Vivo Xshot review: Shot in the dark

Gallery

The gallery app on the vivo Xshot is pretty simple, but also quite pleasant to use. Underneath its intuitive white exterior, there are a multitude of quite interesting features that definitely deserve to be mentioned.

Launching the app brings you to a timeline interface of your photos and if you don't fancy this, you can easily switch to a folder-browsing mode. There are also albums, which the user can organize. More albums can easily be created, but the cover selection is quite limited and there is no apparent way to create or download new ones.

The main gallery interface is simple

Opening an album takes you to a timeline interface, just like the one on the main screen, while clicking on a folder, brings up a vertically-scrollable, tiled view of the pictures. Pinch zooming works on images and clip thumbs as well and zooming out reviews a horizontally-scrollable film-like preview of the shots and videos.

Viewing images on the vivo

The vivo Xshot allows you to edit photos straight from the gallery. The editor itself is packed with features, ranging from trivial cropping and effects all the way up to fine-tuning colors, shadows, exposure and applying different blurs. It is definitely more than enough for quickly fixing up a photo before uploading it online.

The image editor is surprisingly rich in options

Video player

The vivo Xshot 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.

As far as format support goes, the Xshot didn't have any issues with playing every video we threw at it, regardless of the video encoder used. It refused to play a videos with AC3 audio, though.

Simplistic video player

Another interesting feature is the pop-out mode. It spawns a small draggable video window on top of the UI. And it actually works pretty well.

Convenient pop-out mode

Nice audio player

As we have already mentioned, vivo really knows its way around audio. And the dedication to a proper music experience extends beyond capable audio tech and into the realm of software. The music player, bundled with Funtouch OS doesn't look overly impressive but is quite pleasant to use and has a few tricks hidden away.

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 main playback interface consists of a backdrop of album art and a transparent control strip.

Browsing songs in the music app

Swiping it up reveals the volume slider, as well as HI-FI and BEE sound effect toggles. Sadly, both are available only with headphones. There is also a lyrics option included, but it does not fetch the verses automatically online, but rather relies on them being locally available, but we were hard-pressed to find the right format.

Playing music is a breeze, but the lyrics option is hard to figure out

Vivo has thrown another little treat in the music application. It is a simple timer, but one that is tied to your music player. With it, you can easily fall asleep to your favorite jams, without worrying about draining your battery overnight. It can even power-down the device completely, once the deadline is reached.

A nice little bonus, hidden away in the music app

Very good audio output

The vivo Xshot had perfectly clean output when connected to an active external amplifier. The smartphone scored excellently top to bottom, but that’s hardly the most impressive bit about its performance. It’s actually the volume levels which are among the highest we’ve ever seen.

Plugging in a pair of headphones tells a very different story – the clarity degraded with stereo crosstalk rising and some intermodulation distortion appearing. Volume levels also dropped significantly – they were still above average, but no longer quite so impressive.

And here go the results.

vivo Xshot frequency response

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