Vivo X50

As I’ve said in my first impressions for the Vivo X50, I have been interested in Vivo’s new X-series phones for a month now. The new flagship series carries the Vivo brand of tech innovation from the years with the phone (the Pro-version) sporting the world’s first “gimbal” camera system. Now that I had my hands on the phone here’s what I found out.

- Gabriel Pe

DESIGN

Despite being the “base” variant for the X50 series, Vivo did not skimp in the design aspect of the phone. The X50 is housed in Corning Gorilla Glass with aluminum sides. Our model was the Glazed Black color which is pretty sweet looking. Being covered with glass, the phone is a bit of a fingerprint magnet but the included clear rubber case does the trick.

The Vivo X50 has a 6.56-inch FHD+ (2376 x 1080) AMOLED display with a 90Hz refresh rate. Also on the screen is the 32-megapixel front camera. The X50 follows a very minimalist design on the top is a single microphone hole, while on the right are the volume and power buttons. Below the phone is the sim cards tray, the USB-C charging port, another microphone hole, and the bottom firing-hole. At the back of the phone is the piece de resistance, the phone’s quad-camera setup. The Vivo X50 is also one of the thinnest phones in the market coming in at an astounding 7.5mm thin.

HARDWARE

The Vivo X50 is powered by an octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 730 SoC mated to an Adreno 618 GPU. The Vivo X50 has 8GB of fast LPDDR4X RAM and 128 GB of UFS 2.1 internal storage.

The most important feature of the X50 is its cameras. The Vivo X50 Pro is the world’s first smartphone with a “gimbal-like” camera system which gives the camera extra stabilization when taking pictures and videos. While X50 doesn’t have the same advanced system, the main 48-megapixel Sony IMX598 sensor still has four-axis optical image stabilization (OIS). The Vivo X50 has a secondary 8-megapixel ultra-wide-angle lens, a 13-megapixel portrait camera with 2x optical zoom, and a 5-megapixel macro lens. Thanks to the OIS the cameras have plenty of neat features especially in the video department.