Review Summary
Expert Rating
Vivo has released several foldable phones over the past couple of years, but you probably haven’t heard much about them because they never made it to India. That changes with the Vivo X Fold3 Pro, the company’s newest flagship foldable phone and the first one to launch in India. With the Vivo X Fold3 Pro, the brand aims to make an immediate impact and compete with established players like Samsung and newer ones like OnePlus in a segment that is expected to grow significantly in the coming years.
Vivo has many reasons to choose the Vivo X Fold3 Pro as its debut foldable in India. It is the slimmest and lightest foldable in the country so far. It features the largest display and the biggest battery in a foldable phone yet. It is also the fastest-charging foldable phone in India. Additionally, it is the first foldable to come with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset. These “firsts” come with a hefty price tag of Rs 1,60,000.
Table of Contents
Verdict
Vivo has made a solid foldable debut in India with the X Fold3 Pro. This flagship device brings a host of firsts, including being the lightest and slimmest foldable on the market so far. The X Fold3 Pro not only offers a sleek and premium design but also powerful hardware backed by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC, terrific battery life, and impressive ZEISS-branded cameras. However, foldables like the OnePlus Open (review) and Galaxy Z Fold5 (review) are priced lower and can be seen as offering more value for money.
Design
Despite carrying one of the biggest batteries in a foldable phone, I was extremely impressed with how light the Vivo X Fold3 Pro felt in the hand. The device weighs 236 grams, making it around 3 grams lighter than the OnePlus Open and 17 grams lighter than the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold5. The Fold3 Pro is also sleek at 5.2mm thickness when unfolded, making it slimmer than its rivals.
The back of the Vivo X Fold3 Pro is instantly recognisable as a Vivo flagship, with a large circular camera module, which Vivo calls the “big eye,” and an outer ring inspired by luxury watches, referred to by the brand as the fluted bezel design. The rear panel has a satin matte finish that is extremely soft to the touch. This Armor Back Cover is made up of a combination of UPE fibre and glass fibre, which the company says makes the phone puncture-resistant while being lightweight at the same time.
The hinge is solid and doesn’t feel flimsy or weak when folding, unfolding fully or at certain angles. Vivo says the hinge is based on a carbon fibre ultra-durable design and is TUV-certified to withstand 5 lakh folds. You’ll be able to fold and unfold the device 100 times daily for over 12 years. Additionally, the phone is IPX8 rated for water resistance.
Main and cover displays
The Vivo X Fold3 Pro has two similar-looking displays. The cover screen is a 6.53-inch LTPO 8T AMOLED display with a 2,748 x 1,172 resolution, 120Hz refresh rate, 2,160 PWM dimming, and up to 4500 nits of peak brightness. Unfolding the device reveals an 8.03-inch AMOLED display with a 2K (2,480 x 2,200) resolution and the same refresh rate and brightness levels as the cover screen. Both screens offer over 90 percent screen-to-body ratio.
These are top-tier displays, offering excellent sharpness and viewing angles. Whether folded or unfolded, the displays can get plenty bright under sunlight. The X Fold3 Pro supports HDR10+ and Dolby Vision content on both the main and cover screen. Interestingly, the fingerprint sensors are present both on the cover screen and the right side of the main display, and you only need to register your fingers once. The crease on the main display is less prominent than what you see on rival foldables.
The main display can be used in a couple of ways: split-screen and flex mode. When you’re running an app on the main screen, a quick semi-fold and unfold will enable split-screen. Flex mode, on the other hand, is activated when you fold the device anywhere between 75 and 115 degrees. You can place it on a flat surface with the cover screen facing down to use the X Fold3 Pro like a tiny laptop. Flex mode is useful when you want to watch something on Netflix and use the bottom half to control playback, or as a tripod for the cameras if you want to capture a time-lapse video, long exposure, or selfie.
Cameras
The large camera module on the Vivo X Fold3 Pro houses 3 sensors backed by ZEISS Optics: a 50MP VCS True Color main camera, a 64MP ZEISS telephoto lens that’s capable of 3x optical, 10x hybrid and up to 100x digital zoom as well as macro shots, and a 50MP wide-angle lens.
To cut a long story short, the cameras on the Vivo X Fold3 Pro are great in most scenarios and among the best you will find on a foldable phone today. While they aren’t as exceptional as the cameras on the Vivo X100 Pro (review), they come very close. The main camera is able to capture stunning shots in daylight and low light conditions, capturing good details and colours, though the dynamic range could have been better. The main camera’s OIS allows for crisp and blur-free stills and videos.
3x optical and 10x hybrid zoom shots using the telephoto lens captured stunning close-up images. I was impressed with the level of detail and light captured in 10x zoom, both in daylight and lowlight conditions. The portrait mode lets you shoot in multifocal lengths of 24mm, 35mm, 50mm, 85mm, and 100mm depending on how close you want your portraits. This combined with ZEISS bokeh flare modes like Biotar, B-speed, Sonnar, and more allows for some stunning portraits in both daylight and low light with ambient lighting in the background. However, I found that the camera tends to oversharpen facial features at times and adds a slight halo effect around the edges, making the overall portrait a bit unnatural. Vivo should be able to tweak this via a software update.
The 50MP wide-angle lens does a good job of keeping the colours and details similar to what the main camera offers, though the field of view isn’t extremely wide. There were some occasions, especially in low light, where the overall brightness seemed muted compared to a regular photo of the same scene.
Meanwhile, you get a 32MP front camera on the cover screen and on the main screen. The front camera does a decent job with facial features and colours in daylight but tends to soften things in dim lighting.
Performance and software
The foldable is powered by the flagship Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset coupled with 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM. On the AnTuTu benchmark, the device scored over 2 million, keeping it more or less on par with other Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 devices like the OPPO Find X7 Ultra and Xiaomi 14 Ultra.
When it comes to actual day-to-day usage, the Vivo X Fold3 Pro delivers buttery smooth performance in day-to-day usage. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset combined with a smooth 120Hz refresh rate makes scrolling through apps extremely fluid. The 16GB of onboard RAM allows for quick multitasking or switching between apps. And this is primarily what the Vivo X Fold3 Pro will be used for. While the device is powerful enough to run graphically challenging games, its primary appeal lies in seamlessly switching between the cover screen and main screen and using the bigger display for multitasking, reading, or streaming. That said, we noticed that the CPU throttles under stress (close to 60 percent of peak performance) and it also heats up over prolonged usage.
The Vivo X Fold3 Pro runs on Android 14 with Funtouch OS 14 on top. The user interface can initially feel heavy, featuring some pre-loaded third-party apps along with Vivo’s suite of applications. You can uninstall the third-party apps if you prefer a more stock Android experience. Funtouch OS offers various customisation features, such as a Material You-like colour picker for the system and app UI, customisable clock styles on the lock screen, new always-on display styles, and more. You’ll need to spend some time adjusting the UI to suit your preferences, but once configured, Funtouch OS can feel smooth and user-friendly. The company promises 3 years of software upgrades, which seems short for a flagship phone that people might want to keep for a few years longer.
Battery
With a 5,700mAh battery, the Vivo X Fold3 Pro offers the biggest battery amongst all flagship foldables in India right now. I already spoke about how impressive it is that Vivo has managed to fit a battery this large in a phone so lightweight and slim. Talking about the battery life itself, the Vivo X Fold3 Pro doesn’t disappoint. The phone can easily take you over a day and a half on moderate usage and switching between the cover and main display for various use cases. In our PCMark battery test, the phone managed to last close to 14 hours, an hour longer than what the OnePlus Open and Samsung Galaxy Z Fold5 managed.
This is where the Vivo X Fold3 Pro truly impresses. In addition to offering a solid battery backup, the foldable phone can support fast wired charging speeds up to 100W making it the fastest-charging foldable in India. The device takes roughly 35 minutes to juice up from 20 to 100 percent and close to an hour from 0 to 100 percent using the bundled 120W charging brick. The foldable also supports 50W wireless charging using Vivo’s Vertical Flash Charger 2.
Final verdict
The Vivo X Fold3 Pro is a step in the right direction foldable phones are heading towards. While earlier foldables were thick and heavy, thereby making them difficult to handle, the X Fold3 Pro shows that foldables can get slimmer and lighter without making compromises to the design or hardware. In addition to being slim and light, the X Fold3 Pro is also durable and has a sturdy hinge design.
As impressive as the foldable is from the outside, the Vivo X Fold3 Pro is also impressive on the inside. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset, 16GB of RAM, a large 5,700mAh battery and ZEISS-backed cameras make this an all-round foldable phone. The Vivo X Fold3 Pro checks all the right boxes for a foldable phone. Well, almost. At Rs 1,60,000, this is an expensive foldable phone and won’t come as an easy choice for buyers since you have more value-for-money offerings like the OnePlus Open and Samsung Galaxy Z Fold5. Let’s also not forget that Samsung’s next foldable will be coming out soon. That said, the Vivo X Fold3 Pro is definitely worth considering if you can get the Rs 15,000 instant discount offer via select credit cards.
Editor’s rating: 8 / 10
Pros:
- Sleek and impressive foldable design
- Terrific battery life
- Stunning displays
- Impressive performance
Cons:
- Noticeable oversharpening in portraits
- CPU throttles under stress
- Expensive
Tested by: Gaurav Sharma and Aditya Pandey
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Rs. 159,999.00
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