[Vivo X50 Pro+ Guides, News, & Discussion] piskr:
After nearly one month of use, I decided to write an initial review of Vivo X50 Pro+. The main reason is that Vivo as a part of the Chinese BBK Electronic concern is the least known brand in the west, and I believe unjustifiably.

There are three brands under BBK - Vivo, Oppo, and OnePlus. While the first two were at the beginning success only in the Indian market, the last one is well known in the west too. In fact, it was intended for the west and OnePlus phones were known to bring the most bang for the buck except for the average camera (supposedly no more).

And even Oppo made a great breakthrough with the last models. Only Vivo is left behind.

So why buying a Vivo phone if you are not from the east? And why buying X50 Pro+ exactly?

There are many good reasons for this. Let’s look at them closely.

Design

Even I have to admit I’m anything but a fan of the curved screen (my dream phone design is the Nokia 9.3 concept (https://www.phonearena.com/news/nokia-9-3-pureview-5g-concept-renders_id124342) I accept the reality for the time being and I really hope that that madness evaporates quickly. The curved screen is unpractical (distortion and false touches around the corner) but at least I managed to improve the phone outfit by buying a nice case for a few euros. I bought a model with the glass back (glass back is the second design failure I’m fed up with it’s heavy and fragile). There is a really stunning X50 Pro+ model with faux camel leather but then, I’m not yet prepared to go naked, exposing the back of the phone and especially all precious cameras to all unpredictable harsh situations. Hence I bought a really nice case instead of having an exceptional designed phone.

Display

OK, the part of the phone design is a display. X50 Pro+ comes with a nice E3 AMOLED panel with DCI-P3 color gamut, supporting 120Hz high refresh rate and 240Hz touch sampling rate, and has a peak brightness of 1300nit It also supports HDR10+. The E3 means that the display adds 8% to energy efficiency and has reduced blue glare. Otherwise, it has vivid full colors and sharp picture, which is well seen even under the direct sun. It has a small unnoticeable hole for the front camera, adjustable refresh rate, automatic brightness control, night mode, and three adjustable manifestations: home screen, lock screen and always-on display. What I miss is a chance to put your email on the lock screen, you know, it might be helpful if you lose the phone.

Camera

It is a while when the Vivo camera has been the last time evaluated on DXO. And I’m yet to try the camera in all its functionality. But I’ve already had a chance to compare the shootings with the Huawei P40 Pro and I have to say that I’m impressed. The main sensor among the four is the GN1 camera of Samsung, which supports Dual PD and Tetracell technology, which has 50 million pixels, a single pixel of 1.2μm. The output is 12.5 million pixels, and the single-pixel is 2.4μm, which increases the light sensitivity by four times. ISOCELL GN1 has Samsung’s pixel isolation technology ISOCELL Plus, which uses a physical barrier to isolate the pixels so that more light is collected by the microlens and then absorbed by the pixel’s photodiode.*The result is higher color fidelity and higher sensitivity, bringing natural tones and shadows to high-resolution photography. There is a 13 megapixel portrait camera, which has an f/2.4 aperture, a focal length of 50mm, and a double zoom. The 8 megapixel sensor offers 5x optical and 60x digital zoom. Panoramic pictures, on the other hand, can be taken with the 8-megapixel wide-angle lens.*On the front side, there is a 32 megapixel front camera, which offers an f/2.4 aperture.

Battery

I must admit, I’m immodest as far as the battery is concerned. I came from the Huawei Mate 20X side, I had a 5mAh battery, I’m not a gamer, rather a surfing addict. But surprisingly I noticed that Vivo manages consumption rather well without compromising performance. I manage through a long day easily, usually, I have enough power for two consecutive days.

Hardware

As you might know, X50 Pro+ uses to date the last SoC of Qualcomm, the SM8250 Snapdragon 865 (7 nm+). My phone comes with the 256GB ROM 12GB RAM UFS 3.1. It is fast, reliable, and smooth. The 4G antennas cover all common world bands (exceptions are band 20 of EU and more exotic US bands - like TM 66, 71, V 13, 46, 48, 66 and ATT 14,29,30,66). It is understandable, the phone is meant for Asian markets. And it supports both SA/NSA 5G frequencies 1, 3, 41, 77, 78, 79. That means that it had to cover the most common 5G specter in EU (where it exist) and one 5G band from Sprint (41) for TM in the USA.

Otherwise, the X50 Pro+ has both VoLTE and WoWiFi enabled and it must support Netflix too (I don’t use it). The nice move from Vivo is Wifi 2.4 and 5 aggregation and smooth switching from wifi to mobile when needed.

Software and customization

As expected X50 Pro+ comes with a lot of Chinese applications hardly usable anywhere else. Most of them could be removed from settings, others are removable (and retrievable) with adb shell pm uninstall --user 0.

After thoroughly removing unwanted apps there are negligible Chinese traces remain. One is, for example, when you get deeper into the weather app, you eventually come to the pure Chinese site. Otherwise, the weather is from the Accuweather and very reliable.

The launcher is not bad even if it is not as polished as Huawei’s. It supports gestures, themes, and customization. For more customization, you have to get a theme editor, which functionality is more limited than Huawei’s one. You can replace the stock launcher with the custom one. I didn’t decide to replace it yet, it has some useful feathers. I want to mention that I prefer stock Calendar, Clock, Weather, Albums over the Google ones. And the overall design is nice, I just wanted material icons, which I prefer smaller though. You have a native voice recorder with the phone and really nice messages application, which I haven’t replaced with Google’s even than the last now got RCS in my country. Not to mention very useful note applications with text, voice, picture options, and even OCR which works surprisingly well with foreign languages.

So why switch from Huawei to Vivo?

I admired Mate 20x in the time of acquisition but after two years I started to believe in the combination of a smaller lighter phone together with a tablet when needed. But that is not the main reason. As we all know Huawei lost GMS support. I guess I could live without the majority of Google applications. But I strongly consider the phone as a tool which should be sufficient to replace payment instruments, cards, tickets, personal documents, and keys. In my opinion, this is the second most important role of phones besides getting information.

And all this is now jeopardized if you possess a Huawei phone. Vivo is a completely different story. The company is not in dispute with the US administration and the X50 Pro+ is completely capable to serve the purpose. Despite poor and misleading knowledge of a vendor I bought it from it has full GMS support and it matches CTS profile completely. Google Assistant works flawlessly as well as Google pay.