Vivo Y55L Review – Stylish & All Rounder In Affordable Segment

Vivo is known for stylish phones with good designs and decent features. We have been very much impressed with its Vivo3 series of phones which were launched in the month of April. We have the opportunity to use Vivo Y55L for few days which was laucnhed in India on 5th October. This phone has been given the same design language which we observed on mid-segmented Vivo 3 and Vivo 3 Max.

Design

Vivo Y55L is smartly crafted phone and very good quality of metal is used  with curved edges to give it premiumu look. Vivo has given smooth finishing on the back to pervent any chance of slippage from your hand which has been the bane of even few high-end metalled smartphones. To add zing to the overall look, this phone has golden colored metal ring round the sides. The rear camera with LED flash is mounted at the top corner at the left on the back and beneath it their is straight line on the top and at the bottom to give it symmetrical look. Fortunately, the rear camera is not proturding and hence no chance of getting its lens any scratch. Vivo branding is engarved with golden color and their are no chances of getting it faded easily.

This phone has volume rocker and power button on the right hand side which have good tactile response whereas Dual SIM Tray slot has been given on the left side of the phone. This phone comes with dedicated MicroSd card slot on the top of the phone. This is one of the plus point of this phone as it has two separte slots for SIMs and one for extension of internal storage.

The front of this phone is milky white and navigation keys are given below the display which are not illuminated. On the bottom of the phone their is microphone, micro USB charging port and speaker grille. On the top of the disply, Front facing camera, speaker grill and proximity sensor have been given. Overall, the design of this phone is quite attractive and this will be one of reasons to consider it for buying.

Display

We have always been impressed with display of Vivo and Y55L is no exception. This phone has HD display of 5.2 inch having resolution of 1280×720 pixels, which in my opinion is an ideal size to carry and operate. The screen of this phone reproduces sharp, and vibrant colors and has good viewing angles. Surprisingly, the view in the direct sunlight is not bad. To take care of eye strain because the users are glued to their smartphones most of the time, this phone has been provided with eye protection mode that ensures comfortable screen brightness by reducing blue light. This is an added advantage of this phone.

Performance

This phone comes with decent hardware for an affordable segment. This phone is powered by Snapdragon 430 octa-core processor clocked at 1.4GHz combined with 2GB RAM and 16GB of internal memory. Since this phone has separate slot for extension of internal storage, you can use two SIMs at a time and also extend the internal memory upto 128GB which in my opinion is more than enough even for high-end users. This phone performs very well as far as multitasking and switching between the apps is concerned. I have tested this phone thoroughly for its processor vis-a-vis its working when streaming videos and playing games. You can play heavy games also on this phone without any stutter or lag. I have played various media content on this phone continuously for upto one hour which went very smoothly and can applaud this phone on this aspect. I have also not faced heating issue in this phone for average usage.

This phone offers connectivity options of 4G LTE and is VoLTE ready. I have used this phone with Airtel 4G and the call quality on this phone is very good; it receives 4G signal even in basement. Vivo is also known for good audio support and this phone follows the precedent set by it. The audio quality is quite good on this phone and when you hear the music with earphones which are in the box, the sound does not get distorted even in high volume. This phone also offers other standard connectivity options of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and USB OTG etc.

This phone runs on Android 6.0 Marshmallow-based Funtouch OS 2.6 which has useful split-screen feature. Although, I am not exponent of customsied OS but fortunately their are no bloatwares on Vivo’s OS and it is very clean and easy to operate.

Battery

Charging of the phone is becoming headache for users of smartphones nowadays because of heavy usage by almost everybody. This phone gets its juice from 2650mAh battery which on paper may look a little bit low compared to 3000mAh or above being offered nowadays yet it does not disappoint. The battery has been optimised very nicely and in our test, it has worked for almost full day with usage of all social channels, one gmail account, constant checking of news and cricket scores, video playing of approxiamtely one hour and gaming of 30 minutes.

Camera

The photographic aspect of a smartphone has become a significant feature of today as all genres of people use the camera extensively. Vivo understands this trend very well and has equipped the Y55L with 8MP rear camera with LED flash. It also houses 5MP front camera for selifes. The rear camera comes with HDR, Panorama, professional modes. For videos, it also has fast and slow motion modes. The camera of this phone works very well and the images clicked by me turn out to be bright with lot of depth and contrast. The front camera also snaps good selfies and their is screen selfie flash option on it for using it for capturing bright selfies even in low lights. I am reproducing below few images clicked with this phone in different lighting conditions:

To sum up, this phone has pleasing and attractive design, good performance, cameras and battery are decent. It comes with triple slots for two SIMs and one microSd card. On  the downside, this phone does not incorporate fingerprint scanner which agains has become a standard feature nowadays on almost all the phones. This phone is priced Rs. 11,980 which in our opinion is little bit on higher side. The Y55L will face stiff competition from recently launched phones such as Coolpad Note 5 and Redmi 3S+. The Y55L will still attract you if you are interested in good desinged device with decent performance.