[Vivo X80 Pro] wimbawaya:
So, I exchanged the phone for another X80 Pro...I really wanted to give this phone another chance. And so far, it’s…well, a bit of a mixed bag:

BATTERY LIFE:

Battery drain isn’t quite as bad, but it still isn’t great. Yesterday I got 3.5h SoT with 40% battery left, but this was with light use (a lot of brief screen-unlocks just to check notifications).

The screen is the main contributing factor (I’m using 2400x1080; I tried “smart” refresh rate for a couple of days and have now switched to 60Hz to see if it makes a difference), followed by networking: some of this can definitely be attributed to software—both the OS, Google Services with its background BS, and Vivo’s own [lack of] tweaking. Yesterday evening I was offered to update to 12.0.12.7, which I'm guessing focuses more on adquisition of cellular coverage. So far, I've been mostly on WiFi so I can't attest to any differences for the time being.

But there's definitely a software component to the battery drain and heat associated with networking (either wifi or cellular), because it's very much dependent on the app and use scenario: with YT and Spotify (streaming), there’s no out-of-the-ordinary battery drain or heating, while anything that involves downloading files (Gmaps offline maps, downloading music from Spotify, downloading files from Tresorit, uploading to G.Drive, etc) causes the battery to go down FAST and the phone to get very warm to the touch. When restoring Whatsapp chat backups from G-drive, for instance, even though it was downloading at a very slow rate (it took 2.5h to download 3 Gb, but I’m guessing it’s ‘cause the app is designed to use limited bandwidth for backup restoring), battery drain and heating were both very considerable.

I’ve disabled “raise to wake” and “tap to wake”, which were enabled on my previous X80 Pro, as I’m assuming they keep certain sensors awake. We’ll see if it makes a difference. Then again, I have all those features on on my P30 Pro and they don’t have enough of an impact on battery drain to warrrant disabling them.

Looking at screen wakelocks, I found that com.vivo.fingerprint:PowerUtils woke up the phone 113 times (keeping it awake for 1m 43s) in the 2h since the last full charge. That’s nearly once very minute…

I’ve noticed (both on this unit and the one I returned) that with the phone sitting static on a table, the fingerprint unlock icon would randomly appear, waking the screen. And it did so quite often (once every 5-10”), so I’ve disabled “Show fingerprint icon on off screen”. Maybe this is a fingerprint sensor calibration issue (software, because it’s been present on 2 different units), and the fact it doesn’t wake the screen will only solve part of the associated battery drain, since the sensor remains active. If anyone knows of a way to disable this, so that fingerprint sensor only becomes active after hitting the power button and waking the screen, I’d like to give it a try and see if it has any effect on battery life.

Overall, idle battery drain seems pretty high (I’ll report percentages once I’ve had Battery Guru running for a few more days).

Based on the above, I get the impression that there’s a bad combo going on between power-hungry hardware and poor software optimization, with Vivo contributing to making Android’s poor power management (compared to Apple’s) even worse.

Also, not a fan of Vivo’s battery management: it’s either too aggressive to the point of killing notifications and functionality, or completely unrestricted, allowing too much battery drain.

We’ll see how it fairs over time, but with the 80W fast-charging, I’m willing to accept these battery numbers in exchange for the EXCELLENT camera, and overlook the less-than-ideal FunTouch OS, as long as my next main issue doesn’t become a total deal-breaker:

OVERHEATING:

As mentioned before, the heating issue is still there, although, granted, it’s been HOT here: from 35 to 38º C during the day.

Strangely enough, it heats up more during networking activities than during CPU-intensive tasks such as rendering video. 🤷‍♀️

But heating could be a deal-breaker for me based on something that happened yesterday. I went for a 1h bike ride and was using Gmaps Navigation for the route (phone locked and in my pocket, following audio guidance via my earbuds) and recording the ride with Relive. After about 1/2h, I took out the phone the take a few pics and it was so HOT the camera app was stuttering heavily. I tried recording a video and the result is as can be imagined. Even the home screen and menu were lagging heavily.

I’ll have to try again during a night ride when it isn’t so hot, but if this phone is going to heat up to the point of nearly freezing (and surely shortening the battery life), there’s no way I’m going to hold onto it when my trusty old Huawei never had such issues.

Wireless Android Auto also causes severe heating (in a shaded, cool area of the car), while wired AA doesn’t. I could understand if heavy 5G-use caused battery drain but also WiFi? (AA is known to be buggy, but this isn't an isolated case)

I’m really starting to wish they’d shipped globally with the Dimensity9000….

TBH, the only real reason I’m still rooting for this phone is the

CAMERA

.

The stills it takes are EXCEPTIONAL—the best photos on any phone I’ve used. Especially now that I’ve spent more time playing with it. It nails high-contrast HDR situations, and night photos (especially city-scapes) are STUNNING. The camera UI could use a little polish though (so many options, often in not-too-intuitive places).

The video is also very good, even though I find the colours a bit over-saturated and would have like to see a Zeiss colour mode there too. Correcting what I said in my previous, in-depth comment on the camera, it IS possible to change lenses when recording video, but only in 1080p—not in 4K or 8K—and not with AI enhancement turned on.

Transition from one lense to another is smooth enough when zooming in/out, but as is to be expected, there are very noticeable quality losses at certain focal lengths, between lenses, when digital zoom is being applied:

At 0.6X, with the ultra-wide, quality is fantastic for an UW lense. At 0.7X the drop in quality isn’t noticeable, but at 0.8 and 0.9X, the digital zoom on the wide-angle yields grainy, pixelated results.

Once it jumps to the main camera, quality is top-notch, and respectable up to about 1.3X (30% digital zoom factor); at 1.4X the footage is still quite (despite the 40% digital zoom factor), but from 1.5X to 1.9X… Quality drops exponentially until it switched to the “portrait lense” at 2X.

Quality is still very acceptable up to 3X, gradually decreasing until it switches to the 5X periscope.

From 5X to 7X the quality is still very good; from there to the 9Xish mark, it’s still acceptable. But beyond 10X….you can imagine.

Overall, I’m pleased with the video too. Or would be, if it didn’t heat up so much. With a 1min video at 1080p, 30 fps, cpuss-0 jumped from 49º C to 62º C and the battery reached 44º C. Battery dropped 1%. After letting it cool down again to baseline (during which time it dropped another 1%), I tried a video@ 4k60fps, and surprisingly, cpuss-0 “only” reached 56º (maybe the A1+ chip was doing the heavy lifting?), the battery hit 43º C and again, 1% drop in battery level.

But in the 5’ since then, with the phone idle and screen off, it’s dropped another 4% and is still very warm to the touch. I’m guessing that’s Google photos uploading the videos in the background…but still, that’s a 7% drop in 10’, of which only 3’ were active use…

So, overall, the main reason I’m holding onto this phone is the camera—which I suspect is the deciding factor for anyone who buys this phone. As a camera, it excels; as a phone—despite the gorgeous display, fantastic ultrasonic fingerprint reader and nice-sounding speakers—it’s, in my experience, a fairly poor package, especially at its 1199€ price point; both from a HW standpoint (CPU & battery life) and a SW one (Not-too-smooth 120Hz implementation, small lags in the OS and certain apps, poor HW optimization, bugs and issues with notifications, etc.). Maybe SW updates will solve some of the issues. Or maybe the SD 8 Gen1 is beyond fixable...