vivo V17 Pro review

Display

The 6.44" Samsung-made AMOLED display is one of the most important aspects on the vivo V17 Pro, and it alone can easily sell this phone to users looking for a notch-free display. Indeed, many smartphones have OLED screens with minimum bezels, but few do away with the notches. And the V17 Pro is one of those few, obviously.

So, the V17 Pro packs a beautiful 6.44" OLED screen of 2,400 x 1,080 pixels (409ppi) and this makes for a tall 20:9 aspect ratio. This is a minor upgrade over the V15 Pro screen that was 6.39" OLED with 2,340 x 1,080 px and 19.5:9 aspect.

The screen is protected by a flat Gorilla Glass 6 piece, but vivo has also applied a screen protector on top of it in the factory.

We measured a maximum brightness of 500 nits in both manual and auto brightness modes - a very good one for an OLED panel and excellent for the class. There is no light bleed when displaying blacks, and the OLED goes dark completely in the areas showing black.

There are three different Screen Colors settings in Display Options. With the Standard (default), the screen output is tuned for accuracy in the DCI-P3 color space, and we measured an average deltaE of 4.8 and a maximum deviation of 10.3 at point white. As it happens often, the white and gray hues have a noticeable bluish tint.

The Normal Contrast setting corresponds to the sRGB color space, and we recorded an average deltaE of 2.7 for color accuracy, meaning it's a pretty great one.

Finally, the Bright option makes the colors pop at the expense of the reproduction accuracy.

Battery life

The vivo V17 Pro is powered by a 4100 mAh battery, an improvement over the 3,700 mAh cell within the V15 Pro. It supports 18W (Dual Engine) fast charging, and with the supplied charger, it gets from 0% to 40% in half an hour. A full charge usually takes about 100 mins.

The V17 Pro posted an excellent endurance rating of 107 hours and class-leading scores across the board. The screen-on times are excellent - we measured 14 hours runtime in our web browsing test and north of 19 hours in our video playback test. The standby performance was on par with the V15 Pro and overall - a very good one.

Our battery tests were automated thanks to SmartViser, using its viSerDevice app. The endurance rating above denotes how long a single battery charge will last you if you use the vivo V17 Pro for an hour each of telephony, web browsing, and video playback daily. We've established this usage pattern so that our battery results are comparable across devices in the most common day-to-day tasks. The battery testing procedure is described in detail in case you're interested in the nitty-gritty. You can check out our complete battery test table, where you can see how all of the smartphones we've tested will compare under your own typical use.

Speaker

The vivo V17 Pro has a single bottom-firing speaker, nothing fancy here. It scored an Excellent mark in our loudness test, though some high-pitched tones were common, and probably that's how it got this score.

When playing music from YouTube, the speaker sounds (subjectively) quieter than suggested by the numbers and the score here. The audio output is also average in quality, somewhat lacking in the high tones.

Audio quality

The vivo V17 Pro did very well in the first part of our audio quality test, where we hook it up to an active external amplifier. It reproduced our test track perfectly and at high volume.

Things weren't quite as perfect when headphones came into play - the stereo crosstalk raised notably, volume dropped to just above average, and some intermodulation distortion crept in. A decent showing still, but not one to impress audiophiles.

vivo V17 Pro frequency response

You can learn more about the tested parameters and the whole testing process here.