Vivo V3Max review: Horizons expanding

Telephony and phonebook

The phonebook app on the Vivo V3Max is called Contacts and follows the general styling of the rest of the interface, meaning it's entirely custom. There are tabs, but unless you are big on groups, or want to jump to the dialer or to your personal info page all the time, chances are you won't be using them too often.

Dialer • Calling someone • phonebook • a single contact

Viewing a contact is done through a clean and well-arranged interface. All in all Vivo has tried to keep things as simple and intuitive as possible.

Multimedia

The Vivo V3Max comes with a simple gallery. It consists of two tabs, one for your camera roll, the other for your various albums. Either way, you get a grid of thumbnails, four in a row. Hitting the search tool doubles the number of thumbs and groups them by month.

The Albums app is decent

Viewing a single image offers the usual basic options like cropping and rotation as well as a quick shortcut for sharing.

The Vivo V3Max comes with a dedicated video application. It offers a quite basic interface and few advanced features, but definitely gets the job done. The player itself does offer Hi-Fi support as well as DLNA and subtitles.

Very capable video player

As far as format support goes, the V3Max didn't have any issues with playing every video we threw at it, be it DivX, XviD, MOV, WMV, MP4, MKV, including files with the typically problematic AC3 sound. It also has good support for subtitles, though no options for customizing them. Another interesting feature is the pop-out mode. It spawns a small draggable video window on top of the UI, but you can't resize it.

Audio player has headphone profiles

The music player, bundled with Funtouch OS and curiously named iMusic, doesn't look overly impressive but is quite pleasant to use and has a few tricks hidden away.

The iMusic player is simplistic, but gets the job done

Launching the app brings you to a selection of quite a few browsing options. Songs can be browsed in various categories and playlists are easily accessible, for even more flexibility. The smartphone comes with preinstalled sound profiles for a few headsets.

The main playback interface consists of a backdrop of album art and a simple control pad. You get two toggles altogether, one for Repeat/Shuffle and another for switching on Hi-Fi mode, but it only works with headphones attached.

Finally, the Vivo V3Max's big audio feature is its Hi-Fi prowess. The phone features AKM's 32-bit/192kHz AK4375 DAC. Provided you have the right headphones and the right source material, it could potentially allow you to play Hi Res Audio audio.

Audio output starts off great, loses some brilliance

The vivo V3Max went off to a great start in our audio quality test. When connected to an active external amplifier, it delivered very loud output with excellent clarity scores top to bottom – an impressive showing by any standard.

Plug in a pair of headphones though and things quickly go south. Volume drops to average, stereo crosstalk increases notably and some intermodulation distortion creeps in. It’s still a perfectly adequate performance, but it’s not quite as impressive as before.

Anyway, here go the results so you can make your own comparisons.

vivo V3Max frequency response

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