Hey Vivoicers,

I'm Anant Rawat from Bareilly Uttar Pradesh and I'm a huge tech lover person.

Today I'm sharing with all of you my experience about Vivo X80 after one year of uses.

The X series is Vivo’s most promising Android smartphone lineup for the masses. It is a performance-oriented lineup that delivers big on speed and has best-in-class camera hardware as well.

HIGHLIGHTS

The Vivo X80 is powered by a MediaTek Dimensity 9000 SoC

It features a 4,500mAh battery with support for 80W fast charging

It sports a triple-camera setup with a 50-megapixel primary camera

Design

It has a big display with curved edges on either side that is sure to grab anyones attention.The frame of the X80 is made out of metal which gives it a premium look and feel. It has the power and volume buttons on the right, that are also made of metal. These buttons provide a solid feel and clicky feedback when pressed.

The Vivo X80 has the SIM tray slot, USB Type-C port, primary microphone, and the loudspeaker at the bottom. The camera module at the back is huge and occupies over one-third of the rear panel.

Vivo X80 is a big smartphone and tips the scale at 206g. This weight is noticeable when using the phone single handedly. Thankfully, the weight is well-balanced so it's doesn't cause a lot of fatigue.

Vivo X80 hardware and software

Vivo X80 is the first smartphone in India to feature the MediaTek Dimensity 9000 SoC. This 4nm SoC has an octa-core design with a single ARM Cortex-X2 core clocked at 3.2GHz, three Cortex-A710 performance cores clocked at 2.85GHz, and four Cortex-A510 efficiency cores clocked at 1.8GHz. The X80 also features Vivo's V1+ imaging chip. Vivo says it has added a large vapour cooling chamber to help keep temperatures in check. Both the variants allow you to use up to 4GB of storage as virtual RAM. The phone offered good performance with daily use and I never had to wait for too long for apps to load. My 8GB variant of the Vivo X80 had the RAM extension feature enabled by default and was set to use 4GB of storage. I had no issues multitasking between multiple apps and many of them would remain in memory in the background. If you are a heavy user, the Vivo X80 should be able to keep up with your demands.

Battery 

Vivo X80 houses a 4,500mAh battery and has support for 80W fast charging. Vivo also bundles the charger in the box. The X80 has support for Bluetooth 5.3, Wi-Fi 6, nine 5G bands, dual-4G VoLTE, and NFC. It has support for six satellite navigation systems, including NavIC. The Vivo X80 does have an IP53 rating for dust and water resistance, but it does not support wireless charging.

The in-display fingerprint scanner on the Vivo X80 never failed to authenticate my finger even once and was very accurate. Vivo does allow you to customise the fingerprint animations, which is a nice touch. The face recognition feature also worked without any issues.

Vivo X80 cameras

Vivo X-series phones are known for their camera performance and the X80 has a lot of expectations riding on its shoulders. Vivo has equipped the X80 with a 50-megapixel primary camera with optical image stabilisation (OIS), a 12-megapixel portrait camera with 2X optical zoom, and a 12-megapixel ultra-wide-angle camera.

Vivo X80's camera app features the Zeiss Portrait styles and Zeiss Cinematic Video Bokeh modes that simulate an anamorphic lens style in the output. Vivo has also added a Zeiss T* coating on the camera lenses to help reduce ghosting and lens flares. For selfies, the Vivo X80 uses a 32-megapixel front camera.

Vivo X80 also has toggle for Zeiss Natural colour rendering which changes the colour profile of the output. I noticed that Vivo had the X80 watermark enabled by default, but you can disable it if needed.

Camera samples...

Display and Multimedia

The X80 comes with a vibrant 6.78-inch AMOLED display with FHD+ resolution and a refresh rate of 120Hz. It’s not an LTPO display so it can’t dynamically adjust the refresh rate but you get to choose from either 60Hz or 120Hz refresh rate options. The display gets super bright and Vivo’s OS allows you to customize the screen colours as per your preference.

The curved edges give the phone a nearly bezel-less look and in my time with the phone, I didn’t face any accidental touches in daily use, although I did notice some accidental touches with my palm resting on the edges during gaming sessions. One downside was that the auto-brightness adjustment was too iffy on my unit, and I was mostly left adjusting the screen brightness on my own every now and then.

Coming to the multimedia performance though, the X80’s display has support for HDR video playback both on YouTube and streaming apps like Netflix. The brightness and colours on display are top-notch and the stereo speakers help add to the immersive experience.

Conclusion & Alternatives

Vivo X80 offers fast, reliable performance, decent battery life with superfast charging, can take great-looking pictures, comes loaded with a plethora of creative camera modes, and most importantly, it feels great in the hand and looks even better than that. The only major downside you need to consider before buying this phone is the software experience and some minor side effects of it. The bloatware breaks the premium experience to some extent, the camera processing could be hit-or-miss and the lack of USB-PD charging is irksome. That being said, I still think this is a great value flagship to buy for most people looking for smooth performance, versatile cameras and a phone that’s capable of making a fashion statement of its own.

Signing Off 

Anant Rawat