Vivo Y55 review: Budget chaser

MANILA, Philippines – Have you heard about Vivo’s latest entry-level smartphone? Its name is difficult to remember, but its price is easy to swallow.

How does it perform?

For a dual-SIM phone priced this low, you wouldn’t expect much of it, but you’d be proven wrong. Despite having a not-that-spectacular Qualcomm Snapdragon 430 processor and only 2GB of memory, the Y55 never let us down during day-to-day tasks.

We were especially surprised to see the Y55 handle games like Asphalt 8: Airborne on high graphics settings without any hiccups. And even though the display has a low 1280 x 720-pixel resolution, colors pop and brightness is more than adequate while outdoors. There’s a single speaker underneath, and it gets the job done well enough.

Our only complaint is the unsatisfactory 16GB of storage, half of which is used by the operating system. Fortunately, you can expand that with a microSD card.

What about the camera?

Photos from the eight-megapixel camera came out a lot better than we expected. Daylight shots showed more than enough sharpness and good color reproduction. Autofocusing was fast, too, despite having no advanced sensor technologies.

At night, subjects got too blurry for our liking. Details became really mushy, and there was a distinct warm tone to everything.

Our experience with the five-megapixel front-facing camera was way better. Like the Oppo F1s it resembles, the Y55 did fine work during selfies in all lighting situations. A feature called Screen Flash produces a bright, white screen to illuminate your face, but we found it a little excessive and preferred leaving it off.

Will it last more than a day?

Techies would be inclined to shun the 2650mAh battery, but the Y55 manages to last over a day if you stick to light social media and web browsing. Our only gripe is the lack of fast charging to bring it from zero to a hundred percent within two hours.

Like any other device, it’s still best to carry around a power bank with you. Take note, however, that this phone uses the older micro-USB standard, and not the increasingly popular Type-C port we’re seeing on every new gadget.

Is it your gadget match?

There’s a lot to love about the Y55, especially once you find out the price. The unit retails for P7,990, which translates to around $165 – what a deal!

As long as you don’t expect it to pull rabbits out of hats, this smartphone works great as a daily driver. Just be sure to equip its bundled case as soon as possible to avoid minor scratches, and buy a microSD card to squeeze in more photos and videos.