vivo V50 review

Android 15 and Funtouch 15

The vivo V50 boots Android 15 with a layer of the company's in-house Funtouch OS on top, also v.15. The V50 will be eligible for 3 major OS release updates, which sounds like a good level of futureproofing.

The latest Funtouch isn't much different from previous iterations in look and feel, and almost gives off a bit of a dated vibe with its visuals.

Funtouch 15

The present-day functionality is, of course, all there. Funtouch includes niceties now taken for granted like large folders, the split split-screen/pop-up window implementation is about as straightforward as it gets, too. The app drawer is worth mentioning too, because that's where Funtouch keeps its widget selection for some reason.

Funtouch 15

The V50 also comes with Google's Circle to search on board and the Gemini AI assistant as well. A Google Lens-powered screen translation feature is also present.

Google AI

You also get live translation of phone calls, an AI helper in the Notes app, and an AI Transcript Assist utility for making summaries out of spoken conversations. Note that all of these may be region-dependent and not present in your locale.

Also, there's some AI-powered functionality in the gallery editor. You get to delete objects, remove people, and fight reflections - all of those with varying success, of course.

AI object eraser

Performance and benchmarks

Vivo has decided on not upgrading the chipset for a second time, meaning the V50, just like the V40 and V30, runs on the same Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 platform. It's an unusual decision in an industry that moves at a break-neck speed, but we'll take it as an experiment in product planning and marketing, and we'll leave it to the market to prove them either right or wrong.

Performance in day-to-day operations is quite alright, and we have no complaints - it's a modern mid-range SoC based on TSMC's 4nm manufacturing process.

The Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 packs on an octa-core CPU with 1x2.63 GHz Cortex-A715 & 3x2.4 GHz Cortex-A715 & 4x1.8 GHz Cortex-A510 cores. The GPU inside is an Adreno 720 GPU.

The V50 ships in four storage tiers, and they all use LPDDR4X/UFS 2.2 storage - 8GB/128GB, 8GB/256GB, 12GB/256GB and 12GB/512GB. We have the beefiest 12GB/512GB version for review.

In benchmark testing, the vivo V50 offers excellent performance in the mid-range class, matching its SD7G3 peers, and it's on par with the competition. However, the Poco X7 Pro, priced similarly, features a flagship-grade chipset, but this one is more of a disruptor in terms of performance than a regular competitor.

The CPU and GPU inside the vivo V50 are not susceptible to throttling - the V50 always keeps its performance at 100% and remains rather cool, too. Nice!

CPU test • GPU test

Overall, the vivo V50 offers adequate performance, on par with the competition (Poco X7 Pro excluded, obviously), and we can praise its sustained performance, too. We cannot ask for more here.