Vivo V50 review: A wallet trap for thirst traps

Note: This review was first published on 28 April 2025.

How much would you pay for a ring flash on your phone?

It feels like we tried out the Vivo V40 series just yesterday. With the V-series refreshed every six months, Vivo probably has a significant share of users upgrading with each new release, given that its owners have two chances a year to upgrade instead of just the usual one.

A frequent refresh cycle, however, usually means that upgrades are generally minimal, especially when yearly phone upgrades are already so incremental.

This is even more apparent with the new Vivo V50. There are very few changes between this model and the preceding V40 (news here). The phone has the same midrange Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 chip inside, which was released in November 2023 and has been used in both the Vivo V30 and V40 phones.

Vivo has also opted for LPDDR4X RAM and UFS 2.2 storage, both of which are older standards than the latest LPDDR5X and UFS 4.1 storage that can be found in today's midrange and flagship-lite phones.

TL;DR version:

Despite its IP ratings, excellent photography, and situational ring flash, the Vivo V50 desperately needs updated hardware when compared to competitive alternatives and even its predecessors.



The phone is available online at Lazada, Shopee, TikTok, and authorised retail partners including Challenger, Courts, Best Denki, and Harvey Norman.

Thankfully, Vivo has upgraded the phone’s durability with a new IP68 and IP69-rated dust and water resistance rating and a new Diamond Shield Glass protecting the display, offering 50% better drop resistance than the V40.

There’s also a larger 6,000mAh battery, 90W wired fast charging and an upgrade to the cameras and AI Aura Light Portrait 2.0 ring flash.

However, do the upgrades justify a price increase to S$699? Let’s find out. 

Sleek outside, same ol' inside

The pill-shaped camera bump on the rear returns with a slimmer profile, making the V50 look better than its predecessor. A glass back with a satin finish and a colour-matched camera bump complement this, giving the V50 a consistent design that rivals phones triple its price tag.

Of note is Ancora Red (pictured above), a special collaborative colour between Vivo and the Italian luxury brand Gucci. We've always felt that luxury partnerships with phone brands could afford to extend beyond accessories. Vivo V50 pulling this off on an actual phone signals a shift in how personal consumer tech is also perceived as an intimate statement piece within an everyday essential item.

The back glass is also curved slightly, which makes for a comfortable holding experience. Although the phone's glossy sides do retain fingerprints, the maroon-like colourway helps mask some of them. Luxury can be practical, too.

The satin finish offers additional texture and grip, making the phone less slippery despite its thin, lightweight design. 

The 6.77-inch 1.5K Flow AMOLED display (2,392 x 1,080 pixels resolution) is slightly downgraded from its past models (6.8-inch AMOLED display with 2,800 x 1,260 pixels resolution).

That said, the Vivo V50 retains a 60-120Hz refresh rate, support for HDR10+, and a 4,500-nit peak brightness. Under bright sunlight, the phone’s display is still very legible, with nice colours that aren’t washed out. The screen is flatter than the V40 and V30 models, and we get thin bezels all around.

A glaring omission on the Vivo V50 is the lack of eSIM support. Travellers carrying this phone must purchase a physical foreign SIM, rent pocket Wi-Fi, or use data roaming services if they need overseas coverage. These options are either more expensive or more cumbersome than using an eSIM, which is a disadvantage for the Vivo V50 and strange for a 2025 phone that's nearly S$700.

It also flies against the entire proposition of a portraiture-first phone camera: when travelling, you'll want a trusty phone that shoots amazing photos when you're sipping on beachy cocktails, eating fresh snow that's stuck in your long, luscious locks of hair, or when you're in the middle of a street obstructing traffic with your face card and a deliberately nonchalant pose. Instead, you're burdened with expending extra time, space, or money, just to make sure your Vivo V50 has the overseas connectivity to upload these snaps to your Instagram.

On the software side, we get Vivo’s Funtouch OS 15 reskin of Android 15. It's generally serviceable, with updates frequently pushed over the air. We didn’t encounter any lag or large bugs during our testing. Google Gemini is pre-installed and automatically set as the device’s default assistant, which is nice.

It's also relatively light on bloatware. By default, the phone offers one folder of Recommended Apps and a few other pre-installed ones, which is not ideal from first impressions. Fortunately, seven out of the 10 pre-installed apps (Facebook, Netflix, Agoda, Lazada, Shopee, TikTok, and LinkedIn) are relevant and functional, so we don't think it's as egregious as nonsense games and perpetual advertising notifications.

Users can expect three years of major Android OS updates and four years of security updates, which is expected for a phone with only half a year's grace to stay new and fresh.

Imaging performance

The Vivo V50 comes with the following cameras:

• 50MP main camera, f/1.9 aperture, 1/1.55-inch OmniVision OV50E sensor, 1.0µm, PDAF, OIS
• 50MP ultrawide, f/2.0 aperture, 1/2.76-inch Samsung ISOCELL S5KJN1 (JN1) sensor
• 50MP selfie, f/2.0, 1/2.76-inch Samsung ISOCELL S5KJN1 (JN1)

We’ve already covered the Vivo V50’s imaging chops in our hands-on. We maintain our opinions even after extended testing. The Vivo V50’s cameras perform admirably in well-lit conditions, with nice colour rendition, excellent sharpness and good contrast.

Your photos will turn out differently depending on whether you’re using the ZEISS-branded Natural, Textured or Vivid colour presets. Of the three, we liked the Natural preset most.

All three lenses come with ZEISS optics, and if you’re wondering how the two companies collaborate on this, check out our visit to ZEISS headquarters here.

As mentioned, the cameras perform well in brightly lit scenes, with good detail retention and vibrant colours. There’s a 2x toggle for a digital crop, and the images taken are nice and sharp as well. Portrait shots are also excellent, with sharp detail retention and gorgeous bokeh swirls thanks to the Zeiss-style bokeh options found in the Portrait mode.

Vivo has managed to keep the colouration largely consistent across the main and ultrawide cameras, which is good. There’s a tiny bit of fisheye distortion, which can be corrected in post.

Low-light shots are pretty decent, particularly since there’s the AI Aura Light Portrait 2.0 ring flash to help illuminate subjects if needed. Here, image stabilisation plays a huge role in getting clean and sharp photos, so don't be shy with its built-in ring light (you paid for it anyway).

Benchmark performance 

There’s little to say about the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 chip inside the Vivo V50 since we’ve seen it in both the V30 and V40. It's also on entry-level to midrange phones like the Honor 200. To get a better sense of Vivo V50's performance value, we'll pit it against its preceding V30 and other competitors with a similar price tag from recent times.

Putting it to the test

To find out how the competitors line up specs and price-wise, check them out in this link.

To find out more about the tests we conduct and what they relate to, we've jotted them down here.

Benchmark Performance remarks

Just as expected, we see very similar performance figures between the Vivo V50 and V30, since both phones run the same chip. The V50 performs on par with competitors like the Nothing Phone (3a) Pro and Honor 200, although it’s worth nothing that the V50 is more expensive than both competitors when comparing prices for the same 12GB+256GB model.

Other phones that are close to its price tag with newer components like the Honor 200 Pro, Xiaomi 14T Pro and the Poco F7 Pro all had significant differences in performance while costing, at most, S$100 more. We're also mindful that Vivo V50 saw a price increase, further diluting the overall value on top of its lower display quality from before.

That said, a tried-and-tested processor also meant that  the phone generally runs fine with normal daily usage. Some apps take an extra second or two to load when opened, but games run fine if you do not expect to play them on the highest settings. 

Battery Life

Our battery benchmark uses PCMark for Android’s Work 3.0 Battery Life test to determine a modern Android-based smartphone's battery uptime in minutes. This controlled benchmark simulates real-world usage with a combination of both web and social media browsing, video and photo editing, parsing data with various file formats, writing (on documents), and more.

The Vivo V50’s 6,000mAh battery performed impressively, no doubt thanks to the large capacity. However, it's worth remembering that the extra uptime you get against Poco F7 Pro comes at the cost of half of Poco's performance.

With the included 90W wired charging adapter, the Vivo V50 took about 23 minutes to go from 0% to 50% and 50 minutes to get a full 100% charge. It’s fast even by flagship-tier standards, but unlike true flagship devices, it lacks wireless charging.

Conclusion

Our overall thoughts on the Vivo V50 echo most of our sentiments from the previous V30 review. Vivo's V-series has always been priced slightly higher than other midrange options because of its unique camera set and complementary features essential to selfie-first users.

However, the value proposition has dropped significantly over the last 1.5 years. Aside from minor camera upgrades, there haven’t been many hardware updates. The display even took a small step backwards. As tech geeks, we cannot (in good faith) tell the hottest girl in the building that they should settle for less, especially seeing how some of them already choose their partners.

We contend that Vivo V50 has two things going for it: long battery life and good photography chops. Sadly, it's up against one of the most competitive price brackets for phones. The midrange category is incredibly saturated, with alternatives like Nothing Phone (3a) Pro or the Xiaomi 14T Pro both having excellent battery life, better hardware, decent cameras, and comparable IP ratings for protection. Poco's F7 Pro and its F7 Ultra also offer performance beyond what the Vivo V50 could scrounge together.

With Vivo V50 asking for S$699 to give you 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, it falls short against comparable devices that are either priced lower and have more modern components or against phones that offer double the performance or storage for just an extra S$100. All these are important considerations to photo-taking, and that's not even taking the lack of eSIM into account yet.

Perhaps its saving grace is that its direct rival, OPPO Reno13 Pro, is much more expensive and has far more bloatware. Vivo V50 isn't the worst option for selfie phones, but the lack of upgrades still does no favours.

The brand might be able to push users to get the V50 because of its ring flash. However, you'd likely get lighting help unless you travel alone. The flash is practical for livestreaming content creators or someone who eats, lives, and breathes in dark venues. Most influencers with day jobs, or those who shoot content in daytime conditions, don't fall within this niche.

The Vivo V50 might be a decent pick up if you only care about how well it takes selfies and enjoy the presets offered right out of the camera. If you want a better deal, you might have to wait until Vivo bothers to upgrade its baseline V-series phones.

The Vivo V50 is available in a single 12GB+256GB configuration in Singapore, priced at S$699, available in Ancora Red and Satin Black. You can get it online at Lazada, Shopee, TikTok, and authorised retail partners including Challenger, Courts, Best Denki, and Harvey Norman.