Now let’s kick this off with an unboxing. Now vivo are giving us a clean simple looking white box. Turning the box we get to see some of the key features of the phone and those include an AI Triple camera, a 5000mah battery and a 6.35 inch screen which vivo are calling the HaloFull view display and the color I have here is the aqua blue. You can also pick it up in Burgundy Red. Taking the seal apart and opening the box, we are greeted with another box that holds the paperwork and documentation, -things people never read and a soft silicon case for a bit of added protection. Next we get the phone and taking its wrap off reveals the aqua blue color that gives off this shining pearlscent kind of effect when light hits the plastic back. We also get a Sim ejector tool, a standard power brick so nothing special going on there and a charging cable. A micro USB charging cable. That kind of sucks since this late in 2019 you kind of expect vivo to ship you a phone with USB type C . But okay we take what we get. And that’s all you get in the box. No headphones included.
Checking out the phone’s design, you get your volume rocker and power button on the right side of the phone. Turning the phone down you see the speaker grill, micro USB port, microphone and headphone jack. On the plastic back lies the fingerprint scanner. Nothing on the top, the Sim slot on the top right part, the 16 megapixel front facing camera up front and finally the triple camera set up. First impressions I’d say the phone feels quite hefty in your hands and you’ll probably notice if it wasn’t in your pocket thanks to that massive 5000mAh battery. As Culture is these days, the glossy back on this phone is a fingerprint magnet and I suggest you slap the silicon case it came with. It kind of adds more bulk to the phone and takes the anesthetic from it but those fingerprints look ugly and dirty on the phone.
Jumping in to the phones internals, the Vivo Y15 is running on Android 9 pie straight out of the box with Vivo’s funtouch OS running on top of Android. For those who want more clarification on that, fun touch OS is the counterpart of Samsung’s One UI and Huawei’s EMUI skins that run on top of Android to give it a different look and feel. All that is backed up by 4GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage. Sad news however, is there’s no other variant. It would have been nice to see a 128GB model with 6GB of RAM but hey, we take what we get.
On to the display. As earlier mentioned, Vivo are calling this 6.35 inch screen the HaloFull View display and it’s a 720×1544 resolution screen bringing out 81.4% screen to body ratio. The display is quite bright coming in at so you need not worry about using it outdoors but then again it does have quite noticeable bezels with this tear drop notch at the top housing the front camera and one really massive chin.
The phone does come with a traditional fingerprint scanner that unlocks the phone pretty fast every time. I personally like where it has been placed making it easy to reach even without looking for it. The phone also has face unlock which I must stay is pretty fast, works well each time and is somehow hard to cheat with photos or even look a likes. Props to vivo for having it on lock on that end.
As always we can’t do a review without the speaker test. I don’t have much to complain or compliment the phone about. The sound is clear and balanced. I kinda wish it were a bit louder and had more punch to it in terms of bass but it’s not too terrible. Also worth mentioning, the phone does have a mono bottom firing speaker meaning no sound comes out of the earpiece to give you that stereo sound experience but then again at this price point, stereo speakers would come as a surprise.
Now here is where my love hate relationship with this phone tipped over more to the hate part. First up fun touch OS feels kind of cluttered. Cluttered in the way the settings app is arranged. See navigating through settings trying to find that specific setting can be quite a task since the main options aren’t placed where they normally would be found in majority of other devices out there. Example, to find the about phone option you have to go to more settings first before you can find it. Such an arrangement makes you feel like vivo was trying too hard to be different and stand out at the cost of making feel like you don’t know what you’re doing. That my friends is one frustrating feeling. Such frustrations spill over to easy tasks like turning on one handed mode, where vivo want you to quickly swipe right and left to turn it on other than the normal swipe on the navigation buttons or the diagonal swipe up. See how it seems they were trying too hard to be different and stand out?
Next misfire is on the cameras. Now you get a 13 megapixel f/2.2 primary shooter backed up by an 8 megapixel f/2.2 ultra wide angle lens and a 2 megapixel f/2.4 depth sensor which makes the phone look very good and well equipped on paper but it has nothing to show for those numbers. The standard lens does an okay job but clarity is lost with the ultra wide angle that takes hazy images that just won’t cut it. The presence of the depth sensor also doesn’t make sense since there’s not dedicated portrait mode in the camera app meaning you have to edit the blur background in the gallery after you take the photo, same as you would before posting a picture on Instagram. Videos max out at 1080p but also leave you wishing they were better. The phone does try to better the image quality after the shot but they still aren’t shots you’d be proud of. In fact other cheaper competitors like the Samsung Galaxy A30 do a better job than this.
I like the fact that you can use the fingerprint scanner as a shutter button when taking selfies but the selfies here are just straight up hot garbage. You get a 16 megapixel f/2.0 front facing camera and that would be enough to get your hopes up, and it does but soon after the photos taken just fail you. The selfie camera launches in beauty mode by default and can I just mention the Beauty mode shots on here are just terrible. It’s as if the whole image processing process was a huge guess as seen by the softened patches on my face in these sample shots. Normal selfies might seem a little palatable, certainly better than the beauty shots but they still don’t make the cut. There are also some gimmicks in the camera like the panorama mode in the selfie camera which I understand is an effort to make up for the lack of a wide angle selfie lens but it’s also a hit or miss. Nothing guaranteed. Which makes my point even more clear. Vivo was trying too hard on this one. I mean there are phones out there with one selfie camera that just add a crop into the picture to give it a sense of wider selfies and do a pretty good job at it but this here is another failed attempt at standing out.
Also viewing content on here won’t be as clear as you might expect. You might blame it on the lower screen resolution but then again vivo didn’t have an excuse to not fit a 1080p screen on here, I mean they did fit a large enough battery to power a higher resolution right? Even at max resolution video quality still doesn’t look that good.
In terms of gaming, the phone does try to deliver smooth frame rates but you will notice that periodic stutter when gaming. All in all games are pretty much responsive and that 4GB of RAM coupled with that MediaTek P22 processor help keep Games and apps open in the background a little bit longer. You also get this ultra game mode utility that kind of stores all your games in one place and is said to give you that extra juice to smoothen your gaming experience but at this point one can’t quite see or feel its effect. You can’t know if it’s on or off because there’s literally no difference. Maybe just blocking notifications while you’re gaming.
You also get this gimmick reverse wired charging via an OTG where the 5000 mAh battery allows you to share charge with another device but let me just ask. Out of the billions and billions of people on the planet, who walks around with an OTG for the purposes of sharing charge. There’s just a lot of things in that sentence that don’t sit right with me. Starting from the fact that if that was such an important feature of the phone, why wasn’t an OTG bundled in the box? Also just the whole contraption from the micro USB OTG to a normal USB cable to a USB type c or micro USB is just too bulky of a set up and sounds way inconvenient. Might as well have put reverse charging on the phone or leave the reverse wired charging part out of it. To make matters worse, Vivo packed a 5000mAh battery into the phone but didn’t think to equip the phone with fast charging technology or a fast charger. Kind of makes it feel like they were cutting all the wrong corners.
Well now you see my love hate relationship with the vivo Y15 and why it’s a bit hard to say who this phone is for. Apart from a massive battery fitted on there there’s not much going for the phone. Maybe with future software updates the phone might get better but at this point in time, going on that piece of hope just doesn’t feel safe. Verdict this phone isn’t worth the 20,000 shillings its going to send you back on.
Lord Hezion 