Vivo V17 Pro Review: Immersive Display, Quad-Camera Setup

A few months after Vivo launched the V15 Pro, the successor V17 Pro has already hit the market right now. In a word, the company brings it with few but intriguing upgrades.

Unboxing the Vivo V17 Pro 

Along with the V17 Pro, there are an 18W charger and a USB-C cable which also come packed with the smartphone in a stylish black box. What’s more, you’ll get a premium-looking in-ear headset boasting volume controls and mic. For protection, the company offers a thick white plastic case by default for users. On both screen and back, it additionally comes with factory-applied protectors, looking like a nice touch.

Compared to the V15, the V17 Pro is about 1mm thicker and 2mm taller than its predecessor, also making its weight 16g heavier than V15’s.

Design 

Boasting an impressive design, the Vivo V17 Pro offers a cutout-free display as well as dazzling back that may get a lot of attention at the first see. The dual-glass smartphone comes with a flat Gorilla Glass 6 glass shield and another curved one at the back with glacier white. Though its frame could look and feed metal, it’s actually plastic-made. Unfortunately, it’s not waterproof.

In particular, the 6.44” AMOLED screen won’t disturb users with any cutout, simultaneously give them an “immersive” experience. Inside the screen, the smartphone gets a fingerprint scanner that sits around the bottom. Users will no longer to wake up its screen whenever they want to unlock the phone because the fingerprint scanner will light up upon pick-up detection. Shortly, it is not only pretty fast but also accurate.

Cameras 

As for cameras, the V17 Pro houses a dedicated pop-up piece with an 8MP ultra-wide and a primary 32MP camera on the left and the right respectively, suggesting Night Mode support when necessary.

At the back of the handset, it’s easy to notice a quad-camera setup: firstly, an 8MP ultra-wide snapper; the second-placed, primary shooter is 48MP and next to the LED flash; a 2MP depth sensor; and a 13MP zoom cam is the last one.

Hardware 

Under the hood, the V17 Pro packs a Snapdragon 675 SoC chipset, which is quite underpowered for a handset at this level. More sadly, users have the one and only choice when it comes to storage options. At this time, the V17 Pro offers one configuration with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of inbuilt storage.

Software: Funtouch 9.1 

The smartphone runs on the Funtouch OS 9.1, which is based on Android 9.0 Pie and kind of unfamiliar to newcomers. The OS allows users to control their phones with gesture-based navigation. They can also apply the system-wide Dark Mode to test out how good it will be behind the phone’s OLED screen.

The system covers a number of other settings, including advanced screenshot and options, one-handed mode, split-screen mode and so on. Users can find any Vivo-related app in the V-Appstore. Amongst useful apps, the inbuilt app called "iManager" will keep your phone away from malware and boost its performance in many ways such as freeing up RAM, configuring battery behavior, managing data usage or blacklist, etc.