vivo V80 Overview - After a month of use (Long Post) This phone starts at INR 63,999 in India for the 8/128 variant, and goes up to INR 69,999 for the 8/256 variant & INR 79,999 for the 8/512 variant. With that, I start my opinions: 1️⃣ DESIGN & BUILD - It comes with a new camera plateau design having raised camera lenses: it does look nice, but the Orange color is too bright for my liking (liked the Blue color more). - The metal frame & textured glass back, combined with the 6.59-inch form factor, lends it a premium in-hand feel & fingerprint smudges are non-existent. - The weight management is done very well despite the 7200 mAh battery, and it has IP68/IP69 rating. 2️⃣ DISPLAY QUALITY - The 6.59" 1.5K LTPS OLED display looks crisp & sharp, has reasonably thin bezels, and is plenty bright outdoors. PWM tuning is also done well. - It has 120 Hz refresh rate in most apps, while 144 Hz works for a few. Also, unlike older versions of OriginOS, this phone finally selects 120 Hz/144 Hz by default for most pre-installed apps. - However, the display color tuning is oversaturated & a tad bit oversharpened too, and while saturated colors do appeal to average users (and can be tweaked regardless), the oversharpening needs to be toned down via OTAs. 3️⃣ SOFTWARE - This is one of the first global phones to run OriginOS 7 based on Android 17 out-of-the-box, and will get 4 major OS updates & 6 years of patches. - It has almost all the new features: Stickers for AOD, Lockscreen & Homescreen, new Lockscreen styles (AI Pets, Glint and Wobble), Icon styles (ability to customise icons with photos), AI Call Assistant, redesigned Notes & Albums, and so on. - However, it still cuts on some other features: the new Jovi assistant, the glass effect in the UI & Origin Workbench are absent. There are app opening-closing animations but they lack blurring (typical V series cuts). 4️⃣ BATTERY & CHARGING - The 7200 mAh battery has consistently given me 7.5+ hrs SoT on 5G, and 9 hrs SoT on WiFi with normal non-gaming use (20 mins cameras, 30 mins hotspot, 1 hour YouTube, 1 hour Netflix and the rest texting & doomscrolling) - The bundled 90W charger can fully charge the phone from 10% to 100% in about ~1 hour. 5️⃣ PERFORMANCE - This is the biggest drawback of this phone. While the Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 offers decent performance for normal usage, it is far from the most powerful chip at this price. It is NOT recommended for gaming either. - On top of that, the RAM type has now gone back to LPDDR4X and storage is UFS 3.1. I have the 8/256 variant, and it is able to operate the phone smoothly in nearly 90% situations. - However, I faced some instances of microstutters, as well as problems when using the camera app (which can get extremely jittery & laggy quite often): hence the performance can be optimised further. - The next generation really needs a significant chipset upgrade: V70 Elite with 8s Gen3 was actually very promising. 6️⃣ CAMERA SUMMARY - Camera quality remains the biggest USP of the V series, and the V80 continues that legacy. - The main LYT-700V main sensor takes pleasing shots with saturated colors & some oversharpening, which is more evident at 2x (2x shots, in fact, can get artificial and inconsistent at times). HDR tuning remains mostly consistent, and skin tones are tuned more towards looking good (AKA slightly smoothened) rather than for pure authenticity. - The 3x IMX882 telephoto takes good zoom shots at 3x & 6x, and can do well upto 10x in many cases. It is also useful for portrait shots, which look good, and the selfies are also great: thanks to an 18 mm lens and AF. - The 8 MP UW is extremely average. Videography is good enough: I liked the Cinematic modes, but the general quality remains a bit oversaturated. ❌ However, I faced problems when using the camera app (which can get extremely jittery & laggy) & the processing time is also quite long, especially for portraits. These are two aspects that I wish to see fixed via OTAs, urgently: they are hard to miss & really affect the camera experience. - On the flipside, the camera app allows incredible flexibility. It has the full-fledged color palette from X300 Ultra, which is extremely good and allows tweaking the color science to our liking, alongside Sharpness & Contrast sliders, and the Film Camera mode.