Vivo V30 review: a stylish all-rounder

Vivo knows a thing or two about making sleek smartphones, and the new Vivo V30 is a good example. It’s astonishingly svelte, and yet, still manages to pack a 5,000mAh battery, and offer a capable set of snappers too. Let’s figure out how it fares overall.

Verdict

The Vivo V30’s highlights include a slim, svelte design, curved display and an interesting, useful Aura light at the back. The phones delivers in most aspects, including display, cameras and fast charging, and while performance and battery life are quite good too. A few pre-installed apps and lack of stereo speakers are the only notable foibles in an otherwise solid mid-ranger.

Design and display

Not straying too far away from the design of its more accomplished sibling, the V30 Pro (review), the V30 comes in a slim chassis which is just 7.5mm thick and weighs 186 grams. The smooth body and curved edges make it a tad slippery sure, but that doesn’t take anything away from how sleek this phone is. Add to that the camera island that doesn’t protrude all that much, and you have a phone that looks quite stylish. The shimmering Peacock Green back panel on our review unit helps it stand out from the crowd too, and doesn’t smudge easily. The Aura ring light at the rear helps bring that extra touch of seriousness to the phone’s camera prowess, despite its Pro sibling hogging the limelight for its Zeiss snappers.

The 6.78-inch AMOLED display up front is quite capable, offering a resolution of 2,800 x 1,260 pixels, up to 120Hz refresh rate and support for HDR10+. The display looks nice overall, outputs great colours, and despite its reasonably large size, doesn’t make the phone unwieldy to hold or use for prolonged periods. With a rated peak brightness of 2,800 nits, sunlight legibility isn’t an issue either. That said, due to its curved nature, a few mistouches can happen during usage.

Cameras

While it can’t boast of the Zeiss goodness featured by its Pro sibling, the Vivo V30’s shooters are quite capable. On offer is an optically stabilised 50MP f1.88 primary camera, along with a 50MP ultra-wide snapper. There’s a flash present, right in the middle of what Vivo calls the Aura light. The latter can not only illuminate dimly-lit environs and act as fill light, thanks to adjustable colours, but it can also help you get creative with light effects.

Apart from the usual shooting modes, available options also include interesting stuff like Superman, Astro, and Dual view. There’s a Micro Movie mode as well, that allows you to shoot small video clips with effects, suitable for sharing on social platforms.



Coming to the crux of the matter, the Vivo V30 works as a capable pocket shooter, regardless of lighting conditions. The daylight shots turn out nice and crisp, and are quite likeable overall, with just a hint of warm tone to them. The portraits look nice, with the edge detection being on point.



And when it comes to low light, the V30 does a swell job as well, though I feel it can do with a little tweaking when it comes to handling light flares. The 50MP selfie camera is a capable performer as well, with nice, accurate skin tones and textures.

Software, performance and battery

Funtouch OS working atop Android 14 is what you get out of the box. The platform is full of features and customisation options, and yet, reasonably clean and loaded with very few extra apps. Apart from the usual set of Google apps, Vivo throws in its own app store called V-Appstore, a browser, an app called iManager that includes a cleanup utility and security scanner, plus a few third-party ones like Netflix, Snapchat, PhonePe, Facebook and LinkedIn. I’d say most of these should be useful to many users, but you can get rid of them if you want.

The V-Appstore however, can’t be removed and can also throw up random notifications (which can be disabled). There’s Jovi Home, a panel that can be accessed via the quick settings, and includes app shortcuts, weather, cricket scores, etc. These elements can be customised in terms of what you want displayed and in what sequence.



Relying on the 4nm Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 to do its thing, the Vivo V30 also features up to 12 gigs of RAM (with another 12GB available on tap by utilising storage) and up to 256GB of UFS 2.2 storage. Smoothness is the name of the game, with the handset offering lag-free operation for all tasks, big or small. Gaming is handled reasonably well too, without much heating evident. Benchmarks paint a rosy picture as well, and the CPU Throttle test shows the device can sustain 84 percent of its peak performance when stressed. Similarly, the 5,000mAh battery proves to be a capable performer, lasting a day easily, and then some more if you’re careful. The PC Mark battery test score shows a run time of 17 hours 30 minutes, which is really good. And then there’s the 80W charging speed, which juices up the phone in less than an hour.

Final Verdict

Priced starting Rs 33,999 for the 8GB / 128GB variant, going up to Rs 37,999 for the top-end 12GB / 256GB variant, the Vivo V30 has lots going for it. The lack of stereo speakers at this price point is a bummer, and if you’re a performance fiend, you could consider the iQOO Neo 9 Pro (review) which offers the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset for Rs 36,999. Among its close rivals like the Samsung Galaxy A35 (review) and Redmi Note 13 Pro+ (review), the Vivo V30 seems like a better performer. Its sleek design, Aura light and capable cameras work its favour too, making it a phone worth more than just a second look if you covet a stylish phone that ticks most boxes.

Editor’s rating: 7.5 / 10

Reasons to buy

• The Vivo V30 is super-slim and lightweight
• The cameras deliver good results in most scenarios
• The Aura ring light on the back is a useful addition
• The display is nice and vibrant

Reasons not to buy

• The phone misses out on stereo speakers
• The slim design and curved display make it a tad slippery & can lead to mistouches