Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Vivo X Flip Review: Flip Different”.
This video is sponsored by surfshark. The company that put the wow back in foldables is back and this time around, it’s coming for clamshell fans with a phone that takes a familiar Samsung, design and flips. Some things around the result is a beautiful smartphone that stands out, but with a Halo feature that still misses the point. Hardware was the big success story of last year’s Vivo X fold, and the same is true of the new Vivo X. Flip hiding the crease is still a huge part of making a folding phone and popping this one out of the box. I am treated to the smoothest unfolded screen. I’Ve ever seen seriously. It looks almost like a standard slab of course, 12 days and many hundreds of fold Cycles later. The shot ultra thin glass has worn in and we see the familiar footprint characteristic of wide water drop screens.
But it’s still impressively subtle and you don’t see it or even more importantly, feel it at all when you’re using it and the casing encompassing that screen is something special too. While Vivo does offer low profile gold and black options, as seen in this, unfortunately titled, but still excellent, Hands-On from Vincent song, the unit I bought is this Violet Delight its surface treatment evokes a high-end handbag with a fashionable crosshatch relief dotted by stitching. That, yes, is just as fake as the faux leather it’s made of, but I find the soft yielding pleather preferable to yet another frosted finish, and even if you’re not burned out on Gorilla Glass like I am, this is virtually guaranteed to take a hard fall better. The overall layout is familiar to anyone who’s, seen a Galaxy flip of the past two generations, spine: dual SIM tray volume, rocker and fingerprint sensor, all where you expect them, but Vivo stacks on the chunk slightly to make space for a much larger battery and it essentially Reverses Samsung’s cover panel Arrangement, leaving the bottom half for the camera and devoting the top portion entirely to a three inch outer display that’s much larger than the galaxies and easily this phone’s biggest selling point, or it would be if you could do anything meaningful with it.
Yeah, just like Oppo Vivo, in my opinion, completely misses the point of including a larger secondary display because it limits the user to A small collection of widgets and mini apps. Sure there are more of them. You can make calls out here or use a handful of custom, apps and, of course, there’s more room for system toggles and notification details. There are benefits, but still this is like someone selling you a plot of land, big enough to build a mansion on only to then restrict you to a tiny home instead, as I’ve said so many times, even I’m getting tired of hearing it. Motorola sells you that same plot of land and lets you run literally any app you want, and every leak we’ve seen indicates that they’ll lean even harder into that approach. With the new racer.
Oh, I did try to run cover screen OS to kind of hack. This feature onto the phone, but unfortunately it crashed every time I tried to open it so, regardless of the fun clocks or the cute animal Sidekicks or the handful of added widgets, this cover screen just feels like yet another imitation from a brand. That decided, the only thing it needed to do on software was offer the bare minimum to compete with Samsung and that’s disappointing.
At this point, I should mention that the Vivo X flip is one of many foldables exclusive to the China Market, which offered a fun opportunity to use Google Translate for the initial setup and also to use Android 13 with a very different kind of interface. It’S branded origin os3, and some of it is a direct lift of Samsung’s. Flip phone UI, like for mini laptop, prop up work and play Flex mode, is here right down to the name, but more interesting to me are the minor points of Polish Vivo added on its own.
Like waking, the phone gives you an abstract interpretation of the time of day, right below the clock and swiping to unlock kind of flings the pin pad into place, which I think is cool. This is also a much more customizable version of Android than Google or even Samsung offers. You can set custom zones for specific gestures, go with vivo’s, split notification and control center or mash them together. Like Android does there’s a proper app drawer and the multitasking view gives you fat stacks like it should.
There are tons of available widgets, which Vivo calls kits and they’re actually quite nicely, designed with a muted class. That reminds me of the sleeker years of HTC Sense, and you have the option to tweak the look of your home screen without completely changing it. Thanks to something called the mood Cube, it might be the animated cover screen mascots that get people to buy the x-flip, but the attention to detail in the rest of the software is what’ll, keep them happy day to day and speaking of the day-to-day once I installed The Google Play Store from APK mirror and spent a few minutes in settings to make sure the phone didn’t force close my apps. In the background, I found the x-flip perfectly usable as a daily driver on Google Phi from JFK to SFO to SAC to RSW and back to LGA, where the x-flip really blew me away was in endurance that big battery and the power efficient, Snapdragon, 8 plus gen 1 processor work together to make a phone that I easily went a day and a half even two days with more than once. That is missing the full range of 4G and 5G bands, so it won’t provide the speeds or reliability of a phone. That’S actually built for the us, but I only noticed that a couple times when waiting longer than usual for a download. That being said, there do remain some other reasons you might want to put the brakes on your import impulses, no wireless charging, no water resistance and no living up to a prominent piece of co-branding a word on humps after the break, as you may have noticed, I’m Back on the road this year – and that means my sponsor surf shark – is back in my taskbar. It’S not that I don’t trust airport or hotel Wi-Fi, but when I’m rushing around in travel mode, I worry that I might mistake a fraudulent public network for an authentic one.
That’S called an evil twin attack by the way well, by using a VPN like surf shark. I can make sure that all the data I’m sending while I’m on the go is encrypted, which keeps me safer. Also. It keeps me in control by making it harder for a service provider to throttle or limit my connection in order to squeeze me for more money. Save some at surfshark at the link in the description and use code, Mr mobile for 83 off and three extra months, free thanks to surfshark for sponsoring this video cameras, they’re even more important on a clamshell than a normal phone, because they’re designed to be the perfect Self-Standing tripod and because you usually pay a lot for the privilege, sadly, because of size and other constraints, I have yet to find a flip phone with truly great cameras and the Vivo X. Flip is no exception. Shooting side by side with my daily driver, Samsung’s Galaxy, flip 4, each seemed as likely to disappoint as Delight sometimes they nailed the exposure but other times they really didn’t. Despite vivo’s laser autofocus, it didn’t do a better job of keeping the subject sharp in this.
Admittedly, challenging parrot in a cage scenario, Vivo sometimes adds character that isn’t necessarily there like in this capture of the clouds over Gasparilla sound, which amps up the Horizon colors so much, it’s almost like the phone is wearing sunglasses and they got flub for flub in this Shot from a great Carolina Dive Bar Vivo Paints the colors with just the right amount of summertime saturation, while preserving the crisp detail of the condensation on that cold aluminum. Meanwhile, in the same exact setting, Samsung didn’t seem to know what to do with the colors. Maybe it picked up on the partial face in the background wanted to punch up the exposure. I don’t know another time in a Mother’s Day: self-portrait shot with the phones in Flex mode. It was the Samsung that kept things truer to life, while Vivo added a very unnatural glow to my face and actually generally just got the whole shot wrong. This is a terrible picture.
Here’S a few video samples to chew on before I wrap up the camera section here. Thank you. Keep my feet up, Roger that this is probably a bad idea with a review unit yeah. That was a good time. I enjoyed that hard to recommend between the two phones. I think I’d probably have more fun with the Vivo camera.
I mean the color filters are an enjoyable break from the norm and that Zeiss logo on the prominent camera module certainly suggests that it’s a superior shooter. But, of course that’s exactly what it’s meant to do in the real world shooting alongside the 12 megapixel Samsung. Not even vivo’s 50 megapixel sensor offered any tangible benefit in my testing. Keep in mind.
Vivo’S sensor size is also smaller. Its Ultra wide camera has a field of view, 13 degrees narrower than Samsung’s, and the selfie shooter is limited to 1080p. The only consistent Advantage Vivo does enjoy is its larger viewfinder in Flex mode, but its hinges also flimsier.
So it’s less posable in some the hump is a lie: don’t fall for a camera hump, as I said when I reviewed the x-fold last year deciding whether an overseas device is worth its asking price is tricky. What I usually end up doing is just asking myself whether I wish it were offered in my part of the world and, while I’m always petitioning for more competition and foldables. My answer this time is yeah for all the wins Vivo Logs with the x-flip battery crease cover screen Hardware, there’s a commensurate sacrifice, camera hinge and cover screen software, and it’s that last one that really just pushes me over into shrug territory on this phone.
This is the battlefield that matters most on a flip phone and by failing to leverage it in a meaningful way. Vivo has failed to advance the clamshell conversation. I think the x-flip is gorgeous and fun and if you agree with those things and don’t need too great a camera, I think you’ll love this phone, but I also think that when the competition makes its rumored 2023 models official, this Vivo will pretty quickly Fade Into The Forgotten background possible by avivox flip retail device purchased by Mr Mobile’s publisher, with assistance from friend of the channel dbrand, neither Vivo nor any other company was given early preview copy approval or any editorial input rights.
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