‘Tis the season for affordable smartphones! And today we have the affordable vivo Y31s 5G. The vivo Y series of smartphones is aimed toward the entry-level price point, so it should be affordable. Let’s talk about this phone today. It’s a rather straightforward phone, so let’s begin.
Battery life
We’ll start off with the battery life first since this is the main selling point of the vivo Y31s 5G. It comes with a rather massive 6,500mAh battery – no idea what’s the exact Wh value since it’s not published anywhere. Wh is a much better way to measure battery capacity.
Anyway, this phone can last for around 25 hours and 16 minutes in our standardized battery life test – which is actually quite good.
Charging speed
As for the charging speed, the vivo Y31s 5G comes with a proprietary vivo FlashCharge charger in the box, and it can go up to 44W maximum. Using the default settings, this phone can charge from 15% to completion in around 80-ish minutes. It’s actually quite okay in for this battery capacity.
Using our own USB-PD PPS charger, the phone will take an average of around 92 minutes or so to charge from 15% to completion. Not too much of a difference. Even the charging curve shape between the two chargers are very similar – but it caps out at only 20W, hence slightly slower charging.
Still, I wouldn’t worry about it. Any USB-PD PPS charger will work just fine for this phone for fast-charging.
Performance
As for the performance though… this is where things get a bit more complicated. It’s equipped with the Snapdragon 4 Gen 2 and it’s definitely a low-end chipset. Given how Qualcomm’s product stack works right now – the Snapdragon 4 series is practically near the bottom.
Navigation is generally okay, but there is a noticeable delay while loading apps or even the settings menu. I mean, it’ll just snag here and there, and that is to be expected.
With this kind of performance, don’t expect to play any heavy games like Zenless Zone Zero. Those games already performed terribly on the Snapdragon 7 series, so just don’t even consider running them on the Snapdragon 4 series of chipsets.
I installed Brawl Stars to give it a try… and it works just fine. I guess Brawl Stars is one of those super simple games.
Multitasking is also possible since this phone has 8GB of RAM, but it is definitely not going to be a smooth experience.
Software
And let’s talk about the software now, why not. The vivo Y31s 5G comes with OriginOS 6 but it is a rather watered-down version of OriginOS 6. A lot of the fancy animations are cut down to become much simpler.
Plus, we have a bunch of bloatware and ads here too. We can manually uninstall or disable most of them, but it is definitely annoying that we have to go through this to begin with.
Screen
As for the screen – the vivo Y31s 5G comes with a 6.75-inch IPS LCD screen with a resolution of 2408×1080 pixels and goes up to 120Hz refresh rate. I’m actually quite glad vivo gave us a 1080p screen here instead of 720p.
This display goes up to around 800 nits at most and down to around 2 nits at minimum, while the color gamut coverage and color accuracy is rather fine. At 84.4% DCI-P3, the screen is comfortable to look at, while the color saturation look good and isn’t hurting our eyes.
There is no color profile selection, by the way. The default color profile is the only color profile we have.
Camera
The camera is something that I don’t have much time to test. This phone comes with a single camera only, while the other one is a depth sensor. Yeah, they still exist in 2026.
To have a look at pictures taken with the vivo Y31s 5G, take watch our video at the top of this review.
Design
Here comes the design. The vivo Y31s 5G comes in black and purple colors, and we obviously got the nicer purple design. It has a very nice matte back with a flowy reflective design, and the purple is actually more pinkish around the top of the phone.
Overall, the phone looks and feels great and rather chic, I’d say.
A few more things to mention
And a few more things to mention here – the vivo Y31s 5G comes with a USB 2.0 port at the bottom, no display output capability, and it also has a dual SIM card slot – that’s about it.
Should you buy the vivo Y31s 5G?
So, should you buy the new vivo Y31s 5G? I gotta say, it is indeed an entry-level smartphone, but the price is rather… inappropriate? On vivo’s website, the launch price is at RM1,699, but it is discounted to RM1,499 right now. Still, it’s a rather crazy amount and I expect this phone to be at least half the discounted price.
The 6GB RAM version is a whole lot lower in price, at RM1,199. I still think it is way too high, though. So, wait for a discount. The phone itself is okay, but the price is just egregious.
Where to buy? (Affiliate links)
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