Handsome state employee: smartphone Vivo Y91i - advantages and disadvantages

Despite the fact that most of the Vivo models are released in the Indian or Chinese markets, the phone called Vivo Y91i became the hero of the release in Russia on January 29, 2019. This smartphone belongs to the superbudget class, so you can't count on any innovative solutions.

Nevertheless, in its class, it has every chance to take its rightful place. Let's take a closer look at the advantages and disadvantages of the Vivo Y91i.

About company

The Vivo campaign is one of the world's largest smartphone companies. Founded in 2009 in China, it quickly carved out a niche in the local market and entered the Top 3 Chinese mobile phone companies.

Since 2014, Vivo has opened branches in India and some countries in Southeast Asia. Although it is not so unknown in Europe and Russia, in the eastern countries Vivo products are valued for their quality and cheapness, therefore, even without entering the European market, it feels great due to the huge client base of China and India.

Design

The design of the new state employee meets the majority of newfangled trends. Most of the front panel is occupied by a huge bezel-less display with thin stripes on the sides and a triangular notch at the top that resembles a drop. For which it is often called "teardrop".

Despite the love of phone makers to put glass on the back of the phone, there is a regular plastic cover instead.

Directly on it is a fingerprint scanner, made in the form of a square with rounded edges, and a dual sensor of the main camera with an LED for backlighting.

The body frame of this device is also made of plastic, which, in general, is a common occurrence for budget smartphones.

On the right side of the device there is a volume rocker and a power button. On the right is a slot for a microSD card and two SIM cards, which can be considered a pleasant surprise from the company.

The speaker, 3.5 mm headphone jack and microUSB charging connector are traditionally located at the bottom, and the earpiece grill is made in the form of a small strip above the front camera.

The color range of the cases produced is rather poor, but interesting. There are only two colors:

• Classic / Galactic Black;
• Galactic red.

If the red looks quite standard, then the black case with a picture of the starry sky looks very interesting. There is also a red version in the same galactic design.

Display

The screen in the smartphone is made using Halo Full View technology. In fact, this is a normal display with an IPS matrix and a resolution of 1570x720 pixels. For a screen of this size, this is not so hot what resolution, because of what it loses in clarity, as evidenced by the rather low density of pixels per inch, which is only 270 ppi.

As befits a frameless phone, its aspect ratio is 19: 9.

The display size is 6.22 inches, which is quite impressive even by modern standards, when almost all phones are at least 6 inches.The screen occupies 88.6% of the surface of the front panel of the smartphone and is protected by a protective glass Panda King Glass, the manufacturer of which claims that it is comparable in reliability to the popular tempered glass Corning Gorilla Glass.

The image looks rather saturated, albeit dull. He clearly lacks brightness. But in general, the screen is very, very good for this price. Perhaps you will not find the best in this price range.

Main technical characteristics

Before we go any further, let's take a look at a table that will briefly describe the characteristics of a smartphone.

CPU

To keep all the components of the new smartphone running, Vivo used an inexpensive chip from MediaTek. It consists of eight Cortex A53 cores. These are the cores of the old generation, which are usually used in new processors as energy efficient ones. The task scheduler usually transfers processes that do not require high performance to them.

It should be noted, however, that they do their job perfectly and the processor really drains the battery much more slowly.

Good power saving is also facilitated by the PowerVR GE8320 graphics chip, the advantage of which is just its energy efficiency, because of which you have to sacrifice the maximum available screen resolution. It is only 720x1600 pixels, which is quite enough for this smartphone.

In addition, this chip is manufactured using a new 12 nm tech. a process that is also more energy efficient than its older 16nm version.

Speaking directly about performance, it is worth noting that it is not as bad as it might seem. According to the results of the synthetic GeekBench test, it showed 823 performance units per core and 3645 with all eight active cores. These are the results of smartphones from the middle price category, albeit at a rather low bar in this very category.

For a state employee this is more than an impressive result.

However, tests alone do not give a complete picture of the phone and it is better to test its performance in games.

As it turned out, games like Asphalt Extreme run quite successfully and work without lags. Problems start when trying to play PUBG. Although at low or even partially medium settings, the phone does not experience any serious problems, if you raise them a little higher, lags and freezes begin.

Memory

The new smartphone claims 32 GB of internal memory and only 2 GB of RAM, which is surprisingly small for 2019.

Due to such a small amount of RAM, the readings of synthetic tests of the processor may be lower, since the figures given were obtained when testing on a phone with 3 GB of RAM.

Camera

Another positive side of the smartphone that manufacturers are so proud of is the rear camera with two sensors. The main sensor has a resolution of 13 MP with phase detection autofocus and f 2/2 aperture notch.

The second sensor has 2MP and f 2/4 aperture and is apparently intended to create a blur effect known as bokeh.

Front-camera

The front sensor located in the drop at the top of the phone has a resolution of 8 megapixels. and aperture f 1/8, which seems to be good, but the lack of autofocus spoils the matter.It has only a fixed focus, which tries to expose maximum sharpness over the entire area of ​​the image without fixing on a specific subject.

AI

Nevertheless, artificial intelligence, built into the camera control software, and which manufacturers are so persistently writing about when advertising their phone, can fix the situation.

In the front camera, the role of autofocus can be performed by Artificial Intelligence, determining with the help of special sensors various areas of the face, skin color, eye shape, gender, age and lighting for further automatic adjustment in beauty mode.

The rear camera also uses AI. It is needed primarily to create a bokeh effect when shooting, well, it is also used to improve the quality of photos "on the fly".

Operating system and firmware

By default, the phone is installed with Android 8.1 Oreo system. It is not known whether it will receive updates and whether it will be possible to update the device to 9.0 in principle, but version 8.1 also proved to be quite good at the time, making several interesting cosmetic changes and adding some useful properties such as the picture-in-picture function.

You can read more about this system in our smartphone review ZTE Blade A530.

The Funtouch OS 4.5 shell is responsible for the visual component. And this is where the ninth version of android, more sharpened for gesture control, would just come into place. The shell was created for the most part for frameless smartphones without buttons, and most of the actions are carried out precisely with special gestures.

This shell has a beautiful visual design with soft, pleasant icon shapes, a convenient way to sort and search photos, an intuitive interface and a game mode in which all pop-up messages are displayed on top of the gameplay.

And yet there are complaints about her. Mainly due to the gesture curve, as a result of which, during the swipe, applications that you swipe over can launch, as well as curtains that open from the bottom on some phones, so when buying it is advisable to make sure how the shell works before buying a phone.

Battery

That's what you definitely can't find fault with the phone for, it's the battery. Not only is the battery itself of an impressive volume, more than 4000 mAh, but also almost all smartphone systems are sharpened for low power consumption.

And here again, Android 9 would come in handy with its smart battery system. It would fit perfectly into the existing energy-saving functionality.

According to rough estimates, using a browser, social networks and without launching heavy applications, the battery can easily last for 2 days, or even more. Playing games can count on a full day of work.

Advantages and disadvantages of a smartphone

• Beautiful design with eye-pleasing body colors. Galactic colors do look stylish, especially black;
• Bezel-less display with teardrop notch. And although the display is inferior in quality to other models with a similar type of screen, it is very good for its segment. It is doubtful that somewhere you can buy the same cheap phone with a similar screen;
• Powerful and economical processor. In addition to low power consumption, the Helio P22 can also offer enough power for most popular games, albeit not at the highest settings.
• A very durable battery that can provide battery life for a smartphone for more than 2 days.
• Price. A phone on the Russian market can be found for 10,000 rubles, and on average around the world its price is on average $ 150.

• Front camera without autofocus. Without it, the photos are fuzzy and blurry. AI of course partly solves this problem, but only partly;
• Very average main camera. Photos through it also suffer from a lack of clarity, and their brightness leaves much to be desired, but in general the quality of the photo is acceptable;
• Funtouch shell issues. Not everyone likes it, and besides, the problems with the use of gestures have not been canceled.

Output

Despite some flaws with firmware and a simple camera, it has more than enough for its money.

A good processor for a budget employee, a large screen and a beautiful design make it one of the main contenders for the purchase. The existing shortcomings are smoothed out simply by an incredibly low price.