Vivo X Fold 3 Pro review
After teasing us for a good 3 years, Vivo has finally brought its foldable series of smartphones to India! The Vivo X Fold 3 Pro is the first foldable from Vivo to make it to the Indian market and it is safe to say that I was super excited to try out this smartphone.
Now ever since foldables have become a reality, I have had a bit of a mixed opinion about them. While they are great multitasking devices, they are not very convenient to use or carry. My last experience using a foldable as my primary was with the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3 back in 2021.
Back then, I didn’t quite like the whole form factor. The front screen was a bit too thin to be used as a proper smartphone, and the sandwich form factor (when folded) was too thick to carry around. But then, I used the OnePlus Open for a bit last year and that smartphone completely changed my perception in terms of the usability of a foldable as a glass-slab smartphone. But then again, the bulk remained.
The Vivo X Fold 3 Pro, however, goes a step ahead and takes good care of the whole bulk and thickness. It is slimmer than many glass slab smartphones when closed, it has a front screen that can be used as a conventional smartphone, and along with that, we get Vivo’s camera trickery in collaboration with Zeiss which I have become a big fan of over the last couple of years.
So yes, the Vivo X Fold 3 Pro was naturally one of the devices that lured me into putting my SIM in it and since the last few days, I have been using it as my primary smartphone. And boy, do I have some thoughts. So without much further ado, let’s get into it:
Like always, I will let the Vivo X Fold 3 Pro’s design take the lead. While my intro to this review gave a hint into what I think about the design, let’s talk in a bit more detail. First and foremost, the form factor. Like I said, this is the slimmest foldable smartphone out there. Even when folded, with both sides sandwiched together, the Vivo X Fold 3 Pro is slimmer than many conventional glass slab smartphones, which is pretty much a game changer in the foldable smartphone space.
At about 11mm thick when folded. Notice that a folded phone is almost like two sandwiched glass slab smartphones. The Vivo X Fold 3 Pro is very easy to use and it fits in my pockets very comfortably. Not once did it feel like I had something bigger than a smartphone in my pocket. Something I have felt with each and every foldable that I have used so far. Unfolded, this smartphone is only 5.2mm thick. This is even thinner than the latest M4 iPad Pro from Apple, which is being called one of the slimmest devices ever. Yes, the 5.2mm thickness does make the smartphone feel very fragile when using it in the unfolded form, but I got used to it very quickly.
Now let’s talk about when the smartphone is folded. Here, it gives a similar in-hand feel to a normal smartphone. The aspect ratio is still thinner than a proper conventional smartphone, but it’s negligible and everything works as it would on a regular glass slab device. The screen is curved, but it curves slightly more on the right side of the screen. At the back, it takes the X-series design language with the large Zeiss-branded circular camera module at the back and a frosted glass back panel.
Over and above, we are also getting IPX8 water resistance with the Vivo X Fold 3 Pro along with Schott Xensation scratch resistance at the front. So yes, there is a certain level of durability as well.
So the design of the Vivo X Fold 3 Pro is good. It is well thought of and it is quite a refined take on a foldable smartphone in terms of the design. It is slim, easy to use and fit in pockets, which itself is a pretty decent feat. There are no gaps and the hinge feels super durable (Vivo has used carbon fiber to make it light and rigid at the same time). Yes, it does feels fragile when unfolded. Yes, the round camera module doesn’t look the most aesthetic, but those seem to be nitpickings given how well everything else works and looks in the design department.
Coming to the display, first I will talk about the front panel. This is a 6.53-inch AMOLED panel with a 120Hz refresh rate and an FHD+ resolution. The display also supports most HDR formats like HDR 10+, Dolby Vision, and more. Now, on the face, the outer display is as good as any other flagship. It is bright, it is sharp, and it is super responsive.
Coming to the more geeky stuff, this display is also extremely colour accurate. In our colour checker test, the Vivo X Fold 3 Pro showcased an average Delta E of 0.8, which means that the error is only 0.8, meaning that the colours represented by this display are very close to the actual colours. The lower the Delta E, the more accurate the colour representation. A Delta E of under 3 is considered good for smartphones so this is brilliant.
In our greyscale test, the Vivo X Fold 3 Pro’s outer display showcased good balance. It tracked gamma 2.2 very consistently while displaying a good RGB balance. The blue is slightly blown up as compared to the red and green.
Coming to the inner foldable display, it is also bleeding edge in terms of the specifications. We get an 8-inch LTPO AMOLED display with a 120Hz refresh rate. The Vivo X Fold 3 Pro’s main display also supports all HDR formats like HDR10+ and Dolby Vision. The display is also very smooth and responsive. Of course, being a UTG (Ultra-thin glass), it isn’t as vibrant as the outer display, but that’s not always bad.
In terms of the colour accuracy, this is as accurate as the outer display. Here also, I got a DeltaE of 0.8, which showcases the colour representation capabilities of this display. Along with that, the Greyscale results are also very good and in-line with the display tuning that Vivo has done on the outer display (graph below).
In the day-to-day also, both displays on the Vivo X Fold 3 Pro are very good. Be it watching videos on YouTube, or movies and TV shows on platforms like Amazon Prime or Netflix, the experience is immaculate. Of course, the main foldable display’s aspect ratio is never matched, so we get thick black borders both on top and bottom. You can watch HDR content on all major platforms, so the details in movies and TV shows are as good as it can be on a smartphone. Plus, we get the option of a bigger screen, even though it comes with thick black borders.
Performance-wise, the Vivo X Fold 3 Pro comes with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset paired with 16GB RAM and 512GB internal storage. The performance is good. Of course, this is a flagship so we are getting enough power and might with this smartphone to run all apps and games. Even multi-tasking is effortless on this device. You may be operating two apps or five apps at once, but the experience is exactly the same.
In benchmarks also, the Vivo X Fold 3 Pro showcased its might. The smartphone scored over 2 million points on AnTuTu. In Geekbench, the smartphone performed much better than I expected, with a single core score of 2061 and a multi-core score of 6259. This is higher than most flagships of 2024 including the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, the OnePlus 12, and the likes. The Vivo X Fold 3 Pro, however, fell just short of its smaller sibling, the Vivo X100 Pro.
In GPU benchmarks, the story is slightly different. While it matches up to all competitors in terms of the numbers, the Vivo X Fold 3 Pro fell short as compared to some competing devices like Xiaomi 14, Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, OnePlus 12, and the likes. This is in benchmarks like 3D Mark Wildlife Extreme and GFXBench.
Now, coming to how the smartphone performs. I absolutely loved multitasking on the Vivo X Fold 3 Pro. And despite my disliking of Vivo’s FunTouch OS, this smartphone has many features and optimisations that other foldables can also use. My favourite one of them is the “flex for split-screen” feature. This allows you to easily switch to split screen when using any app. All you have to do is flex your screen twice to send one app to the left side, then choose the other app to get a split-screen view.
Then again, Vivo has also optimised some of the most common apps to work seamlessly on the bigger screen, which is a great move. Having Instagram optimised for a larger screen is a great thing and does make the experience that bit more improved (as compared to other folds). However, there are a few bugs here and there like if I open an app in the bigger screen, switching to the smaller screen cuts the app a little bit. On top of that, there are the browser and V-app store notifications which are just annoying if you don’t turn them off (thank god there is an option).
While we are at performance, it is also important to mention the storage speeds, which have been one of the highest on the Vivo X Fold 3 Pro so far. The smartphone uses a UFS 4.0 storage, which makes data transfer much faster.
Coming to battery, this smartphone also has a large 5,700mAh battery. The battery backup is great. The bigger battery unit has definitely worked well as the Vivo X Fold 3 Pro easily lasts about a day and a half, even on heavy usage. During my brief time with the device, I’m easily getting over 7 hours of on-screen time on a single charge after using both screens here and there. This is great battery life for the device.
Coming to more objective stuff, the Vivo X Fold 3 Pro only lost 4 percent of the battery while streaming an HDR video in 2160p resolution on YouTube for 30 minutes. A 15-minute gaming session of Call Of Duty: Mobile only drained 4 percent of the battery, and GPS navigation for 1 hour lost 5 amount of battery on the Vivo X Fold 3 Pro. In my charging test, the Vivo X Fold 3 Pro charged from 0 to 100 in 39 minutes, thanks to the 100W fast charging support.
The battery is actually very good on the Vivo X Fold 3 Pro. Even on like a 50 percent battery, the smartphone easily lasts with me for a whole work day at least. Even the last 1 percent lasts forever. Similar to the Oppo Find X7 Ultra, the last 1 percent on the Vivo X Fold 3 Pro last enough for you to comfortably reach a charger while using the device. It was difficult to kill the battery on this smartphone after the last 1%, basically. Amazing.
Camera is where Vivo has not disappointed me in the last couple of years at least. The Vivo X Fold 3 Pro is also similar. We are getting a flagship-level triple rear camera setup with the critically-acclaimed Zeiss collaboration. If you have read my review of the Vivo X100 Pro, you will have an idea about the features offered by Zeiss and Vivo and how much I like them. But if you haven’t, I’ll tell you.
First and foremost, there are two colour profiles that you can use – Zeiss Natural and Zeiss Vibrant, where the natural tone give a more true-to-life colour to the photos, and the “vibrant” tone makes the colours more vibrant.
Then come the Zeiss optics like the multi-focal portraits or the portrait styles like Biotar or Sonnar or Cine Flare, or more. In this smartphone, the collab with Zeiss goes as deep as the last two flagships from Vivo.
Before I tell you how the camera performs, let’s get the specifications out of the way. We are getting a triple rear camera setup with the Vivo X Fold 3 Pro. There is a primary 50-megapixel shooter, a 64-megapixel periscope telephoto shooter, and a 50-megapixel ultrawide angle lens. There are two front cameras on the Vivo X Fold 3 Pro, one on the outer display and one on the main display. Both are 32-megapixel shooters with similar quality.
Now while we are getting features that are similar to the Vivo X100 Pro flagship, does the X Fold 3 Pro’s camera also perform similarly? Short answer is no. While it is a very good camera, it isn’t as good as the Vivo X100 Pro.
Yes, there are a lot of things similar, but the quality of images isn’t the best. For example, I felt that there is a lot of smoothening happening with faces. Even in portraits, where the Vivo X100 Pro is one of the best smartphones out there, the Vivo X Fold 3 Pro smoothens the skin. Not that the portraits are bad, even turning the beauty filter all the way down does smoothen the skins a little bit, but it’s not a deal breaker. The portraits are still very good, just the tuning isn’t as perfected as the Vivo X100 Pro.
Further, I felt that the processing takes a bit long. Here also, portraits are the ones that take the most amount of time. But then again, once the processing is done, the results are outstanding.
Now that we are done with the criticism, it’s time to show you what this camera does well. Apart from the things mentioned above, it does everything pretty well. The details are prominent. Low light photos are brilliant. Photos from the wide angle shooter are also good in terms of details and colours and there is consistency between the two in ideal lighting conditions. In low light, the ultra-wide doesn’t showcase the same level of quality. One thing that impressed me that even in low light situations like the city street, there is not a lot of flare and the camera still ekes out details like the clouds which aren’t usually visible above city lights.
The photos from the primary shooter and telephoto are amazing, as usual. I really enjoyed clicking photos on this smartphone – be it clicking a scenery in 1x or be it clicking something that’s afar with 10x optical zoom. It may not be the best Vivo camera but it is exactly as fun as using any other Vivo flagship camera.
Why I think the quality isn’t up to the standard Vivo has set itself could be because the brand is using Ominvison lenses as compared to the Sony lenses in other X-series smartphones. Further, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip could also not be tuned to Vivo’s requirements, something we have seen the MediaTek Dimensity 9300 ace in the previous X-series flagship from Vivo that I have used.
Nevertheless, the photos are very good in every focal lengths. Despite the smoothening, the portraits look straight out of a professional camera, and we get all the Zeiss smarts that we have come to know in the last few years with Vivo smartphones, especially flagships. It is safe to say that this is the best foldable camera so far.
So that was the Vivo X Fold 3 Pro. It is the most refined foldable that I have used so far. It is easy to hold and grip, it has a brilliant display both inside and out, and it is very powerful at the same time. Couple of things that I didn’t like in terms of performance and how the phone functions are firstly, I don’t like the whole look and feel of Vivo’s FunTouch OS (that is my personal preference, I’m sure many users prefer this) and secondly, I found the Vivo X Fold 3 Pro heats up often.
Apart from that, we are getting an extremely sleek and refined foldable experience. Add to that one of the great camera setups out there and we have a winner. I am using the Vivo X Fold 3 Pro as my primary and I don’t think that will change anytime soon since it is no different than using a glass slab phone when folded and when unfolded, it is nothing short of a multi-tasking beast!
