This is the new Vivo V40 – the company’s latest premium mid-range smartphone that packs quite a punch with the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 and also ZEISS optics for the cameras.
So, is this phone good? Let’s take a look at what it has to offer.
Design
Looking at the design, the Vivo V40 is a good-looking phone. The unit we have is with the Nebula Purple color – and it has sparkles all over the back. It also has a matte finish, and it just feels absolutely great to touch and hold.
It has slightly rounded corners, and both the front and back of the phone curve into the frame. It actually feels quite nice to hold as well.
Cameras
The camera bump is quite an easily-recognizable one. It occupies quite a lot of real estate but I’m glad Vivo didn’t opt for the giant circular design at the center of the phone.
However, the camera sensors are only housed at the circle at the top. The extension at the bottom is mostly just… for aesthetics. The flash is placed at the extended piece, and this black circle – well, I have no idea what it does. There is a sensor inside there, but I can’t recognize what it is. I tried digging through the review guide and product page – but there are no details.
Now, the Vivo V40 only has two actual cameras to take pictures – and all photo samples here are taken with the Vivid color mode because that’s the default.
To look at all the pictures and videos taken with the Vivo V40 across different color modes, then watch the video at the top of this review.
Screen
The Vivo V40 comes with a pretty massive 6.78-inch OLED screen with a slightly higher-than-usual resolution of 2800×1260 pixels and also goes up to 120Hz refresh rate.
The color accuracy and brightness of this screen are pretty typical for a phone like this, it can reach around 1000 nits of maximum brightness and covers 98.85% of sRGB and 93.31% of DCI-P3 color gamuts.
But, this is only for the default “standard” color profile. There are two more in the settings menu – namely the Pro and Bright color profiles. The Pro mode is quite bad as it covers only 90% of sRGB and 64% of DCI-P3 color gamuts.
The Bright mode though, is going to push the display to cover 100% of sRGB and 99.96% of DCI-P3 color gamut – but the ΔE number is also nearly doubled of the standard color profile.
My recommendation is to stick with the standard color profile if everything looks fine to your eyes – and go for the bright color profile if you want a more vivid-looking screen. Either one works, it just depends on your personal preference.
What I don’t like is the under-display fingerprint scanner location. It is placed way too low, and it’s not ergonomic to use at all.
Performance
Now, the performance. It’s using the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3, which isn’t found on that many phones in the market right now.
While we don’t have a gaming test video for this phone because our schedule is super packed, it can run Genshin Impact at the medium graphical preset at 60fps at around 30-ish FPS. That’s not bad by any means, but do note that this is in version 4.8. The game will get graphical improvement in version 5.0, and many older chipsets get downgraded graphics too. I suspect that for version 5.0, this phone won’t be getting 30fps at medium graphical preset.
Software
The Vivo V40 is running Funtouch OS 14 on top of Android 14, and while the overall software experience is decent, but there are some things that just annoy the heck out of me.
If I accidentally scroll to the left on the lock screen, then it’ll pester me with this type of popups, asking me to agree to this whatever lockscreen poster thing. I absolutely hate this.
And let’s not forget about the amount of ads that this phone has. You see, this list when I just finished setting up the phone, it started downloading all of these trash games via the Google Play Store. That’s how I end up with another page of trash apps that I have to manually remove.
Then, please change the swipe-down gesture to the notification center. Do not use the Global Search feature as it is once again covering 80% of the screen with ads. And no, we can’t remove them. So, I just consider this entire feature to be unusable.
What’s worse is that the V-appstore cannot be disabled, and you’ll have to be careful of these things when you launch the app for the first time. I suggest you just turn both of them off.
By the way, since the V-appstore cannot be removed, the Hot Games and Hot Apps are always in the app drawer, taking up space and hoping that you’ll accidentally press on it.
I mean, whatever smoothness and good design that the FuntouchOS have instantly vaporizes thanks to these horrendous bloatwares that not only eats up storage but also negatively impacts the user experience.
Battery life
As for the battery life though, this phone comes with a 5,500mAh battery with an unknown Wh value – and it can last for nearly 20 hours in our standardized battery life test – and that’s just amazing. I think this is the longest-lasting phone that we’ve tested so far.
Charging speed
The Vivo V40 also comes with a proprietary 80W charger in the box – and it can charge the phone from 15% to completion in around 48 minutes.
However, this isn’t actually “fast-charging” by default. We need to head into the settings menu to find this option to actually enable fast charging.
And the charging speed is about an hour. Our usual battery logging app doesn’t log anything since the phone kills all apps when the fast-charging option is enabled. This is actually very common across other fast-charging phones too.
But we do have another tool to monitor what’s the wattage input – and we can see that it takes in around 66W maximum even though it has an 80W charger. It also requires around 50 minutes to charge from 15% to completion.
And it also supports up to 33W of USB-PD standard and it actually charges faster than the stock proprietary 80W charger with the fast-charging option disabled. That’s interesting.
A few more things to mention
And a few more things to mention – this phone does have a USB 2.0 port at the bottom, and it also does not support display output via USB-C, which is to be expected.
It also does not have an audio jack, no microSD card slot, but it does have a double SIM card slot.
What’s interesting though, is the certification for IP68 and IP69.
Should you buy the Vivo V40?
Now comes the question of – should you buy the Vivo V40? The price in Malaysia is at RM1,999 and I think it’s an okay price for what it has to offer. The hardware and software are fine, but the mixture of intrusive ads interlace into so many parts of the UI really knocks the entire user experience down a few notches.
If you can tolerate and avoid all those stuff like threading a string through a needle, then you should be fine.
Where to buy? (Affiliate links)
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