush Green has a changing color variant and Noble Black possesses Fluorite AG Glass.
Our test car is an Aqua model, and that rippled effect beneath the rear glass looks as though Honda swept up some water on its way to work one day. This blue tint of the back panel is quite light.
V30 has curved glass over the OLED display which measures 6.78 inches in size on both versions of the V30 (vivo doesn't differentiate between standard and Pro with a Plus or Max). Only the protective glass, not the screen itself is curved. Bezels are on the thin and equal, a tiny perforation for the selfie camera.
In the above-the-screen earpiece is barely noticeable, while invisible to human eyes sits under-scree fingerprint reader. As with most optical solutions, it is fast and reliable.
Back looks attractive from hundreds of similar-looking mid rangers, thus places vivo V30 in the trending category.
In any case, the upper square houses cameras while another - LED flashes. A flimsy metal cage surrounds the entire island.
On the sides of the vivo V30 Nothing unusual here.
Vivo V30 is launched in four color options This extra-thin profile is great for when the phone's lying flat on your desk or table, and it looks soooo cool.
Unfortunately, the V30 is one of the more difficult phones to hold without a case. The it is an all-gloss body, with no bezel or frame around the edge and zero grip meaning this phone slips out of your hands like a nightmare. Even worse: it is practically impossible to lift off the desk without dropping almost immediately. It appears that the other colors may produce a matte surface, but we doubt it will be much better.
The retail bundle comes with a silicone case that provides some grip, but it bulks-up the skinny profile.
Vivo V30 Display:
The vivo V30 has a 6.78-inch curved AMOLED screen with a resolution of 1,260 x 2,800 or about ~453ppi This is protected by a curved Schott Alpha glass.
The panel is as premium as it gets - 10-bit color depth, upto 120Hz refresh rate and HDR10+ with upto 2,800nits of peak brightness. The High Maximum Brightness which the display is capable of withstanding is 1200nits.
So, we've conducted our own display test and once again the numbers make perfect sense given vivo's claim. We saw an initial 528nits of peak brightness, when we moved the manually controlled slider to max.
In Auto Brightness mode, though, the screen can be significantly brighter - as high as 1,253 nits.
The smallest white point, is only 2 nits of the minimum.pyplot
The display has 120Hz refresh rate support but features there are three different modes of refreshing -as specified above- which includes - 120Hz, 60Hz and Smart Switch. The 120Hz and the Smart Switch scale down to 60Hz when screen displays static content, but the downgrade behavior from the Smart Switch is more restrictive - it would sometimes cap system UI and apps like this too at 90Hz or even alogether drop them back to standard refresh rate.
The vivo V30 has Widevine L1 DRM and it could stream in Full HD with HDR10 support on major apps, yes at Netlfix animally.
Vivo V30 Camera:
In some markets, the vivo V30 will be launched with two cameras while in others it'll have three. The wildcard here is a next-to-useless depth sensor, so feel no guilt if the triple-camera variant isn't in your future.
Primary Camera: 50 MP OmniVision OV50E, Wide (main), f/1.9, 23mm, 1/1.55", 2160p@30fps
Ultra wide angle: — 50 MP Samsung ISOCELL JN1, f/2.0, 15mm, AF;1080p@30fps
Front camera: 50 MP Samsung ISOCELL JN1, f/2.0, 20mm (wide), AF; Video capture:.2160p@30fps
Both cameras on the vivo V30 shoot well though, particularly in ultra-wide mode. New to this year is the 50MP camera that replaces an old, outdated 8MP ultrawide and makes a world of a difference whether for grainy detail or autofocus for closer up perspectives sequences.
The front cam is really nice. This phone, in fact offers one of the worlds 50MP front-facing cameras. Check out the quality below.
Main camera
In daylight, the main camera of vivo V30 produces quite neat photos in colorful and damp details You will notice the shadows a tad darker than regular, however we expect it to be overcast hence its normal. Otherwise, dynamic range is excellent and even the smallest details show up well in all conditions including low light indoors. Nonetheless, we would pay a little more for a cleaner exposure in parts of the stills and noise reduction on flat and dark areas.
Those that are concerned about the bold and in your face color palette of these IPS displays will be pleased to know there's three color modes, including one more subdued than Vibrant with Natural or Textured giving you different options on how poppy those colors appear.
2x zoom Camera
True to style, the 2x zoom samples provide the same rendering with an impressively high level of detail, but are perhaps a bit on sharp side for our taste. In fairer lighting the noise reduction algorithm appears to be churning overtime and blurs out finer details in order to keep the scene even more soft. That's not the best execution of 2x zoom we've seen.
Ultrawide camera
The V30 produces standard ultrawide shots, which beats any 8MP that the competition provides of late. The photos are really dynamic, surprisingly well detailed to be sharp and leave little to complain.
However image quality seems to take a hit when shooting indoors or high-contrast scenes. You will see the formerly crushed shadows, clipped highlights or both. But this ultrawide camera is still one of the best aspects...
Selfies Camera
The selfie shooter on the Vivo V30 is strong, too. The camera presents clear and sharp photos with true-to-life colors, real skin tones. In turn, the dynamic range is also good with our challenges from tricky scenes to low light in general not seem to pose a problem for selfies too much.
Main camera
The system will lean on Night mode rather heavily, but the amazing part is that it doesn't yield many issues; did I always like what came out of it? Another situation where some post-processing is needed as the images captured with the main camera are clean, balanced and having punchy colors along also they carried lots of details in low-light samples that we have taken before during night time. And plenty in the shadows, while highlights and light sources are consistently kept so. In fact, we will even venture to say that the photos in low light at night are very close to flagship quality.
As expected, going to 2x zoom gives a tad soft and sometimes noise pictures but they will be alright for most casual social media posts.
Ultrawide camera
There are fewer surprises from the ultrawide camera, and that is a good thing. At night, if a little on the sharp side and sometimes over-processed, they're clean-cut with good edge detail well up to mid-zoom volumes. There are a few clipped highlights and soft patches now and again, but it is generally very impressive for the class.
Vivo V30 Video recording:
For video recording, both the main and selfie cameras of the vivo V30 max out at 2160p at 30fps. The ultrawide camera has enough pixels to record in 4K, even though the feature maxes out at 1080p.
Stabilization is added to the standard 4K footage, along with an Ultra stabilization mode that drops down resolution to 1080p and looks like pretty traditional action camera-like stabilization.
As you can see in the 4K footage, it is quite lush. The twist is a great equalizer for it exudes sharpness at every turn, and detail on point surrounded by vibrant colors. Even with the overcast, were fairly impressed by the rendering overall as there's still a fair amount of detail in even shadows without blowing out highlights.
The ultrawide video is less impressive - it has limited dynamic range, plenty of noise and its pretty soft too. Well maybe not the last part but that could be because 1080p.
But it is understandable given the price bracket, and for night time videos (main camera), they are right enough. Certainly, the video might come out a little soft and noisy (especially in flat areas like skies), but it will be plenty full of dynamic range is ok, contrast looks well enough balanced --- plus there's detail galore.
Vivo V30 Performance:
Devices with the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 started coming out in early-2024, after its late-2023 announcement. The new chipset is part of MediaTek's Dimensity series which sits in the mid range category, built on TSMC 4nm process it promises better performance as well its predecessor... And this isnt who you think.
As the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3, worded without any + or even a tacked-on G branding-and sandwiched between the Snapdragon 7s Gen2 and Snapdragon -oh-the nomenclature is still wack! With those figures and the comparison being Snapdragon 7s Gen 2 data, Qualcomm is promising that we are looking forward to a CPU increase of up to twenty fifth likewise as forty fifth on GPU. Within the SD7 family, that distinction goes to the highest performing model of them all called the SD 7+ Gen 2.
Now, with that semantics-heavy explanation aside, let's dive into what the SD7 Gen 3 provides. It packs an ton octa-core CPU, with 1x2. 63 GHz Cortex-A715 & 3x2. 4 GHz
Unsurprisingly, the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 inside vivo V30 is pretty much in line with what we've already expected -- sandwiches between the Snapdragon 7s Gen2 and Snapragon 765G (Snapdragon Gauguin). The V30 is at least on par with, if not a little bit better than the competition. And from the looks of it, there appears to be a lopsided challenge at hand here- with the OnePlus Nord 3 driving away unchallenged considering that this Dimensity 9000-powered handset is significantly faster than even Vivo V30 Pro.
As for sustained performance, the vivo V30 easily cleared our battery test. The handset maintained nearly 90 percent of CPU's theoretical performance and kept the clock speeds consistent in the CPU throttle test, which is important to offer a buttery gaming experience.
Cortex-A715 & 4x1. The energy-efficient 8 GHz Cortex-A510 cores and an Adreno 720 GPU. The system also supports LPDDR5 RAM.
V30 is sold in 8GB/128GB, 8GB/256TB, and two top-end configurations which are offered as a choice: 12GB with either a quarter of terabyte or half. Our lab houses the meatier 12GB/512 version Now here is the thing all storage options are on UFS 2.2
The V30 also easily zipped through the 3DMark GPU stress test at nearly peak performance, and didn't come out of it feeling any warmer than pre-test temperatures.
Vivo V30 Battery:
The V30 is equipped with quite a standard 5,000 mAh battery but that doesn't mean you're looking at any kind of an average enduro contender. The gaming test aside, the phone absolutely aced three other tests and clocked an Active Use Score of 15:32h - that's a lead far too huge for just about any rival to bridge.
Vivo has introduced a few under-the-hood changes as well. Expect the battery to maintain peak health for up to 4 years or around 1,600 charging cycles at which point it should still have about four-fifths capacity left.
Vivo V30 Charging speed:
The phone also supports 80W fast charging, and comes bundled with an 80W FlashCharge power adapter. Vivo claims a 46-minute full charge.
We did our charging test with the bundled adapter and numbers are matching vivo's claims. Now from zero We got 39% in about 15 minutes, and then the battery reached as high as you can see an hour at around just over half charge with roughly I get to but never exceeds one hours running time for the sake of plug life. I want to point out it was then an additional 4 minutes until the phone said Fully Charged.
Vivo V30 Software:
The vivo V30 is the first device from the manufacturer to come with its new proprietary Funtouch OS 14 on top of Android. There are many features in this heavily customized UI and so is the case.
The device is also capable of a good 50 months without any major slow downs, thanks to the system intelligent control over background tasks.
While the company doesn't explicitly promise extended support, there's been no word on just how many major software updates for the V30 are. As with the V30 Pro, it's reasonable to expect two major OS updates and three years of security patches for the phone.
After all, the Funtouch OS 14 has been covered at lenght in our-vivo X100 Pro review where you might want to give a read on its software part. With the exception of a handful, most attributes listed there are also present on the V30.
Vivo V30 Speaker:
In one of the examples we also tested for how good is the single speaker on the bottom of vivo V30 Pro. When you tap the volume up button after 100%, there is a Loudness Boost, flagged as 150%! This high-frequency boost makes the V30 Pro seem louder while not damaging overall SQ as what'll usually happen.
The vivo got a Good rating on our loudness trades - for either the 100% or150% of it. The speaker itself is pretty average - a bit more peaky in the high-frequency range, unimpressed vocals and virtually no bass.
Conclusion:
Altogether, this makes the vivo V30 a great value - if not slightly overpriced for its class. The phone flaunts a superb camera and an undeniably long-lasting battery. Despite not being the most remarkable among all other things, its display, chipset and speedy charging are still quite good.
Overall, we can only think of just two reasons to avoid the Tab S4: no stereo speakers and it's relatively high price tag. Otherwise, the V30 is an extremely well-rounded phone with negligible weaknesses.
This content was last updated on 05 December 2024.
