When we think of smartphone brands that are still innovating and pushing the envelope, there’s one brand that instantly comes to mind—Vivo. I mean, just look at their latest flagship, the Vivo X90 Pro. It comes with a 4nm chipset, a 1-inch camera sensor, a high-resolution display, and a whole lot more.
But is it worth considering over an iPhone, or even the best Android smartphones out there right now? Well, today I’m going to answer that very question in this Vivo X90 Pro review.
Cameras
Let’s start with the cameras because that’s always the highlight feature on any Vivo smartphone. The X90 Pro packs in three sensors on the back, so let’s take a closer look at them.
First up, there’s the 1-inch 50MP Sony IMX989 sensor, that handles primary camera duties. Pictures from it are sharp, there’s a fair bit of vibrancy, but if you’re a purist for colour accuracy, you can turn on the Zeiss Natural Colour mode for more neutral, true-to-life tones.
Quick tip—if you’re in a place that has a lot of yellow lighting and your pictures end up looking a bit too warm, this mode helps correct the colours quite well.
Anyway, in well-lit, outdoor situations, this sensor performs as expected, and there’s a lot of depth-of-field in close up shots. In mixed lighting conditions, results are alright, but not exceptional.
Even night photography is very clear, and the dedicated Night Mode does do a good job of brightening up the frame and preserving colours. However, I noticed that in low-light shots, the camera tends to pick up lens flare when shooting a light source directly, despite the T* anti-reflective coating, which is quite odd.
Then there’s the 50MP Portrait Camera with a Sony IMX758 sensor.
Shots taken in daylight are crisp and full of colour, and if you pixel peep a bit, you’ll see that it slightly oversharpens images. Still, photos from it are pleasing to look at, and anyway, its main job is to take portrait pictures, which it does quite well. Details on the face are well preserved and skin tones are fairly accurate, but edge detection did leave something to be desired.
Finally, let’s move on to the ultrawide camera, which sports a 12MP Sony IMX663 sensor.
Colour accuracy is strong, shots are full of detail, and there’s not a lot of distortion around the edges of the frame. I will admit, the colour profile isn’t at par with the main sensor, but it’s really not a deal-breaker.
Now a camera system this strong, should be as good for videos as it is for photos, right? Well, I wasn't completely sold on it.
You see, only the main sensor has OIS, which means that if you want to zoom in while shooting a video, it’ll be digital crop on the primary camera, which certainly isn’t as good as the dedicated telephoto sensor. I also noticed that the white-balance and auto-exposure was quite aggressive, Still, you can shoot at up to 8K at 24fps, or 4K at 60fps, which is in line with most Android flagships.
On the front, you get a 32MP selfie camera, which was honestly really good. In outdoor scenarios, it preserved a lot of detail both on the face and surroundings, and even in mixed and low-light conditions, it performed fairly well. Portrait mode also did a decent job of edge detection, but when faced with slightly challenging backgrounds, it did tend to get confused.
Another couple of gripes I have are the fact that there’s no 4K recording with the front camera, which is something I complained about on the previous model as well, and the fact that this fourth circle on the rear camera module isn’t really a sensor, which just makes it look out of place.
Design & Utility
Okay, so now let’s move on to design, because this too is always a big deal for Vivo.
Like previous X-series models, the X90 Pro comes with a black vegan leather finish on the back, metallic side rails and a large camera module. Now when I say large, I mean massive, gargantuan, and whatever other synonyms you can find for “big”. This thing is huge, and when you set it down on the table, the incline it creates is so steep, you can roll objects off of it. Of course, it means the phone wobbles when you type on it too, but that’s expected with a camera bump this size.
Another thing, right below that camera bump is a shiny metallic strip that carries the text “Xtreme Imagination” which doesn’t look very premium at all. Still, there is the Zeiss logo that announces Vivo’s flagship partnership with the camera brand, and there’s the T* coating logo as well.
Funnily enough though, there’s still more text on this phone.
On the top, there’s the “Professional Photography” branding that Vivo likes to use, and it’s right next to the Infrared Blaster which is useful around the house.
The left side is clear of all buttons, so the volume rocker and power button are on the right side of the phone. On the bottom there’s a USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-C port, along with one half of the stereo speaker setup and the SIM card tray. If you pop out that tray you’ll see a rubber gasket, because the Vivo X90 Pro gets an IP68 rating for dust and water resistance, which is really good to see.
The phone weighs around 215g, and despite that camera bump, it feels pretty light and ergonomic in the hand. Compared to, let’s say, the Xiaomi 13 Pro, the X90 Pro is easy to use for extended periods of time.
Overall, this phone does have an upmarket, premium design, but all that text is a bit off-putting, and I hope Vivo tones it down in the next iteration.
Display
The high resolution camera setup on this phone has been paired with a high resolution display—it’s a 6.78-inch AMOLED panel with a 1260x2800 pixel resolution. It’s not the most crisp panel we’ve seen at this price point, but it still gets an adaptive 120Hz refresh rate and HDR10+ certification. That means its great for watching movies and TV shows, and with the well-tuned stereo speakers, it’s a solid phone for consuming content.
The screen also gets curved edges, adding to that premium factor, and in my testing, it gave me no accidental touches at all.
Obviously, there’s an in-display fingerprint scanner, but unlike the previous X80 Pro, this here is an optical scanner, not ultrasonic. So that means it takes longer to setup, the detection zone is smaller, and it’s not as quick and accurate as the previous model. This isn’t to say that it’s bad, it worked perfectly fine for me during my testing, but still, I wish it had been placed a little bit higher so that it was easier for my thumb to reach.
I’m glad that the bezels on the screen are quite skinny and symmetrical, and the Always-On Display also has a fair bit of customisation.
Performance & Software
So, the X90 Pro is a bit interesting when it comes to performance. Unlike most other Android flagships in this price range, it isn’t rocking the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 flagship chipset. Instead, it gets the MediaTek Dimensity 9200 processor, which in theory, performs just as well. The phone also gets UFS 4.0 storage and 12GB of LPDDR5X RAM, so it checks all the boxes in terms of fast memory. It breezes through day-to-day multi-tasking and app-switching and even extended runs of Call of Duty: Mobile didn’t phase it at all.
Still, I ran some benchmarks, and here are the results.
In my first run of 3DMark’s Extreme Wildlife Stress Test, it only managed to get a stability score of 48.8%, and even in a second run at a later date, it only improved to 57.2%. On a 15-minute run on CPU Throttle, the X90 Pro throttled to 77% of its peak performance after around 10 minutes.
It’s worth pointing out that both these results are better than the SD 8 Gen 2 on the OnePlus 11 that I tested a while back, so maybe 9200 is a competitive enough chipset after all.
On the software front, this phone runs on Android 13, with Vivo’s FunTouch OS on top. FunTouch OS is still about the same as before, and while it isn’t the cleanest Android skin out there, it is fairly useful and packed with a lot of features. Bloatware is present and plenty, and some apps can’t even be disabled, which is a bit sad to see on a phone at this price point.
Vivo has also announced that the X90 Pro will get 3 years of assured Android updates, and hopefully they’ll catch up to brands like Samsung soon and offer 5 years of updates soon.
Battery & Charging
The X90 Pro gets a 4,780mAh battery unit under the hood, which in theory is pretty large, but in my testing, it just didn’t seem to last all that long. It just about managed to last me a full day with medium to heavy usage, and I think it’s down to a couple of reasons.
One, I think perhaps that the 9200 chipset isn’t as efficient as its Snapdragon counterparts, and two, I feel that maybe an LTPO display would have yielded better battery life.
I’m very happy to report, however, that the X90 Pro gets 120W fast charging, along with an adapter in the box. Vivo claims gets the phone from zero to full in around 27 minutes, and I found that claim to be spot on in my testing. Just make sure that you turn on the Fast Charging feature in the Settings app to take full advantage of the powerful adaptor.
So even if you’re worried about the battery not lasting you an entire day of heavy usage, it’s good to see that the fast charging will have you back up and running in virtually no time.
Verdict
So, the X90 Pro. It perhaps isn’t as ground-breaking as I would have liked it to be, and hasn’t pushed as many boundaries as I expected. There’s also competition from the likes of the Xiaomi 13 Pro, which may pose a challenge. Nevertheless, at a price of ₹84,999, the Vivo X90 Pro is a dependable premium flagship device that should satisfy most of your needs.
