THU, MAY 2
NimishAndAkriti
With great design and cameras generally come stiff price tags. Vivo has been trying to change that, especially with its V series, We had talked about how the brand had managed to pack in some very serious camera muscle into its V30 Pro at around Rs 40,000 a few weeks ago, and now we are seeing the most affordable device in the V30 series - the V30e which starts at Rs 27,999 and has some pretty impressive looks and cameras for that price.
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Let's start with the appearance - the Vivo V30e gives off very strong flagship, rather than premium mid-segment (that's what they call the Rs 25,000 - Rs 35,000 zone these days) vibes. We have what they call the Velvet Red shade and the back is a blend of slightly sparkly maroon glass with a matte finish with a vertical band of slightly glossy darker maroon glass. On the matte side you have a very prominent circular camera unit with gold accents. Basically, you have three colours on the back, with mostly subtle and some flashy shine,
The Vivo V30e is just 7.65 mm thin and has a very curve-y feel to it, with the front sporting a curved display, the back curbing towards the sides, which themselves are slightly convex, rather than the straight ones that the iPhone has made popular. The entire phone weighs 190 grams and has very good and premium feels to it. You could tell someone this a phone that is priced twice as much as it really is, and no one would doubt you. Design-wise, we actually think it is more than impressive than even the more subtly elegant Vivo V30 Pro.
As in other V series devices, the cameras are the stars of the show. The back as two cameras - a 50 megapixel main camera with OIS and an 8 megapixel ultrawide. The main camera is a Sony IMX 882 sensor and Vivo says that it is capable of brilliant portrait photography and can also act as " a 50mm prime-focal length portrait lens which deploys a lossless-2x zoom-in." And as in the Vivo V30 Pro, the flash is no ordinary one, but is a Studio Quality Smart Aura Light, which can change brightness and color temperature based on surroundings. You generally do not get features like these on a Rs 27,999 phone.
There is also a 50 megapixel camera with autofocus in the tiny notch one the display. As in the case of the V30 Pro, it comes with autofocus and support for 4K video - again features you do not expect at this price You also get a 6.78 inch inch full HD+ AMOLED curved display with 120 Hz refresh rate, which looks rather impressive, and Android 14 with the oddly named Vivo FunTouch OS on top of it. It might seem a little cluttered but has a truckload of image editing and sharing options.
We actually were surprised when we were told that this slim phone had a 5500 mAh battery as batteries of that size generally make phones bulky. Again, pretty impressive at that price, we have to say.
It is not all roses, though. You can see where Vivo has cut corners to get those features it at an affordable price. The phone runs on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 chip, which is really a bit of an oldie and out of place in a segment where most phones have the more powerful Snapdragon 7. And while that 5500 mAh battery is big, it charges at 44W, which is slow in this zone (the OnePlus Nord CE4 charges at 100W and the Redmi Note 13 Pro+ at 120W, just to give you an idea). We also think the phone lacks stereo speakers, which are a staple in this segment!
You can get phones with way more powerful processors and certainly comparable design at around the same price, but not with this sort of camera performance (the Samsung Galaxy M55 too has a 50 megapixel front camera but its performance is forgettable so far - perhaps a software update will fix matters) . Which is why we feel that the success of the Vivo V30e is going to boil down to how those cameras on it perform, especially in conjunction with that slightly older chip. The absence of processing power can make image and video processing a little laggy (which did happen on the V30 pro). Vivo deserves credit for getting out of the pure numbers game that prevails in the mid-segment and trying to focus on cameras and design. Let's see if the move pays off!