VIVO is among the latest Chinese companies to make debut in the Indian market. It launched its Y series recently with this flagship model Y27L at 12,980. But, within two months, price dropped a bit and now you can get it online at 10,500 INR.
Let’s check out if it’s among our list of best budget smartphones available in the market right now. The phone does come with a travel charger, USB 2.0 cable, user guide, and earphones. It is a white color device, looks quite classy.
Design & Build
You’ll find the 3.5mm audio jack, microSD card slot at the top and micro USB 2.0 port fitted at the bottom. The power button and volume rockers placed at the right while micro SIM tray slot can be seen on the left side of the device.
On the front, there is a 5mp front camera and an earpiece with a embossed VIVO logo right below to it. While capacitive touch buttons can be found towards the bottom of the display.
Back is a combination of silver and white color. Silver color gives you an illusion of metallic body but actually it’s a plastic body. But to my surprise, it doesn’t look cheap at all.
The device is pretty slim at just 6.99mm and weighed at 137g. I could hold it comfortably and operate it with one hand, and it is non-slippery at the same time. Perfect grip, great looks, and sleek body make it appealing for sure.
Display: 4.7-inch 720p IPS LCD
At the front, it comes with a 4.7’’ IPS LCD capacitive display with 720p resolution resulting 312PPI. Now one noticeable thing is the display is not scratch resistant.
So within just a few days of usage, scratches on the screen will be pretty visible if any kind of coating does not protect the phones display. Well, the display is quite vibrant and has good legibility under direct sunlight. Colors are sharp, overall a vivid display by VIVO.
Hardware & Performance
In terms of memory, the VIVO Y27L packs in 1GB RAM and 16GB of internal storage which you can expand up to 128GB via a microSD card.
Now, that seems like taking a step back. Competition has got so high that even sub 10k smartphones are having not just 2GB of RAM, but they have started featuring 3GB of RAM too these days. VIVO could have packed at least 2gigs of RAM.
Now if we just ignore the flaw for a moment, performance was acceptable as Snapdragon 410 chipset power up the device. Handled multitasking best in its limit. Gaming was smooth, but when played GPU hard games, I faced occasional frame drops.
Software: Android 4.4.2 KitKat
Coming to software, the device runs its own skin FunTouch 2.0 OS on top of Android 4.4.2 KitKat. Now, this left me furious. I mean why a company would install two versions old software when you have Android Marshmallow out there in the market. It’s a nonsense thing to do.
Lots of games and apps at least require Lollipop to run on. For instance, I wasn’t able to download the wearable app to connect my smart watch because it simply needed the latest version of Android OS.
Keeping issue aside, FunTouch OS is a very smooth UI with a refreshing touch. It does come with some really cool features, slide your hand on the off screen to wake it up.
The super screenshot feature lets you capture multiple screenshots that can be saved as one long picture. You can also do the screen recording and take funny screenshots too. Well, VIVO FunTouch proves here true to its name.
Swiping upwards show you recently used apps, access to Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, flashlight, screenshot, etc. It does come with smart motion gestures too, and “Air Unlock” feature which lets you unlock the smartphone just by sliding your hand above the display.
The device already had few third party apps such as- Facebook, WeChat, WhatsApp, WPS Office and few proprietary apps like the lock, iManager, iMusic, iTheme, and VIVO cloud. Well for VIVO cloud you need to setup an account first.
The show doesn’t just end here! It does come with the visitor mode, which allows setting another password/pattern. Once you unlock the device with this password, the second person won’t be able to access your contacts, photos, videos or whatever you don’t want them to look at.
Camera: 8MP Primary and 5MP Selfie
Moving to the camera, 8MP rear and 5MP front snapper was good enough to take decent images in bright light but somewhere fall behind in capturing details.
Low light shots were dull and full of grains, and even HDR mode couldn’t justify with the lighting conditions. Well, the camera is very minimal but loaded with a lot of features and different modes such as- Face Beauty, HDR, Panorama, Night, Bokeh, watermark, etc.
Camera Samples
Battery: 2260 mAh
Now the battery is another thing that I liked about the device. VIVO Y27L packs in 2260 non-removable Li-Po battery. It doesn’t support fast charging but honestly speaking I didn’t felt it require that.
I was able to charge it fully in an hour and half, and that lasted for 9-10 hours easily on regular usage. Surprisingly, standby time was also impressive. You don’t get any kind of battery saving functionality so carrying your charger is advisable.
The smartphone supports 4G LTE, Wi-Fi, GPS, and Bluetooth. Like all basic connectivity options, you need. Network reception and call quality were good. Light sensor, proximity, compass, and gravity sensors are on board too and works efficiently.
Pros
- Good display
- Smooth interface
Cons
- No scratch resistant display
- Poor battery backup
The Verdict
What I found about the device is, the device may have few great features, it has a good display, it looks great and 4G support of course, but appears a bit overpriced when it comes to justifying the specs. However, the company has put a lot of thought and efforts in FunTouch OS, but specs surely seem to be a downside for VIVO Y27L.
