The Vivo Y55s is an expandable smartphone that reaches more people and is sold offline. It’s nice to know that offline buyers can buy a reliable phone, but in the overall market, the Y55s simply doesn’t measure up to its competitors. The Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 costs about the same and is faster, with better battery life and faster performance. On the other hand, the Moto G5 Plus costs a lot more, but it also has a much better camera, faster performance and better battery life. The Vivo Y55s is remarkable, but it’s not what we recommend.
DETAILED REVIEW OF THE VIVO Y55S
The performance gap between a sub-15K smartphone and a flagship device is narrowing every year. However, there are often devices that do not look powerful on paper, but still perform well. The Vivo Y55s is a good example. The device looks, feels and works like a budget smartphone and you wonder if the benchmarks are really a performance test.
Building and designing
Vivo smartphones have resembled Apple’s iPhones in the past, and so has this one. However, this also means that it is a good phone, or at least I think so. The metal backrest is pleasant to the touch and the rounded edges provide a comfortable grip. A thin metal strip runs around the phone, separating the front from the metal back, giving a unique feel to a phone that looks like all other Vivo devices. The power button and volume control are located on the right, there is a dual SIM card slot on the left and a dedicated microSD slot on top.
The build quality, on the other hand, is roughly in line with the industry average for budget smartphones. I traveled with this one in my pocket and accidentally put my keys and coins in the same pocket, but the Vivo Y55s came out with no scratches. I don’t recommend it, but it’s good to escape unharmed. At least the metal back seems to be scratch-resistant, while tempered glass is installed on the screen as standard.
Display and user interface
The screens on inexpensive devices have evolved over the years, but there are many that lack quality. However, the Vivo Y55s is one of the first. The color saturation and viewing angles are fine and correspond to the Honor 6X and Coolpad Cool 1 sizes. The tactile response is also correct, and I didn’t find this experience to be lacking in any way.
That is, it is not without flaws. I certainly felt the low pixel density on the screen, because the 5.2-inch panel has only a resolution of 720p, in fact, with a luminance of 220 lux, this is one of the darkest panels I’ve ever seen on a device. This also affects the visibility of sunlight, which could have been better.
Vivo has not changed the interface compared to what we saw on the V5 plus a few months ago. In fact, it uses the same iOS interface that it has been using since its launch. However, the interface is now refined and does not load the memory so much, which is good in some ways. It has all the features you would expect from a Chinese user interface, including but not limited to themes, phone manager, third-party app store (V-App Store), pre-installed keyboard and more. There are some gesture-based features, such as Smart Split, which is essentially a split-screen mode, and a dedicated one-handed mode, which reduces the user interface for one-handed operation.
