Personally, I am an advocate for buying flagship devices. I would even go as far as to recommend buying flagship devices from two or three years ago, as it’s a better choice than a midrange device, since most of these still have better hardware that will age more gracefully. However, there has been a paradigm shift in tech lately.
Flagship phones are still very, very expensive, and midrange phones are getting good. And with us is the vivo V70, vivo Philippines’ current upper midrange offering that sits under its X series flagship devices.
The vivo V70 starts at Php 31,999, and comes in two different memory configurations. The one being tested is the “16GB” RAM (8+8) + 256GB variant in Alpine Gray, going up to “24GB” RAM (12+12) with either 256GB or 512GB of storage.
Design and Build
For a midrange device, this comes with a flagship-grade design and build quality materials to make it feel premium. It has aluminum side rails and a matte glass back, making the already sleek device feel a tier above its price range.
Combine the pocket-friendly 194g device weight, svelte 7.59mm thickness, and the two individual ingress protection ratings of IP68 and IP69, and it’s genuinely impressive how far Chinese phone makers have gotten, especially when you consider that it bundles a free transparent case in the box where everyone else requires you to pay up for a full experience.
The top of the device houses two antenna bands, holes for the microphones, and an infrared blaster, a beloved feature for those who want to control household devices and more. The left is bare, and the right features your volume rocker and power button.
The bottom has more holes for microphones, the second speaker, a USB-C 2.0 port, and a dual Nano SIM slot. Take note that the device does not support eSIM, either.
The flat 6.59-inch AMOLED display is protected by a sheet of Schott Xensation Core glass, but it comes with a film screen protector applied out of the box. The resolution goes up to 2750 x 1260, has DCI-P3 or 10-bit color support, and is capable of going up to 120Hz in refresh rates. It doesn’t use LTPO tech, so the phone jumps from 30, 60, 90, and 120Hz instead of scaling from 1 to 120Hz to save on power.
The display is plenty sharp and easy on the eyes, especially for its “goldilocks size”. It gets decently bright in direct sunlight, and the ultrasonic fingerprint scanner has significantly fewer false positives compared to optical fingerprint scanners. Bonus points for the thin display bezels and small camera, too.
In fact, I’ve had several friends ask me, “What iPhone is that?” as I show them the rear of the device. There’s a metal camera island with three lenses, a flash, and a Zeiss badge exactly where the iPhone Pro’s sensors would be. However, this is one part where vivo has gotten the upper hand in its price range.
Camera
vivo and Zeiss established a partnership back in 2020 for their camera systems, and it seems that the fruits of their partnership are starting to pay off. For those unfamiliar, Zeiss (formerly Carl Zeiss) is a German optics company that was founded back in 1846, and has specialized in camera lenses among other items, and has most famously partnered with the likes of Nokia back in 2005, and Sony for its various Alpha lineup and Xperia devices.
As for the V70, it packs an impressive arsenal of cameras for the price range.
The main wide shooter has a 23mm f/1.9 lens with OIS, and a large 1/1.56” 50MP sensor (Sony IMX766). Behind the 73mm f/2.65 telephoto lens with OIS is an equally large 1./1.95” 50MP Sony LYT-600 sensor, and the ultrawide has a fixed-focus 15mm f/2.2 lens with a small 1/4.0” sensor from Omnivision. The front camera has a 1/2.76” 50MP sensor with a 21mm f/2.0 lens with autofocus.
It’s an impressive list of hardware, especially when all of these shooters pack Zeiss optics, and there’s a ring LED flash, for even illumination of faces when taking portraits. Add in the 4K @ 60fps video capabilities, and you could be looking at the camera specs sheet of a flagship device.
Beneath the simplicity of the iOS 18-inspired camera app is a myriad of various options, features, and even AI filters to do things like change the weather, remove unwanted people, recompose images, upscale detail, and even change lighting. Those work as they intend, but the focus will be on the images themselves.
By default, images come out very bright, colorful, contrasty, detailed, and sharpened up to the point where you can see a bit of overprocessing kick in. This is what’s usually pleasing to the eye for most people, good for social media consumption and casual sharing.
The two large sensors perform great in low light, with the telephoto lens also having some natural depth of field, as does the front-facing camera. Once you punch in at 10x zoom, the phone kicks in its AI upscaling. The results are mixed and work well depending on the subject, but this can easily destroy fine detail if used on text. The small sensor, average resolution, and fixed focus limit what you can do with it, and the results are soft and underwhelming.
But for those who want to fully experience the Zeiss imaging pipeline that’s built into this phone, there’s a little film slide icon beside the zoom toggle, and that opens up the style menu.
Setting it into the Zeiss mode does a few things: mainly tone down the colors, the contrast, and the HDR processing for a more “natural” look. For photographers, this is a refreshing change from every other phone camera’s overprocessed, flat, HDR look. This is something that Chinese brands have been getting right, especially for those who partnered with legacy camera brands.
However, there’s something that has been plaguing Chinese phone brands, and it’s the baked-in beauty processing that I haven’t been able to fully disable whenever it detects people.
Be it skin smoothing, brightening, or even putting on lipstick on guys, this is something that you either love or hate. The dedicated Portrait mode even comes with clever bokeh emulation of Zeiss lenses for that extra authentic look.
Video, on the other hand, has no Zeiss mode in it, so it has the camera’s default processing (bright, contrasty, punchy colors) in effect. Video stabilization is good, audio is decent, and zooming is smooth. There are no manual controls here, and take note that the ultrawide lens is limited to 1080 @ 30fps, either.
Performance and OS
The vivo V70 runs the octa-core Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 chip paired with an Adreno 722 GPU. This is mated to 8GB of RAM, which can be virtually “expanded” by 8GB by taking a chunk of memory from the 256GB of UFS 4.1 storage.
Usually, “virtual memory” or swap files are slower than physical memory, but in this case, it’s implemented well enough that you don’t feel a noticeable slowdown when going over the physical memory’s limit.
The chip is no slouch, here being able to tackle fairly demanding titles such as Zenless Zone Zero with ease at 60fps, just with some graphical settings toned down. Lighter titles, moderate multitasking, and general usage are no problem for the chipset.
It runs Android 16 with the OriginOS 6 skin on top, and vivo promises up to four major software updates for the device.
Remember how I mentioned that my friends mistook this for an iPhone? Well, the Apple influence runs a lot deeper in the operating system. You can see it in the lockscreen, the app icons, the control center, which can either be fixed or split, and even a dynamic island clone.
It’s amusing to see just how influential iOS is across the entire operating system, but it also sticks to the nature of Android of how customizable it is. Dig deep enough in the settings, and you’re able to tweak almost every single aspect of the operating system. Battery icon, notification bar location, icon shape, size, color, fonts, animations, something I haven’t seen since my days of using custom ROMs and rooting.
However, the operating system is not without its faults. It’s loaded with a lot of unnecessary apps out of the box, and sometimes, you even get pushed some ads via notifications, and there’s some jank that causes stutters and the occasional app crash.
Yes, there’s also a handful of AI features like writing tools, smart captions, transcriptions, and translations, but at least these aren’t shoved in your face and are optional.
This is where brands like Samsung, Sony, and Google come ahead in terms of polish for their operating systems. This is one aspect that Chinese manufacturers need to improve on, as having an impressive hardware suite isn’t enough to compensate for poor optimization.
Of course, it works well as a phone, with great signal reception, loud stereo speakers that sacrifice some bass for volume, good voice call quality, and a so-so vibration motor that ends up vibrating the entire phone instead of the tight haptics most associated with higher-end models and Apple devices.
Battery
The surprising bit is that this phone packs a 6,500mAh silicon-carbon (Si/C) battery inside, considerably larger than the majority of the Western or Korean flagships. vivo says it handles extreme temperatures better, so using it in the heat or bitter cold should offer minimal to no performance losses.
The device easily nets me a whole day (7:00 am to 10:00 pm) of heavy usage (gaming, camera, browsing, multimedia consumption) with all the settings enabled (120Hz, always-on-display, performance mode). Taking it easy can bring me to two full days before having to top it up.
You can use any USB-C charger here, but you’d want to use it with the included 90W charger in the box. The charger and cable combination enable the 90W vivo FlashCharge tech, allowing you to top up the large battery in less than an hour. The phone also comes with Bypass Charging, which lets the phone run off the connected power source to extend the battery’s lifespan.
Verdict
Some people want the reassurance of a sealed, brand-new device instead of buying a secondhand flagship for the same money, and the vivo V70 is an excellent choice for that crowd.
Of course, Chinese software isn’t perfect, and you’ll have to sit down and tinker with the device for a good while to get it set up exactly how you want it to work, but this phone’s strong point is its cameras. Photography enthusiasts will enjoy the solid set of cameras, and you can especially see Zeiss’ influence within the camera; vivo is known to have some of the more pleasing color science and processing for phone images.
