Vivo V3 Max Review

The V3 Max isn’t the first Vivo smartphone to arrive here in the Philippines but it is currently their best offering in the country as this smartphone offers a powerful Snapdragon 652 processor and 4GB of RAM. Yep, it’s a new processor with 4GB of RAM. So how does the smartphone fare in our tests? Check out my review below.

Generic look but very solid

The Vivo V3 Max is made up metal at the back and it’s very solid, however, the smartphone look really generic and it feels heavy for its size. The Vivo V3 Max has a simple design on the front with three capacitive buttons on the front and unfortunately, there’s no button for the recent tasks and the capacitive buttons doesn’t have an led-backlit keys.

The back is made of metal which also houses the fingerprint sensor that can read your fingerprint really fast. Again, the metal back is very solid, however, the design looks similar to the Oppo F1. The Vivo V3 Max houses the volume button and the power button at the side and it also sports a hybrid sim card tray on the left which lets you use dual sim or a single sim with MicroSD card.

While some people might disagree with me, but the inclusion of a menu button instead of a recent tasks button annoys me. However, the Funtouch OS lets you open recent apps by just swiping up from the bottom. But we’ll discuss the operating system in a short while.

One of the things that I really like in this smartphone is its speaker. The Vivo V3 Max has a speaker grill below just beside the Micro-USB port and the 3.5mm audio jack and the speaker was really loud and clear that’s why I was enjoying watching the latest episodes of Game of Thrones on this one. Oh and before I forgot, the Vivo V3 Max got a HiFi audio too, that’s why playing music on this phone is really damn great.

Not the best display but it’s still great

Look, the Vivo V3 Max has a 5.5-inch IPS display with Full HD resolution. It’s not the best display that you can find on the market but for most consumers, this is more than enough. The IPS LCD has nice colors, it is bright and has a good sunlight visibility. Watching movies isn’t a problem on this as this one has a pretty good viewing angles too.

Overall, I’m pretty satisfied with its display. I believe the smartphone doesn’t need a Quad HD display as a bigger resolution will result in a shorter battery life.

No App drawer, no problem

The Vivo V3 Max is running on Android 5.1 with Funtouch OS. It doesn’t feature an app drawer which made the smartphone more user-friendly to some and it does have a lot of features that you might find very useful. Some of these features include an S-capture which lets you take a long screenshot for web pages, rectangular screenshot, funny screenshot for adding doodles, and a screen recorder that lets you take a video of your screen.

There’s an app in the Vivo V3 Max called iManager that lets you control the performance and power of the smartphone. That app really helps to improve the battery life of the smartphone when needed. There are also some cool features in the Vivo V3 Max including the multi-window however, that doesn’t work as the one on Samsung devices. Instead, there are only a few apps that will work on the multi-window.

Stellar performance

This smartphone is one of the first to sport a Qualcomm Snapdragon 652 processor with 4GB of RAM in the country. Surprisingly, the smartphone is performing really great and it is really fast. Not only that this is swift and fast to use but it is really powerful.

Playing games on this smartphone is a breeze. Whatever game that you installed on this one will run without problems. I’ve tried GTA: Liberty City Stories at max settings and it runs smoothly. NBA 2k16 won’t be a problem too as this smartphone can run really well. Other games that I’ve tried are Modern Combat 5, Order and Chaos 2, GTA: San Andreas, & Hearthstone and all of them ran well without problems at the highest settings.

Overall, the Vivo V3 Max’s performance feels like a flagship smartphone from the last year. The smartphone performs similar or better than the Snapdragon 808 but without the overheating.

Just an average camera

The Vivo V3 Max got a 13-megapixel rear camera with LED flash and thanks to PDAF, the smartphone can focus really  fast on an object that you are shooting. Well, the camera isn’t the best in the market but it is good for its price range. At well-lit conditions, the smartphone performs well in the camera department, I really had no issues with it and it was fun to use. However, in low-light conditions, the smartphone seems to struggle a little bit because of noises. Check out some of the shots that I took using the smartphone:

Verdict

Overall, the smartphone is really great for its price range. The smartphone is priced at P16,990 and I think this is the smartphone to get at its price range. It has a powerful performance, solid build quality, and an average camera quality. For P16,990, this is a really great smartphone. And yes, I really recommend this smartphone if you have a budget at its price range.