vivo x70 Pro review – Camera with a built-in phone

Just when you think vivo made a great smartphone with a greater camera, they introduce the X70 Pro, which I’ll be looking at in this review. Whether you’re a fan of vivo or not, consider checking out the specs of the X70 pro as well as the rest of the review:

Specs​​

Design

The X70 pro has a slim and stylish design, definitely one of the better-looking phones that I have seen. The X70 Pro review unit that vivo Malaysia sent us (thanks vivo Malaysia!) is in Aurora Dawn, which looks gorgeous. It reminds me of a pearl. You can also get the X70 Pro in Cosmic Black, if you prefer something more discrete. 

The phone also has a matte design, which makes it hard to leave fingerprints. The Fluorite AG surface of the phone also feels smooth and comfortable to hold in my hand.

As for the dimensions, the X70 pro’s thickness is 7.99mm and the weight is 183g for Cosmic Black. For Aurora Dawn, the thickness is 8.08mm while the weight is 184g. The size feels just right and even after holding it for a long period of time to take photos or to play games, my wrist doesn’t feel too strained.

The power button and the volume button are on the right side. The bottom of the phone has the speaker, type-C port for charging and SIM card slot. Unfortunately, It doesn’t support additional SD cards and also doesn’t have a 3.5mm jack, so those who do not have Bluetooth earphones, take note.

ZEISS camera

If you read the title of this review, you’ll know that I referred to the X70 Pro as a “camera with a built-in phone”, because the camera is more of the spotlight here, rather than the phone. Developed in cooperation with ZEISS, a lens company, the X70 Pro is hands down one of the best smartphones for photography.

One major difference between the X60 Pro and the X70 Pro is X70 pro has 4 lenses, compared to the X60 pro with 3. The 4 camera lenses of the X70 Pro are:

• 50 MP (main)
• 12 MP (ultrawide)
• 12 MP (telephoto)
• 8 MP (periscope)

All the lenses are ZEISS T* coating certified which reduces ghosting and stray light effect. This is very good for night photography, as it makes night shots very clear. The camera also has Gimbal Stabilisation 3.0 and a bespoke Sony IMX766V sensor which makes shooting with it very stable. As a result, I feel that it’s pretty user-friendly. Even a bad photographer can use this to take nice pictures.

Night shots are pretty much perfect, thanks to the reasons I mentioned above. As for the day shots, they are also very clear. I’m quite impressed with the zoom. Even when you zoom in 5x, the image quality barely drops. The only thing that I dislike about the day shots is that they’re a bit oversaturated and too colourful for my liking, but it’s something that is pretty minor.

As for video recording, it’s also very stable, as you would expect. The VIS 5-Axis Ultra Stable Video feature is a very good built-in gimbal. Even if you’re running and shooting video at the same time, there is only a little bit of shaking in the footage. Ovrall, very smooth and easy to use.

vivo X70 Series (VIS 5-Axis Ultra Stable Video)

The selfie camera uses a punch-hole design near the top of the display. The X70 Pro has four different ZEISS style portrait filters, all of which are very pretty and useful for those who like to take portraits.

Performance

The X70 Pro uses MediaTek Dimensity 1200 chipset, together with 12 GB of onboard RAM and 256 GB of UFS 3.1 flash storage. The Dimensity 1200 is pretty similar to the popular Qualcomm Snapdragon 870, and helps to run programs and apps on the X70 Pro pretty smoothly.

As for the screen, the X70 Pro uses a 6.56-inch AMOLED display with a 120 Hz refresh rate. Thanks to the super-fast refresh rate, the images on the screen are very smooth. The screen also displays movies, images and games with great quality and vibrant colours.

Something that surprised me is how good the battery of the X70 Pro is. It has a 4450mAh battery and it lasts very long. You can expect to take photos and browse the internet for 6 hours straight, good enough to last you the whole day. Of course, playing games will cause the battery to drain faster, but the 44W fast charge means that the X70 Pro can get back its full battery in about an hour.

Game Performance

I tested 3 games on the phone, Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, Punishing: Gray Raven and Genshin Impact.

Even though Mobile Legends: Bang Bang is not a new game and almost any phone can run it, I tested it with the Vivo X70 Pro to see how smoothly it can run. It is a competitive game, so having a good phone definitely helps.

I played on high graphic settings, which is the maximum settings for the game. The experience is very smooth, without any delay or lag. If you die in the game, blame yourself—not the phone.

Punishing: Gray Raven released on global in July this year, and even though it is a 3D action RPG, it is extremely well optimised for phones.

I can run Punishing: Gray Raven on the vivo X70 Pro at Ultra settings and encounter no problems whatsoever. The game runs super smooth and looks amazing.

Since the previous two games didn’t give any problems to the vivo X70 Pro whatsoever, I decided to put it to the final test—Genshin Impact. 

The opening cutscene when you choose the gender of the main character is already very laggy. The moment I can move around, the phone sets the game to run at Medium settings by default, and it’s pretty smooth.

I took it 1 step higher and run the game at High settings. At this point, the game is already telling me it’s overclocking the phone. I was surprised to see the gameplay run pretty smoothly! It only lags slightly when I change the camera suddenly, or when I aim with the bow. The phone got pretty hot, though. Cinematics are still laggy.

At the Highest setting, there is not much difference from High settings. Still, like basically all mobile devices that can play Genshin Impact, I recommend playing it on low settings to avoid lag.

Closing thoughts

As a flagship phone, the X70 Pro is an excellent choice, more so if you snap a lot of photos. It maintains the excellent camera quality that vivo is known for. The phone looks beautiful, the pictures it takes are also amazing and performance-wise, it’s extremely solid. 

The X70 Pro is priced at RM 3,299, which I think is quite worth it for what you’re getting. For more info, visit the official website or the vivo page on Shopee and Lazada.

X70 Pro Review Unit provided by vivo