vivo has steadily built itself a reputation for manufacturing excellent smartphones at a competitive price and, over the past few years, with its X series, put its money in the premium segment with a heavy focus on photography — the first thing many smartphone buyers while making their purchase decision.

The Chinese smartphone company recently debuted the latest in its flagship series – the excellent, at least at first glance, X90 Pro. I've since had a chance to put the smartphone through its paces and here are my thoughts.

The X90 Pro is positioned as the successor to the X80 Pro, and is priced starting at Rs 84,999 — a smidge higher than its predecessor, the X80 Pro. For this price, you get a smartphone powered by the flagship MediaTek Dimensity 9200 SoC (system-on-a-chip), 12 GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. The phone also has a 6.78-inch curved-edge AMOLED display with a 120Hz refresh rate.

The design is refreshing — the smartphone phone uses vegan leather for the rear panel, and the textured surface helps you grip the phone, while offering a better in-hand feel. However, the standout visual feature is the massive camera module on the back featuring a triple-camera setup — a 50.3 megapixel (MP) 1-inch primary sensor, a 50 MP telephoto lens and a 12 MP ultrawide shooter, with the prominent Zeiss branding. On the front, you get a 32 MP selfie camera.

Also read: vivo V27 Pro Review: Great camera, better performance

The camera setup is powered by Zeiss Natural Colour 2.0 — in addition to the pro mode and the auto mode, you also can use the Zeiss mode to shoot your photos and videos, which vivo says results in professional-grade results. It's hard to disagree after taking the camera out for a spin. It suffers a bit in low-lighting conditions — but that is the case with pretty much every smartphone out there due to the physical limitations of camera hardware — but the output is as good as it gets — this is as good a camera setup as you can get at this price point — the X90 Pro competes against the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S23 lineup, the iPhone 14, and the Xiaomi 13 Pro.

The smartphone weighs about 214g, and the weight distribution is done well so that it doesn't feel particularly heavy, despite it being about 20 grams lighter than the on-so-heavy iPhone 14 Pro Max.

Compared to the WQHD+ (3200x1440) on the X80 Pro, the X90 Pro's screen has a lower resolution of 2800x1260-pixels, but nevertheless, it produces vibrant colours and has good viewing angles. vivo claims the display offers up to 1,300 nits of peak brightness. There is support for HDR10+ playback, which is most effective while watching videos or shows on Netflix and YouTube. The dual, stereo speaker system produces loud and crisp sound, making for a great multimedia experience.

Also read: Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra Review: Aiming for the Moon

As for biometrics, the X90 Pro features an optical in-display fingerprint sensor, which is responsive and unlocks the phone quickly. The X90 Pro packs a slightly bigger 4,870mAh battery compared to the X80 Pro, and supports 120W FlashCharge wired charging — with a charging brick included in the box — and 50W wireless charging. There is support for Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.3, and NFC.

The vivo X90 Pro runs Funtouch OS 13 — based on Android 13 — out of the box. The new version of Funtouch OS — as I've noted in previous reviews of the 2023 vivo smartphones — is more refined than 12, and offers a bunch of customisation and personalisation options. The phone is smooth and seamless when scrolling through the user interface. Be sure to update the phone to the April 2023 Android security patch, which fixes a few issues. The X90 Pro comes with a few third-party apps preinstalled, but they can be uninstalled if not needed.

vivo promises to provide three years of Android and security updates for the X90 Pro, which is good, but some of the competition — such as Samsung and Google — offer slightly better support.

In conclusion

The vivo X90 Pro is a good flagship smartphone with impressive features. The phone's camera, display, and battery are impressive, and the performance is exemplary.

Also read: OnePlus 11 5G Review: A return to form

First Published:May 8, 2023 2:06 PM IST