Vivo X60 Pro Review | Zeiss camera phone plus built-in gimbal!

So yeah, the Vivo X60 Pro certainly ain't cheap at 750 quid here in the UK. It's more expensive than some rivals like the OnePlus 9 and about the same cost as Xiaomi's Mi 11 and the Samsung Galaxy S21—some pretty tasty competition there. But the question is: if you chucked all of these phones into some kind of bizarre smartphone thunderdome, would the Vivo X60 Pro stand any chance at all? Well, to find out, I slid my SIM card in this bad boy. I've had my Vivo X60 Pro going on full-time for the last week or so. Here's my in-depth review.

Design & Build

The smart design definitely warms the cockles of my heart. It's nothing revolutionary for sure, but the Vivo X60 Pro does look neat and tidy, with two curved plates of glass separated only by a very slender strip of metal. The smartphone's got a good heft to it, but it's not as heavy as some other premium smartphones like that Mi 11, and it is reasonably slim to boot despite the jutting camera lens. The rear is constructed from AG glass, where the AG stands for anti-glare, and in Vivo's words this gives a lovely satin finish to the Vivo X60 Pro. I certainly do like the pearl-like finish to this smartphone; it's got a very soft-touch feel, so it feels really nice in the hand. It is all about that hand feel, and best of all it does a pretty bloody good job of repelling any greasy prints and the like as well. Thank God.

The Vivo X60 Pro can be grabbed in Midnight Black or Shimmer Blue. This is the shimmery one, and I do like that subtle iridescent finish—the suggestion of colors waiting to burst forth from just beneath the surface. Touch wood, the Vivo X60 Pro seems perfectly durable as well. It has been banged about a fair bit this past week; no scratches or scuffs to speak of on the back end, and you've got a pre-installed screen protector over that front glass as well.

However, a feature that I did really miss here on the Vivo X60 Pro this past week was the lack of water resistance, which is a real shame. That means you can't rock it in the shower checking your emails first thing in the morning, you can't take it in a nice hot bubbly bath to relax with your favorite ridiculously violent anime—and that is a feature that you will find on a lot of rivals at this price point.

Software & Features

When you switch on the Vivo X60 Pro, your eyeballs will be met with the merry display of Android 11 enveloped lovingly by Vivo's Funtouch Launcher. Yes, that's the Funtouch Launcher. Funtouch doesn't mess about with the standard Android design or aesthetics, but it does add quite a few worthy bonus features and gestures. For instance, you can swipe up with three fingers on a supported app to split the screen and multitask with two apps at a time. You can also long-press the volume-down button in order to launch up the camera or another app of your choosing. There's also a nifty one-handed mode which is slightly awkward to call up, but it's definitely useful, as reaching to the top end of that screen can really put your thumb out of joint. You can even use that camera flash as a kind of notification light, although there is the usual edge lighting and shenanigans for any incoming calls and other notifications—fully customizable, lots of different options that you can choose from.

Rounded off the general features: you've got a generous 256 GB of UFS 3.1 nice-and-nippy storage crammed into the Vivo X60 Pro. Just as well, because there's no microSD memory-card support for expanding it. I also had absolutely bugger-all issues with the in-display fingerprint sensor—nice and nippy and responsive, definitely one of the better ones that I've used. You've also got full face-unlock support on here as well, which again is nice and nippy.

Display & Audio

Like other handsets of this sort of price, you've got an AMOLED screen that curves slightly around the edges, giving that premium feel with very skinny bezels to frame it. The Vivo X60 Pro's panel is a 6.56-inch Ultra O Samsung screen, hence the centrally positioned selfie orifice. It's not big, but it does intrude on the action when you go full-screen. No complaints on those Full HD+ visuals with full HDR10+ streaming support for Netflix and the rest. Color accuracy veers towards natural by default, although you can boost those colors in the display settings if you like. It's a 120 Hz display, so flicking around in the general UI and using supported apps is definitely very, very buttery smooth indeed, and there is a Smart Switch option so you can have it flip automatically between 60 and 120 when needed.

As for the audio, well, it's a basic mono-speaker setup, and as usual that's very easily muffled while you're gaming or busy kicking back watching a video. With a good bit of Bluetooth 5.1 support, I found that wireless streaming was absolutely perfect for music, audiobooks, whatever you want. You do have Hi-Res Audio support as well here on the Vivo X60 Pro, but unfortunately you will have to get all dongled up because there's absolutely zero headphone-jack action here.

Performance & Gaming

The X60 Pro uses the Snapdragon 870 chipset, which is basically a Snapdragon 865++. It's also found in the Poco F3, and it's not quite the billy-big-bollocks Snapdragon 888 found in most rivals at this price point, but it will happily run every Android app out there, and you can even kill an afternoon with a proper memory-hog like Genshin Impact, helped considerably by the generous 12 GB of RAM stuffed inside. This phone can also apparently make use of 3 GB of that UFS 3.1 storage as makeshift memory in a pinch, but frankly I've never found that to be necessary at all with 12 GB on board.

There's an Ultra Game Mode on board as well which you'll have to manually add your titles to, but once you do that this offers up all the usual tools including notification blocking, brightness lock, all the good stuff. No worries as far as cooling goes either: I played Genshin for about an hour straight and while the Vivo X60 Pro definitely got warm, it certainly didn't overheat, the frame rate stayed stable, no stuttering in sight. Vivo has also added all kinds of acceleration engines to good old Funtouch, supposed to take over in the background just keeping things running smoothly.

Battery Life

The Vivo X60 Pro's 4,200 mAh capacity battery may be dwarfed by some rivals, but it certainly proves strong enough for all-day play. Even with loads of media streaming—both audio and video—plenty of messaging, using it as a sat-nav, a bit of Skype action, lots of camera play, I still found that pretty much every single day I finished with at least a quarter power left in the Vivo X60 Pro. When it is time for recharge, the Vivo X60 Pro doesn't exactly particularly impress: it's 33 W fast charging, so pretty bog-standard compared with a lot of rivals at this price point, and no wireless-charging support either.

Cameras

The optics is one area where Vivo's really concentrated, and of course it's very fashionable for smartphone manufacturers these days to partner up with optics firms. Vivo certainly hasn't bucked that trend, cosying up with Zeiss for the new Vivo phones. The main shooter sports a 48-megapixel Sony IMX 598 sensor, but the headline feature here is Vivo's updated gimbal stabilization combined with optical image stabilization to give you five-axis stabilization overall. This will ably counter any kind of handshake or tremor, and the Vivo X60 Pro is certainly capable of pumping out some beautiful and fairly detailed photos even when you get quite close to your subject. Yeah, some colours definitely did appear richer in my shots than in real life, but the results are usually attractive. Indoors you'll not be troubled too much by grain, although moving subjects do often come out rather blurred if they're not well illuminated. That stabilization really helps with low-light shots: even if you've had a skinful, stick on the Night mode and hold relatively still for a few seconds and you'll get significantly brighter snaps that almost look like they were taken several hours earlier.

The next lens is a 13-megapixel ultra-wide-angle effort with anti-distortion correction, which does a reasonable job of preventing any warpy jankiness. While colour reproduction isn't as accurate with this sensor, the pull-back viewpoint is definitely good for subjects of a larger stature. Vivo finishes off the triple-lens setup here on the X60 Pro with a 13-megapixel portrait snapper as well. Sadly you don't get any hot telephoto action like you do on that Vivo X60 Pro Plus; still, the Portrait mode produces some good-looking pics with the ability to tweak that bokeh and refocus a shot after you've taken it.

Video can be shot at up to 4K resolution at either 30 or 60 frames per second, and again the results are five-star: the lovely visuals are crisp, colours are again fairly well captured—although a little bit boosted, shall we say—and image stabilization is decent as you'd expect with that gimbal design, either with or without the anti-shake feature active. Plus that triple-mic spatial-audio recording with wind-noise-reduction smarts definitely does the job when you're shooting outdoors, cleanly capturing the action from all sides with limited distortion. Tap on that Cinema mode and you'll swap to a 21:9 aspect ratio to capture some proper widescreen footage if you fancy yourself as a bit of an indie-director type.

Last up, that 32-megapixel selfie snapper is another good one—at times at least anyway. Sometimes outdoor pics can look a little bit saturated, lacking in tone as well as depth, but indoor shots usually look pretty good, lots of detail in there and only patches of grain and softness. Again you've got a Portrait mode that works pretty well when you want to make the shot all about your lovely bloody face.

Verdict

Overall, the Vivo X60 Pro is a good phone. I have enjoyed using it as my full-time handset for the past week, but unfortunately this sort of price point is definitely rather expensive for what you get in terms of the general overall experience compared with some rivals. The problem is that, certainly for the average everyday user, the Vivo X60 Pro doesn't really offer anything particularly different or unique while also serving up slightly weaker specs than a lot of the competition. Take, for instance, Samsung's Galaxy S21: it doesn't have that gimbal stabilization packed into the camera, but you'll find that shots taken on that side-by-side with the Vivo X60 Pro generally have slightly more accurate color tones and a bit more detail packed in there as well. Of course, if you do suffer from hand tremors or anything like that, then probably that stabilization feature is going to be worth its weight in gold.