Vivo has been steadily winning over consumers and has come a long way since exclusively targeting the budget segment. Its latest flagship, the Vivo X90 Pro, really won us over and I’ve been spending time with the Vivo V29 Pro, which promises to be a great mid-ranger.
Design
The Vivo V29 Pro is quite slim at 16.418 cm × 7.437 cm × 0.746 cm. Made of glass, the body did feel slippery to begin with, but does fit well in my hand. The camera module raises the phone ever so slightly when put on a table. The smartphone has a 6.78-inch edge-to-edge Amoled display which is bright and vivid. The colours are rendered really well on the display while I was checking out The Marvels’ HD trailer on YouTube and watching Kaala Paani on Netflix. Although it has an edge-to-edge display, the edge rejection is quite good. The Himalayan Blue colour variant I used looks youthful and classy. And despite a glossy back panel, it doesn’t pick up fingerprint smudges by the dozen.
Camera
The Vivo V29 Pro features a main camera setup that includes a 50 MP OIS lens, 12 MP portrait and an 8 MP wide-angle camera. The images clicked on the rear camera were quite sharp, retained a lot of details and offered vivid contrast and colour saturation. The USP of the smartphone is the ‘Aura Light’ at the back, which helps with night portraits and colour temperature. This does help give some contrast to rear camera portraits that are shot at night. Because, the night shots aren’t too great, as the camera tends to over-process these images. As a result, it smoothens out details in places where they could have been retained. The 50 MP front with autofocus camera was good for clicking selfies, but the beauty mode tended to over-sharpen the details along my face making the image break while zooming in.
Performance
The Dimensity 8200 is quite a powerful processor on the Vivo V29 Pro and when paired with 12 GB RAM and 256 GB storage makes it quite a powerhouse configuration. On the AnTuTu benchmarking test, the V29 Pro scored 8,99, 077 outperforming the iQOO Neo7 but not able to match up to the Samsung S22 5G. On Call of Duty Mobile, the V29 Pro could breeze through gameplay churning a consistent 60 FPS at max settings without any stutter. Despite having a glass body, the rear didn’t get too hot while gaming or charging the device.
Battery
The Vivo V29 Pro features a 4,600 mAh battery which was able to last through a 7-hour plus workday that included 2-3 hours of calls, three hours of gaming and another couple of hours of co-ordination on Microsoft Teams. Charging with the supplied 80W charger helped get the phone from 0 to 50 per cent charge in under 20 minutes, and full charge in under an hour.
Verdict
The Vivo V29 Pro serves well as a camera and feature-rich device, but also has strong competitors in the OnePlus 11R and the Samsung A54 in the same price segment. The V29 Pro with its camera and photography-centric features is likely to be the favourite of most smartphone users looking for a functional phone with a great camera to go along with it.