Vivo X21 Exclusive Review

Smartphones are evolving at a rapid pace in the industry and we now have better processors, cameras, and construction materials being used at every price level. Recently, we have also seen a lot of innovation when it comes to device security. Apple introduced FaceID last year with the iPhone X which is replaced a fingerprint sensor with a TrueDepth camera.

Price

The company has now launched the Vivo X21 in India and has been priced at Rs 35,990.

Vivo X21 design

Vivo was the first manufacturer to launch an Android smartphone with a top notch screen in India, and unsurprisingly, the X21 also has a notch. In fact, it does look a lot like the last Vivo phone we reviewed, the Vivo V9. The X21 has a big 6.28-inch display at the front with thin borders all around except at the bottom where it is comparatively more thick. The notch houses a metallic earpiece, the selfie camera, and an IR sensor, among other things.

At the back, the Vivo X21 has a dual camera setup with a single LED flash. It does not have a physical fingerprint sensor in the way that we are now used to. Vivo has managed to integrate it into the display on the front, and we’ll have more on that later.

Vivo ships this phone with an 18W fast charger as well as XE710 headphones out of the box. The X21 comes with a pre-applied screen damage protector, and Vivo warns against using aftermarket ones, because it could affect the in-display fingerprint scanner’s performance.

Vivo X21 specifications and software

The Vivo X21 is powered and supported by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 mobile platform and is clocked at 2.2GHz. It is an octa-core processor with eight Kryo 260 CPU cores and an Adreno 512 GPU. The X21 has RAM of 6GB and 128GB of internal onboard storage.

One of the best things about the Vivo X21 is its AMOLED display. It has good viewing angles and punchy colours. The 6.28-inch display has a resolution of 1080×2280 pixels and a 19:9 aspect ratio. The highlight of the X21 is its in-display fingerprint sensor.

The X21 runs on the Vivo Funtouch OS. We found that it was running Funtouch OS 4.0 on top of Android Oreo out of the box. You can change the order of the on-screen navigation buttons or ditch them altogether and switch to gesture-based navigation. We did this while reviewing the X21 and found that the gestures were quite smooth and easy to get used to. Gesture shortcuts let you launch apps by tracing alphabets on the screen when it is off. There are a lot more gestures that you can enable if you like.

The Vivo X21 isn’t free form bloatware and you have apps like V-Appstore which is an app store managed by Vivo, WPS Office, UC Browser, NewsPoint, PhonePe, Facebook, and WhatsApp among others. Other than Vivo’s App Store, you can go ahead and uninstall all of them.

Vivo X21 performance, cameras, and battery life

The Snapdragon 660 SoC which is capable of delivering a smooth experience. With the RAM of 6GB, this smartphone is capable of multitasking without any issues. We put the X21 through benchmark tests and found that it scored 142,969 in AnTuT 7, as well as 1577 and 5791 in Geekbench4’s single-core and multi-core tests respectively. It also clocked 35fps in GFXBench T-Rex, and 13fps in GFXBench Manhattan 3.1. It scored 26,271 in 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited, but failed to run the Slingshot and Slingshot Extreme benchmarks.