Design
The Vivo v21 5g has the same square camera bump and serious design language as many other offerings from Vivo. That’s partially due to the dusk blue color. And you can always go for sunset dazzle or arctic white if you want something more flashy. The back and frame are made of plastic, but it’s premium to the touch. It’s slim and easy to hold to though you should know that it’s not the easiest phone to keep clean. Sadly, there’s also no mention of IP rated protection or Gorilla Glass on the front.
On the front you’ll see a 6.4 inch amulet with a small notch of top and decently sized bezels that are average for the class. At least the fingerprint reader sits under the display and it works well to the screen has a 90 hertz refresh rate which we consider to be an entry level high refresh rate. Don’t get me wrong, though, it’s still a much smoother experience than sticking to 60 Hertz. You have three modes to choose from. The panel has HDR 10 Plus support and wide vine L one certification. There’s no Netflix HDR streaming yet but it might be in the works. The phone is more than usable outdoors. Thanks to the good 761 nits of brightness we got an auto mode.
Audio
There is a single speaker on the bottom of the phone which is a bit disappointing because we have been seeing stereo speakers more and more in this price range. It only got average loudness on our audio tests. But on the bright side it never got screechy and vocals and dialogue are crisp.
Battery
For today’s standard, the 4000 mAh battery isn’t super large, but it got an excellent 123 hours of endurance on our battery life tests. Charging is good too. And with the 33 Watt fast charger, you’ll get from zero to 64% in half an hour, which is around the speed that was advertised. For a full charge you’ll need an hour and five minutes.
Feature
The Vivo v 21. 5g runs fun touch 11.1 On top of Android 11. It’s one of the heavier skins out there at the moment that we didn’t notice any lagging. There is some bloat with all of the pre-installed apps, but you’ll also find a lot of extra features to explore and customization options. Some of that customization is all about the visuals with extensive theme support a lot of always-on display options, and the lock screen poster feature, and the multi turbo menu. You can also switch on the art plus the turbo option for faster app launching. The Ultra game mode has its own settings menu and one of the best features might be the option to turn off the display without needing to pause your game. The game center app acts primarily as a game store and gamespace is a launcher for all of the games you’ve downloaded. In short, there are a lot of gaming options here which while nice might not be of much use to most of the potential buyers of this phone.
Chipset
Considering the fact that the chipset isn’t super powerful. It’s the same MediaTek dimensity 800U 5g chipset you’ll find on the vanilla Vivo v 21. Its focus is more on power efficiency than performance. And unsurprisingly, it’s not the highest performer in this price range. That said it will be more than fine with most day-to-day tasks.
Camera
The 44-megapixel selfie camera is the highlight of this phone. But let’s start with the cameras on the back. The V21 5g has a 64-megapixel main camera with OIS and 8-megapixel ultra-wide camera and a 2-megapixel macro camera. During the day the main camera takes great photos with plenty of detail and little noise. The colors are vibrance but not overly so. However, the dynamic range could be wider and the sharpening can be heavy-handed on occasion. Two times zoom shots are cropped and upscale though the quality is good for the most part. You could even zoom in as far as five times and get usable images. Beyond that things get mushy.
