Vivo is enjoying the aesthetics up card with all the vivo s1 visually striking pieces of kit. It manages to stand besides Xiaomi and Realme’s offers through its distinctive spin on gradients and patterns.

Leading of the phone is traditional, with a huge display and waterdrop notch functioning as the key visual elements.

Gorilla Glass is fairly common; therefore is Asahi’s Dragontrail glass, but this is the first time we hear Schott Xensation 3D protective glass. In my own time with the device, the glass looked to hold up against micro-abrasions and scrapes. However, it was seen how well it handles within long-haul use.

Fit and finish are not quite topnotch, and that I detected significant wobble in the amount of rocker. The power switch, on the flip side, had sufficient supply. Along the bottom edge is a headset jack, speaker grille, in addition to a micro-USB jack (ugh). A passionate Google Assistant secret is a sudden, however welcome, inclusion. Gleam triple slot that will enable you to house two SIM cards and a microSD card.

The phone employs an in-display fingerprint scanner that has generally been quick and dependable.

The rear of the phone is the point where the look gets a bit more interesting. We’ve got the Skyline Blue variant with us, and the milky purple and blue finish appears quite great. It stands out amongst a sea of competitive blues and reds.

Sporting the newly announced Helio P65 chip, the Vivo S1 is probably the first ever to conduct MediaTek’s latest silicon. It would be tricky to telephone the chipset and upgrade within the Helio P60. Unlike the Helio P60, which balanced functionality between Cortex-A73 and Cortex A-53 cores, the Helio P65 pairs 2 Cortex A75 cores using six Cortex-A 55 cores. The largest difference here is that multi-threaded performance is a small downgrade.

The Mali G72 has additionally downgraded the GPU to some Mali G52. The device gets some upgrades within the NPU section that could have some ramifications for AI-based applications. Still, by and large, this isn’t a serious performance jump on the previous creation of MediaTek chips.

Vivo’s exceptional software optimizations go quite a ways to deliver a smooth operating experience. Funtouch OS, despite its quirks, runs pretty well on the hardware. For general purpose usage, the Vivo S1 packs enough oomph to please most users. It required an extra second or so to start up heavy responsibility programs and games such as PUBG compared to equally priced hardware such as the Redmi Note 7 Pro. Once in-game, though, the performance gap wasn’t too perceptible.

Between your 4,500mAh battery and the fast charging support, battery life is one of the regions where the Vivo s-1 excels. Power control is quite nice, and the device could handily go two weeks to get a fee if you’re not a very heavy user. I was able to close to 6 hrs of screen-on-time before having to the plugin. This is not nearly as great as the Redmi Note 7 Pro, which handled somewhat better despite owning a smaller battery life, but it should suffice for some users.