vivo V21 Review - After 1 Month of Use! By Fisayo Fosudo

Hey guys, it’s Fisayo here and I’ve been using the Vivo V21 for some time now. I’ve used it for over a month and I want to share all of the specs and features, the pros and cons and my overall experience using this device. The vivo v21 is arguably one of the slimmest, if not the slimmest smartphone you can get in Nigeria now, coming right about 7.29mm for the Dusk Blue Color which we’ve got here and 7.39mm for the Sunset Dazzle Color. I remember showing people this color of the V21e and it was all gasps. It’s actually unique. Anyway, this video is all about my experience with this device after my extensive usage.

If you’re new to the channel, welcome and if you’re returning, welcome back, I’d love it if you could tap that like button so more people can see the analysis we’re sharing here. Without further ado, let’s get to the video. Unboxing Inside the box, you get the phone itself, you get the SIM ejector tool, you get the important information and warranty card. In terms of accessories, you also get a 3.5mm headphone jack which you can plug into the phone with the provided adapter, you get a USB C cable, and lastly, a huge 33W charger to power that 4,000 mAh battery and this is supposed to go from 0% to 63% in 30 minutes when you use this charger. I did my tests and I’ll show you the results soon.

Build Quality As far as how the Vivo V21 is built, you’ve got a microphone up top, the textured power button and volume rockers on the right side, with nothing on the left side. Getting to the bottom of the phone, we see there’s no headphone jack, we have the SIM slot here that has an orange rubber ring that would help in case of water damage. It’s a dual sim slot, one on top and one at the bottom and this is the kind that clips your SIM card so its good. There’s not expandable storage. However, there’s a trick up their sleeve at least for temporary storage which is the RAM.

I’ll get to it in a bit. You get a Glass Display, Matte Glass back which is supposed to be scratch-resistant, anti-slip, and not easily smeared by fingerprints, it does feel nice in the hand though and then we get polycarbonate or plastic frame to the side. Speaking of the side the phone is really slim and feels very sturdy in the hand and a pleasure to look at.. Color options on here are the Dusk Blue which is the one I’m using here, and Sunset Dazzle. Then there’s the V21e with this awesome checkered pattern that’s a head turner.

Display I love the fact that we get a smooth AMOLED display at 90Hz. The V21 and V21e have HDR 10+ and HDR10 displays respectively, both more than 430 nits of brightness with the V21 having 500 nits. Speaking to more of the technicalities, it’s a 6.44 inch display. You’ve got a 1080 by 2400 pixel display. With an aspect ratio of 20:9, basically how tall and how wide it is going to display for you.

It’s also got a decent 409 pixels per inch. Higher than many midrange devices. I watched videos on here, they were sharp and of course, you can stream 4k content on this guy no problem. I just had issues with the fact that this only has one speaker at the bottom. If you’re not using headphones to consume content, wireless ones at least because there’s no headphone jack and you have to use an adapter, if you’re consuming content with the speakers only are you’re holding it.

You would running into times where you block it accidentally. That lowers the quality of the experience. Storage, Processor and Features The V21e is running on Snapdragon’s 720G which is a huge plus and the higher end V21 is running on MediaTek’s Dimensity 800U 7nm processor which is already challenging some of the best Snapdragon processors out there. The V21’s processor is clocked at 2.4GHz and is an octacore processor As if 8GB of RAM wasn’t already enough for you, you’ve got an additional 3GB of Extended RAM taken from the phone’s storage directly to further boost the phone’s performance. This is the “trick” up Vivo’s sleeve.

It’s cool that they could pull something like this off. I didn’t notice a significant performance difference but it’s nice to know that in case I go overboard, I’m covered with 11 whole gigs of RAM. Although a portion is taken by System software. You’ve also got 128GB of storage space, and I’ll say it’s plenty enough. The Vivo V21 comes with Android 11 on their newest FunTouch OS, 11.1. One thing I like with regards to the V21 is the fact that the interface is really smooth you can hop in from one point to another and it just feels seamless how the windows open and close with a round mask.

Overall usability when typing was cool. I thought the haptics significantly felt better as well. Scrolling was smooth and images rendered well on the V21. Phone call quality when I used the loudspeaker didn’t sound well sometimes, especially compared to the earpiece up top, but overall, call quality was fairly decent throughout my usage except for this one anomaly of the loud speaker being iffy. Gaming + Battery + Charging Gaming quality and resolution was cool on this guy.

Gameplay throughout my usage was smooth and delightful, except for that single speaker issue. On the Vivo V21 you can max out the graphic quality and frame rate of call of duty but only 2 levels of the graphic quality and 3 levels of the frame rate compared to many other displays which have five levels for the frame rate and four levels for the graphics so this is 2 levels lower for the frame rate and 2 levels lower for the graphics. You’ve got game mode as well when you swipe right from the left area of the phone. Here’s where you can either mute all incoming notifications to focus on your game. You can Lock the brightness in case of ambient lighting so it doesn’t become too bright or too dark when you’re gaming and you can autoplay with the screen off.

This could save your battery by dimming the display while keeping your game running if you had other important tasks to do. My battery level when I played the game at the maximum settings went from 82% to 76% in 30 minutes which is a 6% loss and down to 70% in 1 hour of gaming which is another 6% loss. So hypothetically, we should be able to do 8 hours of gaming on this phone before we complain about a low battery and it didn’t over heat. You do get a decent 4,000 mAh battery, smaller than what we see these days and I’d say that the standby time was somewhat average for me in terms of performance. However, remember I said the 33W charger would get you to 63% in 30 minutes? Well, here’s how my own charging speed went.

From 0 to 32% in 15 minutes, up to 52% in 30 minutes and not 63% as advertised, 73% in 45 minutes, 93% in 1 hour which is cool and in 10 more minutes it got filled up to 100%. While it gets from 0-52% in 30 minutes compared to 63%, I still believe it’s fair especially considering that it gets up to 93% in an hour. Phones are charging pretty fast these days. Fingerprint & Face Unlock The fingerprint reader and the face recognition for face unlock was quite fast on this phone. First of all, you’ve got an on-screen fingerprint reader.

It’s a little lower when you consider the position of the screen. It was fast and I had no complaints, same with face unlock. I also like that we’ve got a sort of live wall paper when we unlock. Camera Quality When it comes to the cameras, both the Vivo v21 and V21e share the same functionality, they both have that large 44MP selfie camera and on the back you have a 64MP main wide camera, 8MP ultra wide, and a 2MP macro lens. What makes the vivo V21 stand out among the rest of the line up is that it’s got the first of its kind 44MP Optical Image Stabilization Feature (OIS) where you can record footage and despite your hands being shaky it would capture and stabilize the frames and of course the Night Selfie Camera.

You’ve of course got the Night Mode in the camera app, Portrait mode with adjustable aperture settings and what I like about Portrait mode and how cool it is is that apart from how you can adjust the blurriness in a photo afterwards, you can even select the point of the image to focus on which is alot of data, kudos to vivo on this one. You’ve got your normal mode with the 2 lens modes, to switch between Normal and Zoom mode and then you can click the lens button to activate the 8MP ultrawide mode, bokeh mode and macro mode. Something I noticed was that in the gallery again, it identified photos with text as being documents and that’s due to the AI Document Sensing. You’ve got video mode with the main selling point being the Ultra Steady feature and if I attempt to shake my hands while recording normally it would be bad whereas when I turn it on, it smoothens it out even before recording. For the extra modes, we’ve got the High resolution mode to enable that 64MP camera, panorama, Live Photo, slow motion which can go up to 240FPS but 120FPS for the front camera, time-lapse, Pro mode, AR Stickers, Document Scanning, and Double Exposure which can take multiple pictures and merge into one with opacity effects.

So for instance, I can take a picture of this plant, then take a picture of my hand and it merges them into this effect. All of these features are available for the front camera except panorama mode and document scanning mode. The selfies I took on the V21 were sharp but lacked contrast. The portrait shots are also not bad with aggressive background blur. I like that you can adjust the highlight of your camera down before you take your photo, that way things aren’t getting blown out.

In a group setting which where most people would take selfies you can expect decent results but it might also miss your face and focus on the background. You have the option of using Aura Light or the Fill Light which is the 2 bright lights for dimly lit selfies. While selfies at night looked visible, at least with minimal light, the fill light shines bright and illuminates the face, I wouldn’t go near night mode though for selfies because it aggressively smoothens the face. The magic of Night mode comes with the back camera’s photos though, where you do get a significantly brightened image, although for a landscape subject. Evidence is there in the smoothening but it’s not skin.

The Ultrawide camera is an 8MP one, the mid level quality of the 3 cameras, at least better than the 2MP macro, if you pay attention to the Rug and the wall and we switch to the main wide lens, we see it’s cooler, the walls have better pattern definition and so does the ground. Because you don’t have a telephoto lens though, the zoom piggybacks of the main lens. I like the shots of humans too with the back camera, when properly adjusted it gets you desired results and of course portrait mode does fairly well with that background blur and as I said, you can adjust the blurriness of the background and the point of focus. I wanted to see how the macro mode performed so I took a wide image, then walked about 3 steps forward to take a very close up shot. Needless to say, you get to capture effects closer but it’s 2MP and that is a bit low in 2021.

Anyway, here’s a photo of a small chops plate I took. Let me know what you think in the comments below. Comment small chops if you’ve gotten this far in the video. At first I captured the video in Ultrawide angle and it had microshakes, and the main lens with shaky hands did stay stable because of the Ultra Steady feature but the feature only shoots in 1080p. While 4K was sharp and even significantly more colorful than 1080p shots, I did notice some shakes when I moved.

You will also notice the same thing when zoomed. Ultra steady also works on the front camera too, and it’s fair, this is how it looks, without it, your videos will definitely shake and jitter if you move fast. But exposure was maintained throughout the recording time. Let me know what you guys think about the camera quality overall in the comments below. The V21 is around 159 thousand naira or 318 dollars, while the V21e is around 120 thousand naira or 240 dollars.

I’ll put the price of the accurate naira and dollar price for the Vivo V21 in the pinned comment and description of this video. That’s it from me for now, if you do have any questions at all, feel free to ask me. Thank you for watching. I look forward to seeing you in the next one.

Source : Fisayo Fosudo