vivo V15 Pro review

Android 9.0 Pie-flavored Funtouch OS 9

The vivo V15 Pro runs on Funtouch OS 9 based on Android 9.0 Pie and it offers familiar Funtouch experience. In fact, it offers an iOS-like experience so if you are coming from an iPhone, some parts of the UI may seem familiar.

For instance, swiping from the top won't bring down the quick toggles, it would only display the current notifications. Swiping from the bottom will summon the quick toggles. It gives you control over the volume and the display's brightness. And depending on your app usage, some of the apps may end up in that menu as well for quick access.

The FuntouchOS also offers gesture-based navigation. Swiping from the center takes you home and if you swipe and hold, you will see the recent apps menu. Depending on your preference, the back button works as a swipe from the bottom left or bottom right. Swiping from the other side brings out the quick toggles that we've talked about earlier. Unfortunately, there's no quick switch to the previously opened app so if fast multitasking is your thing, you'd better go with the software buttons. The Funtouch gestures need a little more work.

Home screen, recent apps, notification shade, quick toggles

The settings menu is quite rich and you will find tons of settings in there. You can manage your notifications and the way they appear. You can disable the heads-up pop-up if it gets in the way and you can also choose which notifications stay on the status bar.

Settings menu

The Lock screen and Home screen sub-menu is particularly interesting as it gives you all the options you'd need for customization. The Always-on display setting is in there as well. You can set up a background if you want instead of just a plain clock. Keep in mind that standby battery life will be greatly affected.

Navigation settings and always-on display options

As we've talked about in the design section, the under-display fingerprint works considerably better than the V11 Pro and even the NEX S. It's still optical but we found that recognized our fingertip right more often than not. The face unlock works well too although, not being very secure. The pop-up mechanism works quite fast so the speed difference between the V15 Pro and a phone with a standard front-facing camera is negligible.

Fingerprint input and facial recognition

The battery settings menu comes with a few additional options on top of the standard ones. You can set the phone to work in a low-power state, which limits the CPU and GPU performance. It even turns off all radios like WiFi and Bluetooth. But if that's not enough and you need to squeeze a few more hours out of your dying battery, the Super Power-Saving Mode will help you out. It allows you to use only Contacts, Messages and Clock. Of course, the battery stats menu is at hand as well.

Battery settings

As we've already pointed out, vivo's Funtouch OS is full of useful and maybe not so useful features. The Smart motion menu - as the name implies - contains a couple of off-screen gestures. Drawing a letter will launch an app immediately from a locked state while sliding upwards will bring out the periscope camera to unlock the device.

Off screen gestures

If the device senses a motion, it can wake up the screen while double tapping will do so as well. Double tapping on an empty spot on the home screen will lock the screen. All of these worked reliably and well except for the shaking motion that supposedly launches the flashlight. The phone responded quite slow to the gesture so you might be better off switching it from the quick toggle menu. Or you can set up a shortcut from the volume down key - a quick double press on a locked screen will launch the flashlight or any given app of your choice.

S-capture and smart click

Other settings include the usual split-screen mode, one-handed UI mode, advanced screenshot and screen capture options. On top of that, Funtouch comes with tons of proprietary apps, which could be a bit annoying depending on how you look at it. But most of the apps do are for Music listening, Calendar, Clock, Videos, Weather, Gallery Email, Notes, etc. There's also the V-Appstore for additional vivo-related apps and the so-called i Theme that offers a wide variety of themes for your phone.

Performance

The vivo V15 Pro is one of the first handsets to be launched with Qualcomm's Snapdragon 675 chipset. It features an octa-core CPU that consists of newly designed 2x Kryo 460 Gold cores clocked at 2.0 GHz and 6x Kryo 460 Silver cores ticking at 1.7 GHz. The GPU inside is Adreno 612. The SoC is manufactured on the cost-efficient 11nm node but more advanced than most chips from the previous gen 14nm Snapdragon 600-series. Fun fact, the 11nm (11LPP) process has been developed by Samsung and it's a mixture between the company's 14nm and 10nm nodes.

As our initial benchmark testing suggested, the Snapdragon 675 is a great mid-range performer when it comes to productivity. We didn't notice any hiccups, hangs or performance issues even with the heavy Funtouch OS UI.

GeekBench 4.1 (multi-core)

Higher is better

• Xiaomi Mi 9
  11181
• Honor View 20
  9530
• Xiaomi Pocophone F1
  9003
• vivo V15 Pro
  6527
• Oppo F11 Pro
  6020
• Oppo RX17 Pro
  5944
• vivo V11
  5535
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 7
  5411
• Motorola Moto G7 Plus
  4927

GeekBench 4.1 (single-core)

Higher is better

• Xiaomi Mi 9
  3503
• Honor View 20
  3211
• Xiaomi Pocophone F1
  2438
• vivo V15 Pro
  2386
• Oppo RX17 Pro
  1835
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 7
  1650
• Oppo F11 Pro
  1560
• vivo V11
  1457
• Motorola Moto G7 Plus
  1334

AnTuTu 7

Higher is better

• Xiaomi Mi 9
  372006
• Honor View 20
  275413
• Xiaomi Pocophone F1
  265314
• vivo V15 Pro
  180774
• Oppo RX17 Pro
  154861
• Oppo F11 Pro
  150218
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 7
  139075
• Motorola Moto G7 Plus
  117829

As you can see from the CPU-intensive benchmarks, the Snapdragon 675 blows every other mid-range SoC out of the water. Single-core performance is particularly impressive and goes neck to neck with last year's flagship Snapdragon 845. In multi-core performance, the chipset still comes on top even against the Snapdragon 710 leaving the Kirin 710 way behind. There are some significant performance gains over the Snapdragon 660 as well.

GFX 3.0 Manhattan (1080p offscreen)

Higher is better

• Xiaomi Mi 9
  100
• Xiaomi Pocophone F1
  82
• Honor View 20
  79
• Oppo RX17 Pro
  32
• Oppo F11 Pro
  23
• vivo V15 Pro
  22
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 7
  22
• vivo V11
  20
• Motorola Moto G7 Plus
  16

GFX 3.0 Manhattan (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Xiaomi Mi 9
  60
• Xiaomi Pocophone F1
  59
• Honor View 20
  58
• Oppo RX17 Pro
  28
• Oppo F11 Pro
  21
• vivo V15 Pro
  19
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 7
  19
• vivo V11
  18
• Motorola Moto G7 Plus
  15

GFX 3.1 Car scene (1080p offscreen)

Higher is better

• Xiaomi Mi 9
  42
• Xiaomi Pocophone F1
  35
• Honor View 20
  30
• Oppo RX17 Pro
  13
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 7
  9
• vivo V15 Pro
  8.8
• Oppo F11 Pro
  8.5
• vivo V11
  8.2
• Motorola Moto G7 Plus
  6.3

GFX 3.1 Car scene (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Xiaomi Mi 9
  35
• Xiaomi Pocophone F1
  31
• Honor View 20
  28
• Oppo RX17 Pro
  11
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 7
  7.7
• Oppo F11 Pro
  7.4
• vivo V11
  7.4
• vivo V15 Pro
  7.1
• Motorola Moto G7 Plus
  5.9

Basemark OS 2.0

Higher is better

• Xiaomi Mi 9
  5346
• Honor View 20
  4281
• Xiaomi Pocophone F1
  3713
• vivo V15 Pro
  2936
• Oppo RX17 Pro
  2735
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 7
  2260
• vivo V11
  2218
• Motorola Moto G7 Plus
  1999

3DMark SSE 3.1 Unlimited

Higher is better

• Xiaomi Mi 9
  5816
• Honor View 20
  3025
• Oppo RX17 Pro
  1976
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 7
  1409
• Oppo F11 Pro
  1275
• vivo V15 Pro
  1206

The GPU scores, on the other hand, suggest that the Snapdragon 675 won't be particularly efficient for gaming. The Adreno 612 GPU is just a tad better than the Snapdragon 660's 512 and Kirin 710's Mali-G51 MP4 and measurably less powerful than the Adreno 616 in the Snapdragon 710. But if you are getting it as a daily driver for your web browsing, multitasking and productivity-oriented app usage, the Snapdragon 675 is definitely the way to go. Also, battery tests show that it's fairly power efficient too.