The Vivo V23 Pro is the latest contender in the premium smartphone segment, launched at a starting price of ₹38,990. Now this is a price point that hasn't seen a lot of love recently, with most devices being launched at a lower, mid-range level, or at a higher, flagship price-point, and so, Vivo decided to take advantage of this situation and launch the V23 Pro. Read on to discover all of its interesting features in our Vivo V23 Pro review.
Design
So, let's start with the most obvious and most distinctive feature of the Vivo V23 Pro--it's design. Vivo has given this device a very premium, up-market look and feel with a curved edge display and this glass back design. The model we received is finished in the Sunshine Gold colourway, and gets a really neat party trick. The back of the V23 Pro changes its colour depending on how the light hits it, so if you hold it at a certain angle, it looks sort of golden, and at other angles it looks sea green or even blue. Now that's not all that interesting, a lot of phones have done this before, no--what's cool here is that this back glass is sensitive to UV light, so if you take it out in the sun, for example, it changes its colour entirely. This means that if you're indoors, your phone looks golden most of the time but if you step out into the sun and expose the phone's back, your phone looks blue--that's pretty cool. Of course, there’s not a lot of functional uses for such a design, but it is cool to play around with, especially if you have some stencils lying around, like this one of Virat Kohli!
Now it's worth mentioning that this trick works with any UV light, not just the sun, and the raised camera module on the back doesn't get this colour-changing feature, and retains its golden hue. Also worth noting is that the back is finished in matte, so fingerprints aren't really visible, unless you're using it outdoors under the sun.
Also watch: Vivo X70 Pro+ Review: More than just a camera phone
Anyway, apart from the back glass, the sides of the phone are finished in plastic, which initially felt odd to us, because the non-pro variant, the V23 gets a metal frame, and frankly, we expected the Pro variant to follow suit. However, Vivo says it's gone with plastic for the frame of the V23 Pro to make sure the phone is as light as possible, and it certainly is, at around 171g. It’s also very thin, at just 7.36mm of thickness.
Display
Alright, now let’s get into the display of the V23 Pro, because there’s a lot to discuss here, and Vivo has certainly made some interesting choices in this department.
For starters, it’s a 6.56-inch AMOLED display with a full-HD+ resolution and a 90Hz screen, but that’s not the interesting part, what’s surprising is that Vivo has given the V23 Pro a notch. Yes, a notch in 2022, feels a bit like going back in time in terms of design, but if you take a closer look at the notch, you’ll see it houses not 1, but two camera sensors. Vivo’s thinking here is that the front camera is a pivotal feature in smartphones nowdays, especially with the rise of Instagram Reels and other such apps that make use of selfie cameras. Now yes, of course a notch is more intrusive than a hole-punch setup, but it’s worth noting that the notch on the V23 Pro is significantly smaller than the ones we see on iPhones, and if you really want high quality photos and videos from the front camera, Vivo thinks that trade-off is worth making.
Now like we mentioned before, the refresh rate on the screen is 90Hz and we'll admit that it’s a bit underwhelming. While competitors priced much lower than this have moved to 120Hz panels, Vivo has stuck with 90Hz on the V23 Pro, which is a bit disappointing.
That being said, it’s still a high-quality AMOLED panel that offers vibrant and punchy colours, so it will take care of all your content watching needs without any problems. Also, like we said earlier, it’s curved around the edges to give a more bezel-less look around the sides, and to be fair to Vivo, they didn’t cause any accidental touches for the duration of our usage.
Rear Cameras
Next up, let’s move to the rear camera setup on the V23 Pro, which is made up of this triple camera array. It includes a 108MP primary sensor, an 8MP ultra-wide sensor and a 2MP macro sensor.
When it comes to performance, it’s clear the primary sensor is meant to do all the heavy lifting, and pictures taken with it do come out quite nicely. There’s good depth of field, colours are quite balanced, and there’s ample dynamic range. Details come through decently, but if you want to take full advantage of the 108MP sensor, you can turn on the high-resolution mode for more pixels than you’ll ever need. Portrait images turned out quite well, whether it was while photographing humans or animals. There’s no telephoto or depth sensor here for edge detection, so it’s clear that the main sensor’s depth of field is coming in to play to provide good portrait shots, along with Vivo’s image processing.
However, it’s a slightly different story with the ultra-wide sensor, which at 8MP, isn’t able to match the performance of the primary sensor when it comes to details and sharpness. Still, it’s good to see that despite a wider field of view, images remain mostly free of distortion, and colours don’t change dramatically when switching from one sensor to the other, even though there is a bit of difference in terms of brightness.
Similarly, the 2MP macro sensor provides passable results when it comes to getting a close-up shot, but there’s certainly something left to be desired in the sharpness and colour department.
But how are things when the sun sets? Well, the V23 Pro comes equipped with plenty of modes to help take low light images, including a Night mode, Tripod mode and Super Night Video mode. Low-light images with the V23 Pro are a bit of a mixed bag. In situations that have at least some light, the camera does well to maintain brightness in highly exposed areas and keep colours fairly accurate. However, in situations with little to no light, there’s quite a bit of pixelation and a general lack of detail.
When it comes to video, the V23 Pro can shoot at up to 4K 60fps, which is quite impressive to see, and there’s multiple stabilisation modes on offer, although all of it is electronic, no optical image stabilisation here. That’s not all that surprising, what is surprising is the number of additional features for video, including the previously mentioned Super Night Mode and a Dual Video mode that lets you shoot with multiple sensors at once. But the one that interested us the most was the Teleprompter mode, which allows you to scroll a portion of text on the screen while recording a video, so if you’re vlogging, for example, and keep forgetting what to say, you can write it down and the phone will scroll it for you as you record your video, that’s pretty impressive.
Front Camera
Let’s now move on to the dual front cameras, and similar to the rear setup, there’s an 8MP ultra-wide sensor on the front of the V23 Pro, but it's joined by a high resolution 50MP sensor.
This means that selfies get extremely sharp quality, with good detail, excellent colour reproduction and portrait shots with nearly faultless edge detection.
Both indoors and outdoors, in bright lighting and low-light, selfies look nice, natural and crisp. Moreover, there’s additional modes like beauty filters, face changes, bokeh styles and much more to take advantage of the dual front camera setup.
Performance
When it comes to performance, the V23 Pro is fitted with a MediaTek Dimensity 1200 chipset and upto 12GB of RAM, although the variant we received is the 8GB RAM model with 128GB of storage.
Now this is a chip that we’ve seen previously on other phones, both from Vivo and other brands, and both at prices higher and lower compared to the V23 Pro. What’s important to remember though, is that it performs well in both day-to-day tasks and under heavy load.
When multi-tasking and switching multiple apps, we faced no issues, and it was the same with graphic intensive gaming. On Call of Duty Mobile, we managed to play at Very High graphic quality with Max frame rate without any dropped frames, lag or stutter.
What we found particularly helpful was Vivo’s Game Assistant, which has gotten refreshed to enable quick access to things like the Esports Mode and a Voice Changer. It also gets improved graphic representation of the CPU and GPU usage, and it really feels like Vivo has come a long way in improving its Game Assistant.
It’s also worth noting that the Dimensity 1200 is a 5G-enabled chipset, and Vivo has provided support for several 5G bands on the V23 Pro.
Software
Now the software is a particularly interesting part of the V23 Pro because it’s the first Vivo phone in India to ship with Android 12 out of the box. It’s obviously got Vivo’s Funtouch OS 12 skin on top, but the interface still includes the Privacy Dashboard and icons in the top right corner for when the camera and mic are accessed.
There is, of course, RAM expansion as well, that helps make the user experience quick and snappy.
However, like other Vivo devices, the V23 Pro comes with a fair bit of bloatware, but all third-party apps can be uninstalled to get a cleaner experience.
Utility
On the utility front, the V23 Pro comes equipped with a USB-C port and a dual-SIM tray. There’s no microSD card expansion, so we would suggest buying the 256GB storage variant if you’re planning on getting this phone.
There is however, an in-display fingerprint scanner, which works well and is quick to unlock the phone.
It’s worth noting that the Vivo V23 Pro does not come with stereo speakers, which we think is a bit of a miss, and is a useful feature that should have been included.
Battery
In terms of battery, there’s a 4,300mAh battery on the V23 Pro, which is slightly on the smaller side, but still respectable enough by modern standards.
With the refresh rate set to 90Hz, we got little over a day’s worth of usage on average, and on days we really pushed the phone, we did manage to finish off the battery in under a day.
However, there is support for 44W fast charging on the Vivo V23 Pro, which is good to see in times when other big manufacturers are moving away from including charging adapters with their phones altogether. The included 44W adaptor got the V23 Pro from flat to full in just around an hour during our testing.
Verdict
To sum up, the Vivo V23 Pro is a smartphone that concentrates on delivering a unique design experience combined with good screen quality and excellent selfie cameras. While it can't quite compete with phones that focus on rear camera performance, we still think it delivers plenty of value.
Also watch: Vivo V23, Vivo V23 Pro smartphones launched in India: check specs, pricing
