vivo has been keeping busy in the software department recently. Its new OriginOS is formerly a thing but still exclusive to just the Chinese request. Encyclopedically, the FuntouchOS skin was fairly lately banged-up to interpretation 12, as we saw of the vivo X70 family of bias. Those phones, still, still launched with Android 11 under the hood, whereas the vivo V23 Pro and V23 get the rearmost Funtouch OS 12 with Android 12 underneath.
You can find further than a many traces of the new Android core scattered about then and there, like Google’s new sequestration- concentrated green announcement fleck that indicates when the camera or microphone are being used or the increased” brio reverse” robustness on utmost UI factors. Overall, still, the UI and UX are distinctly custom, which comes courtesy of Funtouch OS 12. The stock-ish-looking UI rudiments that were kind of the norm in FunTouch OS 11 have been substituted with a largely customized and customizable UI. Some of the changes are enough nifty, too, including the system menus being acclimatized towards a single-handed use. A portion of the menus’content moves to the lower half of the screen when you swipe down, however not all, which is odd. vivo has revamped its dereliction selection of contraptions to make them more intuitive and easier to use as well.
The recent apps menu, for illustration, has one of those useful personal features. You can choose between the standard carousel conformation and a vertical penstocks layout- kind of like MIUI, only scrollable horizontally.
The app hole, although stock-ish looking, has an expandable recommended apps order on the top (most generally used bones), whereas using the perpendicular scroller on the right would punctuate the apps beginning with the named letter.
The announcement shade has been revamped too, in terms of aesthetics substantially-the quick toggles are now square-shaped, and the accentuation color around the menus ( including the quick toggles icons) is blue, and there is no way to change moreover. Applying various subjects would just change the symbol pack and backdrop.
The rest of the UI gets plenitude of love too. In the Dynamic goodssub-menu, vivo has grouped quite a many customizable aspects of the home screen, cinch screen, vitality goods, etc. There are indeed colorful charging and facial recognition robustness.
The Ambient light effect gets further grainy control with the option to enable it only during a limited time period, or you can choose which apps to spark it.
The always-on display settings are in a differentsub-menu, still, but the phone still gives you plenitude of options to tinker with-a wide selection of robustness, timepiece styles, colors, backgrounds, the lot.
One small but potentially important grouch we had with the vivo X70 Pro seems to have been addressed on the V23 Pro. There used to be no way to summon the point anthology icon on a locked screen unless the stir detector detects movement. Now, waking the display simply brings up the point anthology as well. Still, we’re still not particularly happy that the double-valve-to-wake function is buried in the Smart stir menu.
The Sound menu holds a many affable surprises. Just like Samsung, vivo is paying attention to people with hail problems, and you can calibrate the sound to be heard by senior people or those with disabled hail. Also, announcements and calls get separate volume sliders. The vibration intensity can be acclimated for calls and announcements singly. No system-wide eq is available for the loudspeaker, however, which could be both a negative and a positive depending on how you look at it.
The preliminarily mentioned Smart stir menu holds a sprinkle of familiar screen-on and screen-off gestures along with some new additions. One of those requires you to gesture in front of the screen during an incoming call to answer hands-free-useful if you are cooking, for illustration.
Holding the volume down key can be used to launch an app or do a certain task, although the list of the ultimate is limited to launching the camera app, turning on/ off the arsonist or starting recording audio. The so-called Quick action point does not work when playing music for egregious reasons. Why is not there a double-press option for Quick action, however?
. Having all of these customizable gestures, conduct and fresh features around is surely nifty, but we can not help but feel that vivo could have organized them a bit better. As effects presently stand, it’s hard to find certain options, indeed when you know for a fact that they live and accordingly, discovering new effects is indeed harder.
Incipiently, there is a little commodity for the gamers. A devoted Ultra Game Mode is available, and it has it all. Utmost of the features are about mollifying disturbance during gameplay or letting certain apps display heads-up announcements. One of the most interesting features that have been around on vivo phones for a while is the capability to turn off the screen and keep the game running in the background. Especially useful for turn-grounded games or those taking some kind of” husbandry” and” grinding”. Eagle eye advancements and 4D vibration are also relatively intriguing in their own right.
By and large, Funtouch OS 12 is an incredible positive development with regards to ease and smart activity. vivo indeed gives you the option the speed up transitions further, which is just another option to add to the myriad of customization available here. However, also you’ll surely enjoy the experience If you’re into that. Still, those that want to use Android as Google intended might not be okay with the various iconography and the largely tailored system menus and robustness.
Synthetic benchmarks
vivo went with MediaTek Dimensity chips for both the V23 and V23 Pro. The former, which we’re presently looking at, gets the tried-and-true Dimensity 1200, whereas the vanilla V23 is equipped with the newer but slightly lower-end Dimensity 920.
Still, the Dimensity 1200 is still one of the stylish MediaTek has to offer, If we do not count the new Dimensity 9000. It’s an effective 6nm chip, rocking an Octa- core (1×3.0 GHz Cortex-A78 & 3×2.6 GHz Cortex-A78 & 4×2.0 GHz Cortex-A55) CPU setup and a Mali-G77 MC9 GPU. It’s also packed with current connectivity, including Dual-Mode (SA and NSA) 5G with binary 5G standby support (Sub-6 only, no mmWave) and VoNR. For original connectivity, the V23 Pro gets Binary-Band Wi-Fi ac, Bluetooth5.2 with LE and aptX HD support and GPS withA-GPS, GLONASS, BDS, GALILEO, QZSS, NavIC support. Quite the loadout. Still, there are some notable deletions, like FM radio, NFC and a slow USB2.0 data connection.
You can get the vivo V23 Pro in one of two memory configurations-128 GB 8 GB RAM or 256 GB 12 GB RAM. We’re conducting this review on the top-league model. Vivo also has its Extended RAM2.0 point loaded on both the V23 Pro and V23 for an redundant 4 GB of”virtual memory”. Version2.0 of vivo’s perpetration of this particular Android point promises bettered effectiveness while using ROM storehouse as RAM.
Remonstrating effects off with some pure CPU performance and GeekBench, we can see that the V23 Pro and its Dimensity 1200 easily hold their own, particularly against other medial and upper-midrange chipsets inside a similar unpleasant value range.
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 870 manages to outpace the Dimensity 1200 constantly in both single andmulti-threaded workloads, though not by a lot. All the while,CPU-wise, the Dimensity 1200 is about similar to Qualcomm’s newer 7-series chips, like the Snapdragon 780 and the 778G.
AnTuTu with its further emulsion marks paints a analogous picture. In fact, we’re happy to see that vivo is managing impressively-high scores for a Dimensity 1200 chip on average.
GFX Manhattan ES3.0 (offscreen 1080p) and GFX Manhattan ES3.0 (onscreen)
GPU performance is a bit further of a mixed bag. The V23 Pro and its Mali-G77 MC9 still hold their own veritably well, but in some on- screen tests in particular, the fps figures do tend to be a bit lower than form other Dimensity 1200 Mobile phones with analogous FullHD native resolution.
Also again, looking a bit closer at the result, it seems that this geste is limited to the aged OpenGL ES3.0 grounded test run. Ramping up the graphical intensity and using OpenGL ES3.1 seems to be a lot more favorable towards the vivo V23 Pro.
Vulkan- grounded graphic tests feel to perform as anticipated to and also paint the vivo V23 is a enough great light overall.
Same goes for 3DMark, where the V23 Pro managed to successfully maximum out the Slingshot Extreme runs in both OpenGL and Vulkan mode and scored veritably creditably on the Wild Life test. So much so, in fact, that it sounded to break away from the rest of the Dimensity 1200 pack formerly again.
Our stylish conjecture is that Android 12 is furnishing a boost to standard figures then and there on the V23. Indeed if that performance delta is doubtful to transfer over, at least not to the same extent, on to real-world gaming performance, it’s still a testament to the significance of running the rearmost Android Zilches.
Just to be thorough, we did put the V23 Pro through a thermal throttling test, since we were curious to find out if any of that emotional burst standard performance maybe comes at the expenditure of long- term sustained figures. We formerly know that body temperature on the V23 isn’t really an issue. It gets noticeably warm after a long gaming session, but is still impeccably comfortable to hold. This, in itself, is a significant accomplishment, given the V23 Pro’s thin profile.
After a solid hour of CPU torture, the vivo V23 Pro unexpectedly loses a sizable knob of its raw performance to heat. Thermal-throttling in a unrestricted thermal system is ineluctable. The way said throttling is handled is much more important, however, and we were happy to see that the V23 Pro noway endured unforeseen jarring drops in performance but rather managed to gradationally telephone back. That is the kind of geste you want to see, and we recommend vivo for it.
Overall, the vivo V23 gets top marks in the performance order. Not only does it have able internals, but it also manages to manage with heat unexpectedly well. On top of that, Funtouch OS 12 provides a veritably smooth and largely customizable and point-rich experience.Its new Android 12 base is reasonable assisting a piece in this with seeing also, and we like its quality. Sans for a many grouches we’ve with vivo’s automatic refresh rate switching sense, we’ve no complaints regarding performance on the V23 Pro. It’s excellent each around, indeed exceeding prospects at times.
Part-1, Part 2, Part 3, Part-5, Part-6