Android smartphones

Technology: Vivo smartphones head to head with giants in Kenya

Last updated on September 11th, 2021 at 02:48 pm

Vivo smartphone made its debut to the Kenyan market a year ago and through them leveraging on innovation and quality of products to offer to customer satisfaction, they have unveiled new smartphones.

The Vivo 17 pro is their latest device in the market with a total of six cameras. It is competing with the likes of Oppo Reno 2Z, Xiaomi Redmi K20 Pro and One Plus.

It is the first product in the market to introduce a dual pop up AI-powered cameras on the front. Its design features a 6.44 inch AMOLED display with full high definition resolution and Corning gorilla glass 6 for protection.

To secure the screen, it is packed with a screen guard because the company thinks you can never be too careful. It also has an in-display fingerprint sensor like the latest smartphones that are in the market.

You can also customize the on-screen fingerprint icon and unlock animations. It has a face recognition system in case the fingerprint authentication fails three times.

The rear cameras are aligned vertically at the centre and it does not protrude much. It has one configuration with 8GB RAM and 128GB storage.

This device supports Widevine L1 DRM certification meaning it can stream video at HD and higher resolution apps such as Netflix and Amazon Prime videos. It is using the Funtouch Operating System 9.1 that is based on Android 9.

Navigating through the device might be a bit challenging but if one has used it before it will be easy using the Operating system.

It is reminiscent of the iPhone as you have to swipe upwards to have the pull-out menu called Control Centre. For gamers, the device has the Ultra Game Mode which blocks notifications when gaming. It will automatically reject calls when you are playing a racing game.

The front cameras are the selling points of this gadget. It has the 32-megapixel primary camera with an 8-megapixel ultra-wide-angle camera.

The primary selfie camera has a wide field of view but the second one lets you get an even wider shot adding a slight fish eye effect making it one of the few phones to allow one to use Night mode with a selfie camera.

The selfie camera has the Posture setting which suggests various poses for selfies by showing you outlines of the pose for one to mimic.

This device allows you to record up to 4K resolution but without stabilisation.

One of the disadvantages of the device is that it is using the now slightly dated Snapdragon 675 SoC which is quite underpowered for such a phone with great qualities while other phones with almost the same features use Qualcomm processors.

(TheStar)