Vivo V23 Review — Cool Selfie Cameras and Design Almost Like an iPhone

Vivo V23 got an inter­est­ing back pan­el design. Pho­to: www.gsmarena.com

Vivo V23 5G is a new phone in the mid­dle price seg­ment (from 40,990 rubles at the time of writ­ing). The com­pa­ny has focused on small size, col­or-chang­ing lid design, and high-qual­i­ty front cam­eras.

In today’s review, we find out what else is good about the new Vivo phone, and what com­pro­mis­es the man­u­fac­tur­er had to make in order to keep the price rel­a­tive­ly low.

Unboxing

The Vivo V23 comes in a stur­dy card­board box fin­ished in dark blue with a glit­tery fin­ish on top. The name of the mod­el is indi­cat­ed in large let­ters on the front.

Inside you will find a brand­ed FlashCharge pow­er sup­ply (44 W), a USB Type-A-Type­‑C cable, a trans­par­ent case and wired head­phones. Since the V23 does not have an audio jack, a Type‑C to 3.5mm adapter is includ­ed.

Design

The side faces look nice, but quick­ly col­lect stains and dirt. Pho­to: www.gsmarena.com

Full face and side Vivo V23 5G resem­bles the iPhone 13 Pro — a flat screen and pol­ished side edges.

The front pan­el is cov­ered with pro­tec­tive glass Schott Xen­sa­tion Up. Unlike the fair­ly sym­met­ri­cal bezels of Apple’s dis­play, the Vivo’s top and bot­tom bezels are notice­ably thick­er on the left and right.

At the top of the screen there is a cutout for two self­ie cam­eras, light and prox­im­i­ty sen­sors and two LEDs, above it is a con­ver­sa­tion­al speak­er.

An opti­cal fin­ger­print scan­ner is installed under the dis­play. It works quick­ly and accu­rate­ly (if you have dry hands). The loca­tion of the sen­sor is not very con­ve­nient — too low to the edge of the phone, you have to inter­cept the device to touch the scan­ner.

The sec­ond option for unlock­ing a smart­phone is by face. It is even faster, but less reli­able in terms of secu­ri­ty, since it sim­ply uses a self­ie cam­era and a 2D image for recog­ni­tion. For com­par­i­son, Apple smart­phones have more advanced tech­nol­o­gy — it cre­ates a 3D image of the user’s face using the front and infrared cam­eras, as well as var­i­ous sen­sors (dot pro­jec­tor and back­light sys­tem).

The side faces are made of alu­minum and paint­ed in the col­or of the case. They col­lect fin­ger­prints and oth­er stains. On the right is the pow­er / lock but­ton and the vol­ume rock­er. The left side is emp­ty. Above is an addi­tion­al micro­phone, below is a card slot, main micro­phone, USB Type‑C con­nec­tor and main speak­er.

The back side of Vivo V23 5G is made of frost­ed glass. The phone is avail­able in two col­ors — “solar gold” and “star dust black”. The first option has a pho­tochromic coat­ing — the cov­er changes col­or from light green to gold depend­ing on the ambi­ent light and the angle of view. The sec­ond option is black with a char­ac­ter­is­tic coat­ing, the phone in this col­or is thin­ner and lighter, although the mod­els dif­fer only in the pres­ence of a pho­tochromic coat­ing. Smart­phone dimen­sions — 157.2 x 72.4 x 7.39 or 7.55 mm, weight — 179 or 181 g.

Behind in the upper left cor­ner is an island with cam­eras — 3 sen­sors are installed ver­ti­cal­ly, to the right of them is a dou­ble LED flash. The mod­ule is met­al, the col­or does not change.

Stereo speak­ers, head­phone jack, SD card slot, no mois­ture pro­tec­tion.

Display

The Vivo V23 5G has a high-qual­i­ty dis­play, but many users may not like the notch. Pho­to: www.gsmarena.com

The Vivo V23 5G phone received a 6.44-inch AMOLED pan­el with a res­o­lu­tion of Full­HD + (1080 x 2400 pix­els) and an aspect ratio of 20:9.

The max­i­mum bright­ness of the V23 screen in man­u­al mode is 435 nits, in auto­mat­ic mode it is 629 nits. The con­tents of the dis­play can be seen out­doors, but not in direct sun­light.

In the set­tings there are 3 col­or modes — stan­dard, vivid and pro­fes­sion­al. The first two are focused on the DPI-P3 col­or space, the third — on sRGB. In all modes, col­or accu­ra­cy is not ide­al — cool col­ors with a slight bluish tint pre­vail. It is pos­si­ble to adjust the col­or tem­per­a­ture.

The dis­play sup­ports HDR (HDR10, HDR10+ and HLG). This means that you can watch videos in high def­i­n­i­tion on all stream­ing ser­vices.

In the set­tings, you can set one of three screen refresh rate modes — 60, 90 Hz and Smart Switch­ing. The lat­ter involves auto­mat­i­cal­ly chang­ing the screen refresh rate depend­ing on the con­tent. For exam­ple, scrolling the user inter­face and menus runs at 90 Hz, after a few sec­onds of inac­tiv­i­ty, it drops to 60 Hz. This is good for bat­tery sav­ing pur­pos­es. How­ev­er, in oth­er cas­es, this mode does not work — Chrome and the vivo brows­er are lim­it­ed to 60 Hz by default, as are most appli­ca­tions. Most games in auto­mat­ic mode also do not run at 90 Hz (the excep­tion is the shoot­er Dead Trig­ger 2). We hope that Vivo will final­ize the “Smart Switch”.

Var­i­ous dis­play set­tings are avail­able, includ­ing the choice of ani­ma­tion for actions (charg­ing, USB con­nec­tion, etc.), you can enable the Always-On Dis­play mode, eye pro­tec­tion, change the font style and size.

In gen­er­al, the screen is clear with rich col­ors.

Battery

Smart­phone Vivo V23 has a bat­tery capac­i­ty of 4200 mAh, which is enough for:

• 26 hours 38 min­utes of calls;
• 16 hours 6 min­utes of web surf­ing (at a screen refresh rate of 90 Hz);
• 18 hours 5 min­utes of video play­back (60 Hz).

Using a pro­pri­etary adapter, the phone charges from 0 to 60% in 30 min­utes. It takes 63 min­utes to ful­ly charge the bat­tery. There is no wire­less charg­ing.

Performance

The pow­er of Vivo V23 5G is enough even to run “heavy” games. Pho­to: www.gsmarena.com

The Vivo V23 phone is equipped with the lat­est Dimen­si­ty 920 chipset from Medi­aTek. It ranks 34th in the mobile proces­sor per­for­mance rank­ing for smart­phones. Its pow­er is enough to run demand­ing games (like Call of Duty Mobile) even at high graph­ics set­tings.

Vivo V23 is avail­able in two vari­ants — 8 GB of RAM and 128 GB of inter­nal mem­o­ry and 12 + 256 GB. Unlike vivo V23e, the stan­dard mem­o­ry card mod­el does not sup­port.

Even dur­ing max­i­mum loads, the phone does not over­heat. Most of the heat is col­lect­ed by the met­al frame, it becomes notice­ably warm, but does not cause dis­com­fort.

After an hour of test­ing the proces­sor, it man­aged to main­tain most of the per­for­mance (82%) with­out any sud­den freezes or drops in clock speed.

Over­all, the Vivo V23 5G is a sol­id all-around per­former.

Camera

The Vivo V23 5G smart­phone is equipped with two front cam­eras — 50 and 8 megapix­els. LEDs are installed on the sides of the sen­sors to illu­mi­nate the face in low light.

The main self­ie cam­era has aut­o­fo­cus (the aut­o­fo­cus func­tion for the eyes is sup­port­ed). The sec­ond is an ultra wide-angle lens with a 105° field of view with­out aut­o­fo­cus. The front cam­era is capa­ble of record­ing 4K video at 30fps and has mul­ti­ple lev­els of Elec­tron­ic Image Sta­bi­liza­tion (EIS). It is suit­able for blog­ging.

There are 3 cam­eras on the back, sim­i­lar to vivo V23e — 64 MP (PDAF aut­o­fo­cus), 8 MP (with a view­ing angle of 120˚) and 2 MP (macro). By default, pho­tos tak­en with the main cam­era are saved at 16 MP. There is a dual LED flash.

The cam­era appli­ca­tion is stan­dard — all the main shoot­ing modes are arranged in the form of a carousel, switch­ing between them is car­ried out with a swipe. The “Advanced” tab lists the rest of the modes, where you can also con­fig­ure the modes avail­able in the viewfind­er.

There’s a Pro mode for adjust­ing aut­o­fo­cus, white bal­ance, shut­ter speed, ISO, and expo­sure. Shoot­ing in RAW is pos­si­ble.

For the two-col­or self­ie lights, there is a sep­a­rate menu for adjust­ing the col­or of the LEDs using a three-stage slid­er (neu­tral, warm, cold).

Pho­tos tak­en in day­light with the main cam­era look good, with pleas­ing col­ors and wide dynam­ic range. There are enough details. How­ev­er, most homo­ge­neous areas (sky, grass) are too soft and noisy. Aggres­sive pro­cess­ing empha­sizes straight lines and edges in images, which some­times caus­es wavi­ness.

Sam­ple pho­to tak­en with Vivo V23 main cam­era. Pho­to: www.gsmarena.com

Shoot­ing in 64 MP mode elim­i­nates some prob­lems — it adds details to homo­ge­neous areas, makes the edges of the pic­ture more nat­ur­al. But the dynam­ic range is nar­row­er (most like­ly due to the lack of HDR) and each image is about 20MB.

Por­trait mode is avail­able, you can shoot not only peo­ple, but also ani­mals, inan­i­mate objects. Object sep­a­ra­tion is good but not per­fect, back­ground blur­ring is nat­ur­al.

An exam­ple of a por­trait tak­en with the Vivo V23 main cam­era. Pho­to: www.gsmarena.com

There is no ded­i­cat­ed tele­pho­to lens, but you can take pic­tures with 2x dig­i­tal zoom. They have the same dis­ad­van­tages as ordi­nary pho­tographs. Dig­i­tal zoom up to 10x is tech­ni­cal­ly avail­able, but image qual­i­ty is below aver­age.

The main self­ie cam­era saves pic­tures with a res­o­lu­tion of 12.5 megapix­els. They look great — excel­lent detail, wide dynam­ic range, nat­ur­al col­ors.

By default, the “Auto HD por­trait” mode is enabled, but the dif­fer­ence with the nor­mal mode is almost not notice­able.

Sam­ple self­ie tak­en in default mode. Pho­to: www.gsmarena.com

The main cam­era takes crisp 16-megapix­el low-light shots (although the pro­cess­ing is still aggres­sive).

Night mode works dif­fer­ent­ly. The final result depends on the spe­cif­ic scene — it can look clean­er and more nat­ur­al, or have an arti­fi­cial look.

An exam­ple of a pho­to tak­en in night mode with the Vivo V23 main cam­era. Pho­to: www.gsmarena.com

The 50-megapix­el front cam­era per­forms well in low light con­di­tions — there is enough detail, and there is prac­ti­cal­ly no noise, the dynam­ic range is wide. Dual-col­or LEDs illu­mi­nate the sub­ject well and improve over­all image qual­i­ty with more even and sta­ble light. Night mode is also avail­able.

Sam­ple self­ie tak­en in nor­mal mode. Pho­to: www.gsmarena.com

Results

Vivo V23 is suit­able for any task, its main draw­back is the over­priced price at the start. Pho­to: www.gsmarena.com

Vivo V23 is a ver­sa­tile mid-range smart­phone, suit­able even for vlog­gers.

Pros:

• inter­est­ing pho­tochromic design in gold ver­sion;
• high-qual­i­ty screen with sup­port for HDR10 +;
• good auton­o­my and fast charg­ing;
• uni­ver­sal per­for­mance with­out over­heat­ing;
• excel­lent front cam­eras.

Minuses:

• mois­ture pro­tec­tion, sup­port for mem­o­ry cards, 3.5 mm audio jack, no stereo speak­ers;
• in Smart Switch mode, the dis­play refresh rate does not change in most appli­ca­tions;
• 16-megapix­el pho­tos from the main cam­era are over-processed;
• no opti­cal image sta­bi­liza­tion;
• over­charge.