Vivo V29 Pro
Like each and every smartphone, the Vivo V29 Pro has its misses. For example, the battery is a hit and miss and there are no stereo speakers. Furthermore, the design makes the smartphone feel very delicate in your hands, and as always, the FunTouch OS software isn’t the most fun to use. But still, after reviewing the V-series smartphones for the past 4 generations constantly, this Vivo V29 Pro feels like the most complete V-series smartphones so far.
So Vivo is back with yet another V-series smartphone. The Vivo V29 series is now complete with the Vivo V29 and Vivo V29 Pro. Very recently, I had reviewed the Vivo V29e, which came as a rather expensive offering in terms of performance, but justified the value in other aspects. Now, this has been the case with Vivo’s V-series of smartphones in the last couple of years, but with the previous generation (Vivo V27 series), performance was taken care of and how.
In comes the Vivo V29 series. With not much to improve, the Vivo V29 Pro focuses on something that no other device has focused on so far – lighting. Yes, as important as it may be, we have hardly seen anything fascinating coming from brands to give people features that will not only help them improve their mobile photography, but also the lighting. Now, I have been testing the Vivo V29 Pro for a while and so far, I have been quite pleased with the smartphone. In this review, I will tell you what I like about the Vivo V29 Pro, what I don’t like about the smartphone and if you should spend your Rs 39,999 on this new smartphone.
Like always, the design of the Vivo V29 Pro remains in-line with other V-series devices that we have seen. In fact, the V29 Pro looks pretty much the same as the predecessor, the Vivo V27 Pro, with only minor differences. Now that isn’t supposedly a bad thing, since both the Vivo V29 Pro and even the previous V27 Pro are both very good looking smartphones. We get a nice curved glass front and back. This time around, Vivo has toned down the whole “colour changing” aspect, and instead, the company is trying new things with the back panel.
This year, the hero colour of the Vivo V29 Pro is the blue one we got for our review. This colour is inspired by the Himalayan range. Using 3D particle technology, Vivo has given this nice pattern on the back panel which is ingrained inside the glass back and shifts shape when we move the back panel against light. Looks good.
Apart from this, things remain largely same. The camera module design is similar. This time, we have an added LED flash module along with the Smart Aura Light in the camera module, and only one colour has the colour-changing AG Glass implementation this time around. Up front, we get the simple hole-punch implementation on the curved AMOLED display, which is something we have come to get used to seeing the last couple of Vivo-V series smartphones.
Overall, this remains a safe design approach from Vivo. There aren’t any drastic changes in terms of the form factor and shape, but minor enhancements like the new back panel design and the slightly changed camera module to incorporate the Smart Aura Light.
The display on the Vivo V29 Pro, like its predecessors, is great. This AMOLED panel is very responsive, colour accurate, and bright enough to use in as bright an environment as the world throws at you.
I put the smartphone’s colours and brightness to test and the results were nothing short of impressive. In the colour checker analysis, the Vivo V29 Pro showcased a DeltaE of 2, which is great for a smartphone, since this indicates that the colours you see on this display are close to actual colours. The lower a display’s DeltaE is, the more accurate the colours are. For smartphones, a DeltaE of 3 or below is considered very good, so 2 is brilliant.
In terms of brightness, the smartphone is claimed to have a peak brightness of 1,300 nits. I used a Lux Meter to measure the smartphone’s luminance and under bright sun, on a white display, the Vivo V29 Pro showcased a peak luminance of 722 nits and 8 nits of minimum luminance. This is pretty good for a smartphone in this range, since sunlight visibility is not an issue at all with the Vivo V29 Pro.
Furthermore, with 120Hz refresh rate, this display is also as smooth as it gets. The display is super responsive and feels absolutely slick while swiping through menus and feeds. Good experience. You can also adjust the refresh rate of this display to 60Hz or use Vivo’s “Smart Switch” feature which adjusts the refresh rate according to the content on the screen. The Vivo V29 Pro also gives users the option to enable high refresh rate for each app separately, which is great since many apps don’t support high refresh rate by default.
Coming to the biggest improvement that we saw in the Vivo V-series earlier this year, performance. Now, while the improvement was substantial from the Vivo V25 Pro to the V27 Pro, it isn’t as much this time around. In fact, the Vivo V29 Pro uses the same MediaTek Dimensity 8200 chip that we also saw in the Vivo V27 Pro and even the iQOO Neo 7. But again, is that all that bad? Not really.
Given the same chip, the performance numbers on the Vivo V29 Pro and Vivo V27 Pro are pretty much the same. But then again, the Vivo V27 Pro itself has sufficient might to be able to handle all kinds of tasks for all kinds of users. Be it a gamer or a casual user, the Vivo V29 Pro is still powerful enough to be able to run heavy tasks smoothly. Here is a graph to give you a hint about the performance as compared to some other devices in this range.
Even in GPU-based tests, the Vivo V29 Pro does pretty well, coming ahead of many competing devices in the range. However, much to my surprise, the Vivo V29 Pro came behind the predecessor, the Vivo V27 Pro in terms of GPU benchmarks, which is a bit surprising since I was expecting a better GPU performance in the more newer device which also has a lot more going in the camera space as well.
Coming to battery, the backup on the Vivo V29 Pro is disappointing. The smartphone drains battery a bit too quickly in certain situations. For example, during a 15 minutes session of Call of Duty: Mobile, the smartphone managed battery well and only dropped 4 percent. But on the other hand, during our video loop test where we run a 4K video on loop, the smartphone lasted about 328 minutes (roughly 5.5 hours), which is probably the least we have seen on any mid-range device this year.
Now while the 4,600mAh battery kind of lags behind in terms of offering a proper backup, the 66W fast charging acts as a pretty good saving grace as it took just about 44 minutes to charge from 0 to 100 percent, which is great.
Coming to the hero of the story – the camera. As mentioned above, this is the first smartphone to not only offer a superb camera performance, but also take care of lighting at the same time. The Vivo V29 Pro offers the most amount of camera features on any smartphone in this segment.
This time around, we get a triple rear camera setup. There is a 50-megapixel primary shooter, a 12-megapixel telephoto lens, and an 8-megapixel ultrawide angle lens. Up front, we get a nice 50-megapixel selfie shooter. This time around, Vivo has gone a step further in terms of enhancing users’ photography game with the new Smart Aura Light.
Now, we have seen an Aura Light on Vivo and iQOO smartphones this year. However, with the Vivo V29 Pro, the company has taken a step in the right direction, and offered something no one has thought of yet. This Smart Aura Light can change colours from cool to warm in order to give users that perfect shot when the lighting is too loud or too inconsistent or even too low. Here are a few before and after shots of how the new Smart Aura Light helps you tackle loud lighting.
Coming to other things, the primary shooter is as good as Vivo phones have come to be known. The photos are sharp, detailed, and showcase a very good dynamic range. Even in low light conditions, the Vivo V29 Pro performs nicely. There is very minimal light flare, and the primary camera manages shadows and light very well in low light.
The portraits are also brilliant. The edge detection is spot on and the background blur is on point at most times. The telephoto lens does well in terms of offering more perspectives while taking portraits, and there are many other styles and modes for users to play around with. My favourite Wedding style portraits have also made their way on the new Vivo V29 Pro, and with the new Smart Aura Light, I can easily play around with the light. Give a bit of red when the subject is too dark, or maybe cut out the blue light in the background to make my subject stand out! Super useful.
With wide-angle, the images aren’t consistent. This means that there is a difference in the colour science of the images taken from the primary and wide angle lenses. Yes, when compared to the primary shooter, the images from this wide-agnle look a bit dull, but if I look at the wide-angle images by themself, they seem quite decent. In low lights, however, the wide angle shooter struggles to match up to the sharpness and detail that the primary camera can put out, but still the results are workable most of the time.
So yes, while the Vivo V-series is known for its brilliant camera, the Vivo V29 Pro still brings a host of improvements and additions to the camera, all of which work quite well and are pretty useful in day-to-day usage.
So the Vivo V29 Pro is probably the most complete V-series smartphone from Vivo so far. The smartphone is as beautiful as previous V-series smartphones. The display is as good as it can be on a premium mid-range smartphone, and the camera remains great, something Vivo’s V-series of smartphones has come to be known for, still with an improvement this time around. The company also takes care of something that has been missing from Vivo’s V-series – performance. The MediaTek Dimensity 8200 chip is great and gives the smartphone enough juice to take on whatever comes its way.
There are misses, yes. For example, the battery is a hit and miss and there are no stereo speakers. Furthermore, the design makes the smartphone feel very delicate in your hands, and as always, the FunTouch OS software isn’t the most fun to use. But still, after reviewing the V-series smartphones for the past 4 generations constantly, this Vivo V29 Pro feels like the most complete V-series smartphones so far.
