Vivo Y97 Review

BBK electronics is rocking their devices with the unique touches, Vivo and Oppo have more or less the same lineup, and there are many devices which happens to have almost the same specifications. This is another device with another such trend. This phone was launched recently around the Oppo A7X and both the phone shares many relevancy with the later one. Today we are talking about the Vivo Y97, and are going to review it to see if it is right for your taste and if you will be able to look forward with this device the next couple of months of your life.

Design

The device comes with a 6.3 – inch display on the front which comes with a teardrop style of the notch. The major con of this device is about the display which has a small bezel on the top despite the notch, and we even have a chin at the bottom of the display.

On the back side, there is a unibody metal which comes with a gradient on the back which changes from blue to purple. Talking about the placements we have the power and volume button to the right of the phone while on the bottom we have the Type C port and a Speaker grill.

On the back of the phone, there is a dual camera setup which happens to be positioned vertically. The single tone flash is positioned below the camera unit. Being a unibody metal design the phone happens to have the best in class firmness which results in the phone to have a better in hand feel and at the same time the device gives a premium appeal in the hand.

The camera unit on the phone is a bit bumped up, and this results into the camera unit poking into your hand at times, hence a good quality cover is recommended.

Display

Vivo Y97 comes with a 6.3-inch display which happens to have a ratio of 19:9 which is pretty high considering the phone, but this makes sure that the phone is comfortable to hold in a single hand, although with a single hand you cannot do most of the stuff. The panel used on the phone is an S–IPS LCD display which can easily showcase upwards of 16M colors which are really great.

The screen happens to have a small notch on the display which does obstruct the view on the screen, although it’s so small that it can easily be managed without any issue.

Talking about the real world performance of the panel, it is quite great, especially in vibrancy and vividness. The display happens to have the best in class contrast ratio although it is an IPS display and not an AMOLED one.

During the daytime, the screen is bright enough to be lit during the day and can easily be read in the bright open sun. At night time you can easily view the display without stressing much of the eyes, even the Funtouch OS comes with a special reading mode which lessens the stress onto your eyes.

Performance

Vivo included the Helio P60 chipset in the Y97, this makes the handset quite efficient in performance, as well as in battery life as the chipset is built upon the power efficient 12 nm platform. Assisting the Mediatek’s top of the line chip is G72 – MP3 GPU from Mali and hence the performance especially on the graphics side is the best. Another great deal on the phone is 4GB of RAM and 128GB of internal storage, all this helps the device to stay powered the whole day with the verity of an app being loaded from the internal storage and keep going onto the RAM.

In the real world, the phone performs quite well and you can easily enjoy all the different applications without any issue. Especially all the Games and heavy applications will be a breeze over the phone, and for sure you are going to get the best of both worlds wherein one is normal day to day use while the other is heavy gaming usage.

Talking about the heating issues which we observed on the phone over extended gaming, it is quite severe and at times you might have to use a case in order to continue gaming. It won’t have any bad effect on the phone, but do mind that constant gaming for over 1 hour and the phone heating up will degrade the battery life in the long run.

Camera

Just like every other device from Vivo, this time too Vivo has included the best of cameras on this device. At the rear, we have a dual camera setup with the primary one being 16MP one which happens to have f/2.0 aperture, while the other is a 2MP unit which is used majorly for depth sensing comes with f/2.4 aperture. On the front, we have a 16MP sensor again with the same f/2.0 aperture. This does mean that the images from the front and rear can come out the same, but this will more depend on the software optimization from Vivo.

In real-world situations, the phone did perform quite well, and it did the best when it comes to the rear camera pictures. The pictures were vivid and well saturated, sharpness was absolutely right at the point, still at times the pictures felt a bit cartoony that was due to over optimization with AI. Rest the pictures taken were all great and were optimized to impress the crowd. Even the front camera did decently well, where it made the selfies great, this also does means that the selfies and groupies will do impress most of the masses, and will give the feel of being captured by a rear camera.

Battery

Vivo included a 3315 mAH battery and that makes the phone capable to be powered for over a duration of 18 hours. This makes it capable to be working the whole day long from morning to late night for all your group chats. Coming to the gaming life of the battery, it happens to be only around 2–2&1/2 hour, and this makes it lack behind most of the devices. Battery charging is quite fast and hence you are not going to have an issue charging the phone again and again.

Verdict

Vivo Y97 is quite great in the daily work when you are using the phone only for calling and social media. Although there can be an issue with the battery life if 4G is being used via the background apps in standby then the battery will be drained. Even the phone happens to struggle in carrier network connectivity. So now what do you think about the device? Do let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.