vivo V50 review

Display

The vivo V50 features a 6.77-inch AMOLED screen with 1,080 x 2,392 pixels resolution and 120Hz refresh rate. The panel supports 10-bit color depth and HDR10+ streaming format. It is protected by a Diamond Shield Glass made for vivo by Schott.

The official screen specs are 1,300 nits for maximum and 4,500 nits for peak brightness.

We have completed our display measurements, and the results are in line with the official numbers. We captured 588 nits of maximum manual and 1274 nits of maximum automatic brightness. The screen can go north of 3000 nits in small white patches, though we didn't test any extremes.

The minimum brightness with a white color patch is just 2.1 nits.

The V50 display supports up to 120Hz refresh rate, and there are three refresh modes - High (120Hz), Standard (60Hz) and Smart Switch. The 120Hz and the Smart Switch drop down to 60Hz when the screen shows static content, but the Smart Switch is more limiting - often capping the apps to 90Hz or even 60Hz.

The V50 display is successfully recognized as HDR10-capable and apps like Netflix and YouTube do stream high-res HDR10 content.

Battery life

The vivo V50 is powered by a large 6,000mAh battery, up from 5,500mAh on the V40 and 5,000mAh on the V30.

The company promises that a full battery is enough to last 16 hours of watching YouTube or 9 hours of gaming. The V50 delivered on the gaming front with exactly 9 hours and over-delivered in the video test with a runtime of 19:19 hours.

Charging speed

The vivo V50 supports 90W FlashCharge, up from 80W on the previous models. It comes with a larger battery, though, so we do not expect a big difference in the charging time, if any.

The V50 is quick off the ground and gets to 40% in just 15 minutes. That is a solid result, but it is lower than what other 90W systems can do with that battery capacity. At the 30 minute mark, the phone is at 71% - a good result, but a match to the 13R 80W system and lower than the Poco X7 Pro 90W one.

A full charge required 46 minutes.

There are two battery health options - fast charging on/off and battery charging limit. You can either set the latter by your prefectures (70%-80%-90%-100%) and you can additionally enable optimized charging (night-time pause for example).

Speakers

The vivo V50 is the second phone from the V-series to come with stereo speakers, and we are glad that the V40 was not a one-and-done affair.

The vivo V50 speakers scored a Very Good mark on our loudness tests. However, their quality is average at best. The sound is shallow, and the vocals are lacking. There is some bass, and the high-frequency range is well presented, but overall, we're not thrilled by the sound quality.

Use the Playback controls to listen to the phone sample recordings (best use headphones). We measure the average loudness of the speakers in LUFS. A lower absolute value means a louder sound. A look at the frequency response chart will tell you how far off the ideal "0db" flat line is the reproduction of the bass, treble, and mid frequencies. You can add more phones to compare how they differ. The scores and ratings are not comparable with our older loudspeaker test. Learn more about how we test here.