Vivo X100 Review: Camera Specialist

Much of the design innovation these days can be seen in the foldable space, while the traditional slab form factor is all about the big screen at the front and big camera bump at the back. The Vivo X100 sticks to this idea, but with a few interesting quirks all around. The front camera is at the centre and not on the somewhat more popular corner spot, while the camera module gets a bit of a crescent moon-like border. 

In all other ways, the Vivo X100 is fairly straightforward to look at, although you might prefer the light blue colour and patterned texture of this review unit as compared to the matte black of the Vivo X100 Pro. The smartphone is IP68 rated for water resistance, but the real USPs of the Vivo X100 kick off a little bit after your first look.

The all-screen look means that we can now have big screens in a manageable overall size factor, and the Vivo X100 utilises this appropriately. You get a 6.78-inch 2.5D curved AMOLED 8T LTPO display with a resolution of 2800x1260 pixels (20:9 ratio) and a refresh rate of 120Hz - all pretty much expected from a device of this stature. The LTPO display offers better energy efficiency thanks to its ability to trigger the 1Hz refresh rate on more scenes than before.

Expectedly, there’s an in-display fingerprint sensor on the Vivo X100, along with a factory-fitted screen protector film. The resolution and refresh rate can be adjusted at the software level for better power consumption, but I’d recommend sticking to the full capabilities for best results - it’s a clean, well-calibrated screen that’s immensely capable after all.

The Vivo X100 series is among the earliest entrants in India with the new MediaTek Dimensity 9300 chipset, and both the X100 and X100 Pro come with it. Depending on the variant of the X100 that you pick up, this comes paired with either 12GB or 16GB of RAM, and 256GB or 512GB of storage. Giving the X100 its photography chops is also the V2 pro imaging chip, handling some of the complex image processing dedicatedly.

You also get a stereo speaker setup, support for Bluetooth 5.4 at the chipset level, and the three-camera setup at the back paired with the single-camera setup at the front. I’ll go into greater detail on that a bit later in the review, though.

Other useful specifications worth pointing out include a 5,000mAh battery, USB Type-C fast charging at up to 120W when using Vivo’s included charger, and Wi-Fi 7 compatibility. There are a couple of key differences between the X100 and the X100 Pro to mention; there are two nano SIM slots but no support for eSIM on the X100, and there’s no support for wireless charging.

Greater levels of standardisation on Android in recent times means that the overall software experience is a lot more uniform, regardless of which smartphone brand and specific fork you choose. The Vivo X100 has Funtouch OS 14, which is based on Android 14 (we’re on the letter U for Upside Down Cake, for those of you who still think of Android versions as dessert). Icons, widgets, and the app drawer are laid out nicely, and you can switch to the iOS-style layout with no app drawer if you choose.

Unfortunately, Vivo doesn’t offer a completely clean and bloat-free user interface, and there are a handful of apps and bloatware that can’t be uninstalled or even disabled. Annoying pop-ups tend to appear at odd times, such as from the unavoidable and extremely intrusive V-Appstore poorly recommending more apps every time I installed a new app from the Google Play Store.

Most of the features of Funtouch 14 are geared around the visual experience, although some such as fast boot, screen mirroring privacy, and album encryption might come in handy. On the whole, it isn’t exceptional, but it isn’t too bad either, although the positives are more to the credit of Android 14 itself rather than Vivo’s Funtouch fork.

Vivo’s X-series smartphones are camera-focused of course, but the triple-camera setup lets the device go a bit beyond standard photography. Interestingly, there’s are a few difference between the Vivo X100 and the X100 Pro in the camera department, but everyday users are unlikely to see too much of a difference in regular use cases. Essentially, the main camera sensor and telephoto sensor are different, with the Vivo X100 featuring slightly toned-down equipment. You also get the V2 pro imaging chip, which was introduced on last year’s X90 Pro.

You get a 50-megapixel main camera with optimisations by Zeiss, a 64-megapixel 70mm telephoto camera that can do 3X of optical zoom and also backs up the portrait mode with reduced distance constraints, and a 50-megapixel ultra-wide angle camera. 

There are a few other software-related tweaks and capabilities as well, such as cinematic portrait mode, multi-focal portrait shots, night mode for photos and video, and astro mode, which helps identify stars, constellations, and planets while using AI to enhance the image. Artificial intelligence enhancements play a big part here, and largely do a good job on the Vivo X100.

Perhaps my favourite photo mode on the Vivo X100 is the telephoto mode. The 3X optical zoom gets you far enough in zooming into distant details, but you can go all the way up to 100X digitally if you like. I found that pictures were actually pretty good at even around 10x in daylight conditions, with the image stabilisation working impressively to keep the camera steady for a clean shot.

Portrait mode works reasonably well on its own without much human effort, standard and ultra-wide angle shots look accurate in most conditions including at night, and most of the AI modes are subtle in the ways that they enhance the images. The only mode I really had an issue with was the specific night mode, which managed to distinguish between sky and everything else fairly well, but gave the sky an unnatural shade of blue that looked quite obviously artificial, purely to make the picture pop a bit more. I found the regular camera much more colour-accurate and detailed in these scenarios.

The Vivo X100 isn’t quite as capable as the X100 Pro, but don’t let that get you down. It packs in most of the capabilities as its Pro sibling save for just a couple of ‘cherry-on-top’ perks, and does so at a considerably more affordable price. It’s the classic flagship (but not Pro flagship) experience that will probably work for most buyers save for the most picky.

This is a camera phone at its heart, but doesn’t really hold back in other departments such as performance, battery life, and screen quality. Get the Vivo X100 if your budget is under Rs. 70,000 and you intend to take a lot of quirky pictures. You might want the 12GB RAM/256GB storage variant for Rs. 63,999, but consider future-proofing yourself with 16GB RAM and 512GB for Rs. 69,999 instead - it's worth it in the long run.