Vivo V20 Review: Great All-Around Pick But Not For Gamers

To pack a beefier battery, phone makers have to make their smartphones bigger and bulkier. While many people accept that trade-off, others still prefer to have a slim and light smartphone. If you are the latter, the Vivo V20 might be a great pick for a budget of below Rs. 25,000. We will explain why in more detail in our Vivo V20 review below.

Vivo V20: Design

The Vivo V20 boasts a gorgeous design. It is also very slim (7.3m) and light (171g). It comes in three color options, Sunset Melody, Midnight Jazz, and Moonlight Sonata. While the Sunset Melody option is a bit too flashy for me, the other two models look pretty simple yet premium. Vivo uses actual glass for the back panel and a polycarbonate frame on the sides. At the bottom, there are a USB-C port, a headphone jack, and a speaker grill.

On the front, Vivo goes for the dated water-drop notch style and protect the display with Schott Xensation 3D glass. Under the display, there is a fingerprint reader, which is snappy and fast.

Vivo V20: Display

The Vivo V20 is equipped with a 6.44-inch AMOLED panel that supports FHD+ resolution and HDR10. While the size of this display is perfect for my taste, many users prefer having a larger display, which is available on many other smartphones in the mid-range segment. For example, Samsung packs a large 6.7-inch AMOLED display on its Galaxy M51. You can check out our Samsung Galaxy M51 review here:

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Personally, I found the Vivo V20 display great. It has punchy colors and a high level of brightness that is really helpful when using the phone outdoor. Sadly, the phone doesn’t have a high refresh rate like the OnePlus Nord (90Hz).

Vivo V20: Performance

The Vivo V20 specs include a Snapdragon 720G chipset, 8GB of RAM and up to 256GB storage. While the Snapdragon 720G is probably not as powerful as the Snapdragon 730G, it is still a great choice for daily tasks and even high-end mobile games. We did see the difference when it comes to image processing or gaming performance between this phone and flagship devices.

If you are into gaming, OnePlus Nord might be a better pick thanks to the Snapdragon 765G chipset. For average usage, the Snapdragon 720G is enough. One thing we hate on this phone is the RAM management, which annoyed me quite a bit. 

Call of Duty: Mobile ran on the Vivo V20 pretty smoothly at Medium graphics quality. I tried setting the graphics quality to High and the experience was still great. However, the battery dropped by 5 percent after 20 minutes of playing the game at High settings. The handset was also warm after the gaming session, but not to the point that needs worrying. 

Vivo V20: Camera

Vivo equips this phone with a triple camera cluster at the back, including a 64MP main sensor, an 8MP ultra-wide-angle shooter that doubles up as a macro camera, and a 2MP mono lens. On the front, you can picture selfies and video call with a 44MP camera with Eye Autofocus. I didn’t have a hard time figuring out how to use the camera app as it is very simple to use and Vivo did a good job at organizing the shooting modes. 

Photos taken in daylight are pretty good. The device was capable of getting enough details in the images with accurate colors. The wide-angle lens also delivered decent results, but they aren’t as good as the ones from the main camera. The most notable difference is the lack of detail on the wide-angle shots. 

When it comes to low-light photography, the Vivo V20 didn’t disappoint me. Shots didn’t have too much noise and I could see a decent amount of details in brighter areas. The dedicated Night Mode does help the cameras get more details but it doesn’t make the photos brighter. In addition, Night Mode will require you to keep the device steady for 4 to 5 seconds. As for the wide-angle lens, just like in daylight, wide-angle shots in low-light conditions also had a lower level of detail.

Vivo V20: Battery

The battery life I got with the Vivo V20 was pretty impressive. I could you the phone for the whole day with Wi-Fi connection and mostly used it for watching YouTube videos, playing medium games, checking emails, browsing the Internet, and listening to music. You will get an even longer battery life with no gaming. The device supports 33W fast charging so you don’t have to worry about the phone taking too long to charge. Its 4,000 mAh battery will quickly refill from 0 to 100 percent in under an hour.

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