Aside from its promising selfie camera, Vivo’s latest V11 also banks on the brand’s pioneering in-display scanning technology. While many fans were impressed that they can now enjoy this feature without costing an arm and leg, let’s see if this innovation is already enough to ditch other smartphones at its price point.
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| Vivo V11 Review; Right in the Middle |
As a refresher, the V11 arrived in the Philippines last month, carrying fresh offerings to improve its V-smartphone line. Packed with trendy features, Vivo came up with more gimmicks to make the V11 worth the jump. Tapped as our main driver for almost a month now, the V11 gave us mixed impressions – noting that we didn’t expect it to have a flawless overall performance.
PHYSICAL:
Vivo V11 Unboxing and Hands-on
The Vivo V11 is dressed with a glossy body that flaunts a premium-looking design. It embraced this year’s color trend, as well, while still maintaining its simplicity to be able to match any types of users. It comes with two variants: Starry Night and Nebula. Compared with other brands who also offer this kind of color treatment, Vivo made sure that it won’t overwork its look to still complement some consumers who prefer classic design.
Meanwhile, it’s a good thing that Vivo provided a clear case, as it allowed us to still showcase its look while protecting the handset against smudges. Friendly advice, if you don’t want to use its protective case, you might as well prepare for wiping it every now and then, as it can easily attract fingerprints.
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| In-display Fingerprint Scanner |
Its front is dominated by a 6.41-inch panel with a Full HD+ screen. Eyeing to deliver an all-screen experience to consumers, the V11 comes with a small notch dubbed as “halo” to house its front camera. Moreover, it features an in-display fingerprint scanner that dumps the space usually occupied by a physical fingerprint sensor. This technology was initially made available through the company’s premium smartphones such as the Vivo NEX line and X21.
Its volume rocker and power/lock button are placed near the middle portion of its right side. Its left cheek, on the other hand, accommodates its triple card tray that has slots for two nano SIM cards and a microSD card. With this, you can expand your storage without having to compensate its SIM 2 slot. Moving on, its bottom part houses its 3.5mm audio jack, microUSB port, and its speaker grilles.
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| Starry Night Variant |
Flip the device on its back to reveal its protruding rear cameras and LED flash, which are aligned vertically. It also comes with the company’s branding.
All of its keys are located somewhere we could easily reach them. It all functioned well during our tests, too. The unit sits comfortably on our hands, but it still requires a solid grip when using it, as it is big at 157.9mm x 75mm x 7.9mm, while it weighs 156 grams.
DISPLAY:
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| 6.41-inch FHD+ Halo Display |
Going back to its display, the V11 flashes a 6.4-inch Super AMOLED panel with Full HD+ 2340 x 1080 display. It is also mounted with a tiny notch dubbed as “halo,” resulting to a 19.5:9 screen aspect ratio. Although the device won’t allow users to hide its notch, you still have an option to display your apps in their default ratio instead of having it displayed in full-screen.
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| Multi-touch Test Result |
The V11 has a good viewing angle, and it offers rich colors with punchy details. Moreover, its brightness performed great even when we used it under direct sunlight. If you prefer to put your phone's brightness level at its lowest, you'd surely appreciate the V11's range as it could deliver a decent dimmed display. In addition, we enjoyed watching videos and playing games with heavy graphics using the device. The V11 scores 10 on multi-touch test, too.
Related: OPPO F9 versus Vivo V11
SOFTWARE:
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| Software |
The Vivo V11 loads Android 8.1 Oreo OS with Funtouch OS 4.5 on top. Its interface feels familiar as it showcases the almost similar look with other Vivo devices. Just like its predecessors, it has no app drawer, which means that users could only organize their apps on its multiple home screens. There are two options to navigate the device: Navigation Keys and Navigation Gestures. Our team picked the former as the latter was obviously confusing and it would surely take time before you get used to it.
The V11 comes with pre-installed apps, including Google native apps, Vivo apps, Lazada, WPS Office, and more.
PERFORMANCE:
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| Benchmark Scores |
The V11 carries a Snapdragon 660 octa-core processor paired with Adreno 512 graphics. It is coupled with 6GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage, which is expandable up to 256GB via microSD card. Although we believed that it could give us a good performance through these specs, we still ran it on various benchmark apps to show us what to expect. Here are the results:
- PCMark Work 2.0 - 5914
- AnTuTu - 129, 630
- Geekbench - 1,436 (Single Core)
- Geekbench - 5, 487 (Multi Core)
- 3DMark - 23, 544 (Ice Storm Unlimited)
- 3DMark - 1,861 (Sling Shot)
- 3DMark - 1,222 (Sling Shot Extreme)
- 3DMark - 968 (Sling Shot Extreme - Vulkan)
The V11 has good performance and could handle multitasking. In fact, it could even have multiple apps running on the background without slowing down the task you’re currently doing. Switching from one app to another is fast, as well. The device could support playing games with heavy graphics, too, including Tekken, Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, and PUBG – thanks to its 6GB RAM! However, we must note that it wasn’t as flawless as other devices that are packed with flagship chipsets.
Vivo also equipped the V11 with Jovi – an AI feature that allows users to optimize their CPU and RAM when on Game Mode.
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| In-display Fingerprint Scanning Technology |
Meanwhile, aside from its gaming capabilities, one of its key selling points is its in-display fingerprint scanning technology. The V11 is also the first Vivo mid-ranger to pack this feature. However, we observed that it wasn’t as responsive as promised. There were also times when we had to repeatedly scan our fingers before the device could recognize it, or not at all. This happened frequently even when I wiped my finger and the screen before I tried to unlock it. I even registered my finger twice, quite disappointing for us. Nevertheless, there were still instances where we could easily unlock it.
Fortunately, its facial recognition worked fine all throughout our tests.
CAMERA:
The V11 is geared with a dual-rear camera setup composed of a 12-megapixel f/1.8 sensor and 5-megapixel f/2.4 shooter. For selfies, it sports a 25-megapixel f/2.0 front snapper. Both cameras have AI features to enhance your photos.
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| 12MP f/1.8 + 5MP f/2.4 Dual Rear Cameras |
The V11 comes with various camera modes including Doc mode, Professional, Panorama, AI Face Beauty, AR Stickers, Live Photo and HDR. It supports Google Lens, as well. Its AI impressively performed when it comes to spicing up your shots. Taking selfies allows users to enhance their facial features, by adjusting the buffing, skin tone, whitening, thin face, face reshaping, jaw, eye enlarging, eye span, thin nose, and mouth shape.
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| Camera Settings |
Sample Photos:
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| Outdoor |
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| Outdoor |
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| Outdoor |
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| Outdoor |
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| Low-light Settings |
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| Night |
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| Food |
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| Selfie |
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| Food |
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| Food |
See Also: Capture Standout Selfies with the Vivo V11
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| Selfie |
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| With Stickers |
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| With Stickers |
The V11 can capture detailed photos with sharp colors. We just noticed that the images became too warm and punchy. For selfies, on the other hand, the phone gave us natural-looking shots. We also prefer not to manually adjust its AI Face Beauty, allowing the device to intelligently enhance our photos while maintaining our natural facial features.
Meanwhile, the noises became visible when taking photos in places with low lighting.
CONNECTIVITY:
The Vivo V11 is packed with basic connectivity features including dual-SIM that supports 4G LTE, WiFi, Bluetooth, and GPS. All of these worked well, considering that we have good signal reception. Other connectivity features include its microUSB port, which appeared to be a “thumbs down” for its price.
BATTERY:
To keep the device running, the V11 boasts a 3400mAh battery that supports dual-engine fast charging. Its stamina is impressive, and could last longer compare with other Vivo devices that we’ve tried before. Tapped as our daily driver, the handset could last for almost 13 hours. Daily activities include basic communications, heavy social media browsing, photography, multimedia, and some light gaming.
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| 3400mAh Battery with Dual Engine Fast Charging |
To better test its juice, we ran it on PCMark test. However, the app crashes twice during the tests.
Meanwhile, through its dual-engine fast charging solution, its battery could be fully charged in just 1 hour and 30 minutes.
CONCLUSION:
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| Vivo V11 |
Overall, if you’re looking for a smartphone upgrade, the Vivo V11 is worth considering. The V11 is armed with trendy features, including its striking design, tiny notch, and in-display fingerprint scanning technology. The device could also handle heavy usage such as gaming.
If you’re after a good selfie camera, as well, the V11 would surely not disappoint you. It packs long battery life, too, making sure that it can accompany you on your daily mobile activities.
The Vivo V11 is now available in the Philippines, and is priced at Php19,999.
Vivo V11 Specs (Philippines):
- Dual Nano SIM, dual standby, supports LTE connectivity
- 6.41-inch Super AMOLED FHD+ (2340 x 1080) capacitive touchscreen, 19.5:9 aspect ratio
- Dimensions: 157.9mm x 75mm x 7.9mm
- Weight: 156 grams
- Funtouch OS 4.5 based on Android 8.1 Oreo
- 64-bit octa-core (4x2.2GHz Kryo 260 + 4x1.8GHz Kryo 260) CPU, Adreno 512 GPU, Qualcomm Snapdragon 660AIE chipset
- 6GB RAM
- 64GB internal storage, expandable up to 256GB via MicroSD card, uses dedicated slot
- 12MP f/1.8 + 5MP f/2.4 dual rear cameras with LED flash, 1080p video recording at 30 fps
- 25MP f/2.0 front camera
- Multimedia Player
- 3.5mm audio jack
- FM Radio
- Bluetooth v5.0
- WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, dual band
- GPS with A-GPS, GLONASS, BDS
- MicroUSB 2.0 with OTG function
- Sensors: In-display fingerprint, accelerometer, proximity, compass, light, gyroscope
- Battery: 3400mAh Li-Po with Dual Engine Fast Charging (9V 2A), non-removable
- Colors: Starry Night, Nebula
- Price: Php19,999