vivo X200 Pro hands-on review

Design and handling

The vivo X200 Pro stays within the familiar design language that its predecessors adopted. We still have the huge circular camera module on the back with a curved back design.

The X200 Pro retains the IP68/69 certification against water and dust and is made of glass on the front and back and an aluminum side frame.

Speaking of, the frame is now semi-flat. It's flat on the side but slightly curved toward the edges, so it doesn't form any sharp corners or ridges with the front and back panels.

vivo X200 Pro

This slightly changes the way the X200 Pro feels, at least compared to the X100 Pro, which has slim and curved side frame.

The quad-curved display is another notable change. It's now curved on all sides with uniform curvatures and extremely thin side bezels measuring 1.63mm, again uniform across all sides.

The available color options are Sapphire Blue, Titanium Grey, Moonlight White and Carbon Black.

The Carbon Black and Moonlight White versions feature a delicate matte finish, while the Sapphire Blue and Titanium Gray are glossy and mirror-like. The Sapphire Blue looks black in the dark, and only certain angles and appropriate lighting conditions reveal the wavy, brushed patterns. The same goes for the Titanium Gray.

Despite the flat-ish frame design, the X200 Pro doesn't feel dramatically different from the X100 Pro. It has a familiar design and ergonomics.

Hardware and features

The handset is built around a 6.78-inch display with 1260 x 2800px resolution and support for up to 120Hz refresh rate, 10-bit color depth and HDR10+ content. Just like last year, it's of the LTPO OLED kind, which ensures better energy efficiency and more granular refresh rate control. It's basically the same display as before but with curvatures on all four sides.

Additionally, the screen adopts Zeiss Natural Color enhancements for more accurate color reproduction and improved sunlight legibility. The advertised peaked brightness is 4,500 nits.

The brand new MediaTek Dimensity 9400 chipset drives all those pixels, promising substantial performance and power efficiency gains. It's based on the 3nm manufacturing process and employs an octa-core CPU with 1x3.63 GHz Cortex-X925 & 3x3.3 GHz Cortex-X4 & 4x2.4 GHz Cortex-A720 configuration. The GPU on board is Immortalis-G925.

As you can see, at this point in time, the Dimensity 9400 SoC is a chart-topper. In fact, vivo promises even higher results, but since our unit is running a pre-production software, we will have to re-test once we have more time to spend with the X200 Pro, so stay tuned for the full review.

Semi-related, the X200 Pro now supports SOS text broadcasting without the need for cellular networks, as well as one-on-one voice and map location display. It uses long-distance Bluetooth connections and the kilometer-level network-free communication technology is co-developed and implemented with MediaTek.

Besides the chip's raw power, it also offers advanced smarts. Its NPU can do serious number crunching, enabling a plethora of AI-powered features. Combined with OriginOS 5 in China or FuntouchOS 15 in the rest of the world, the X200 Pro offers BlueLM Copilot useful for copywriting and taking notes. Circle to Search is also on the list of AI features.

All that hardware is powered by a generous 6,000 mAh battery, which is a sizeable upgrade over last year's 5,400 mAh unit. Vivo coupled it with BlueVolt tech, co-developed with ATL to improve the battery's performance in harsh environments. The OEM says the cell can perform perfectly well in -20°C conditions.

Perhaps due to the increased battery density, this year's charging capabilities over a cable are slightly downgraded from 100W to 90W. Or at least that's our theory of why vivo went for a technically slower charging. However, we wonder if the 10W less charging output will dramatically affect charging times, if at all. The wireless charging remains 50W, though.

And as for the cameras, follow us on the next page.