A few days back I was traveling from Delhi to Jaipur and I found quite a few people using a Vivo smartphone. This was a surprising for me as normally one would see a lot of Xiaomi’s, Motorola and Lenovo’s etc. Hence I spoke to a few of them as to what was their thought behind buying a Vivo smartphone and not any other device. The reason someone mentioned was “Phone market me haath me leke dekha to accha laga is isliye to le lia. Chinese phone ke jaise nahi jo bina dekhe khareedna padta hai” -“The phone felt nice in the hand when I checked in a local shop. It wasn’t like the Chinese phones which cannot be seen physically in stores”.
Vivo is a brand that is surprisingly known to more offline shoppers than to people who love to shop online. The reason behind this is quite obvious as Vivo has concentrated on offline sales and the presence of the brand can be felt in the farthest corners of the country. That is how Vivo has become fifth largest smartphone maker in the world. However, the interaction with the old man had me looking forward to reviewing the Vivo V3 which I got a few days back.
This is the first time I had used a Vivo smartphone, one of the main reason behind this was that I simply did not like designs of a few initial smartphones launched by the brand but here I have been using the Vivo V3 since a few days and let us have a look at what I felt :
Design and Display
V3 comes with a very comfortable-to-hold 5-inch display with an HD (1280×720 pixels) IPS LCD display. It would be really difficult to make out the brand and model if you remove the Vivo branding from just above the display. The phone comes with a 2.5D curved glass and makes the device look premium. The phone came with a screen protector pre-installed. Vivo also ships a transparent silicon case with the device.
The size of the device was perfect for day to day operations, in fact, it felt pleasingly comfortable after using so many large screened devices. On the front, you can find the front facing camera, speaker grill, and the sensors while the non-lit capacitive buttons are located at the chin of the device.
One the metal covered back, the rear camera is located on the top left and the flashlight is located just below that. A square shaped fingerprint sensor is located at the center of the device along with the VIVO branding. The speaker grille, mic, the micro USB charging slot is at the bottom while a dedicated MicroSD slot and a 3.5mm audio jack is located at the top.
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On the left side of the device, there’s a dual-SIM tray that supports one nano and one micro sim. I was quite disappointed with the plastic build of the sim card tray. It looked flimsy and could easily break in case just a little bit force is applied on it. The speakers on the V3 produce a powerful output and audio was very loud and clear. Gaming and watching movies on the device was fun.
Apart from the screen protector and a silicon case, a headset, a charger, a data cable, a SIM ejector tool, and a 4G Airtel SIM can be found in the box.
Read Vivo V3 Specifications and features on the next page
