Vivo today launched its new Y series smartphone in India dubbed the Vivo Y55L. It is an upgraded version of Y51L, that was launched earlier this year in January. The 4G VoLTE Y55L smartphone is priced Rs. 1,000 lesser than the Y51L, which is Rs. 11,980. We went hands on with the device, and here are our first impressions of it.
First up, let’s talk about the Vivo Y55L design. The smartphone boasts of an iPhone-like design, so it looks premium. It uses a mix of premium polycarbonate and metal for the uni-body design, which feels sturdy and confortable to grip in the hands. We got the Gold variant for testing, but it will also be available in Space Grey colour option.
Upfront, the Vivo Y55L packs a 5.2-inch HD (720×1280 pixels) 2.5D curved glass display, which has great viewing angles and decent overall brightness levels for outdoors, so you won’t really complain. Vivo is also touting the smartphone for its unique eye protection mode that ensures comfortable screen brightness by reducing blue light, so your eyes get less strained. But having said that the display is slightly glossy, so it attracts fingerprints/ smudges and colours appear a bit oversaturated as well.
The back of smartphone flaunts soft metal finish with similar antenna bands on top and bottom like iPhone, and the Vivo branding in the center. Since it is a uni-body device, the back panel is non-removable. The dual-SIM tray is on the left and it takes a Micro and a Nano-SIM card. Up top, there is a dedicated microSD card tray along with the 3.5mm audio jack.
The power and volume keys are on the right side and offer good tactile feedback. The Micro-USB charging / data syncing port is at the bottom along with single loudspeaker grill and the primary microphone. The Y55L supports USB-OTG as well.
Above the display sits the 5-megapixel front facing camera and earpiece grill along with two sensors – proximity and ambient light sensor. The three touch buttons – Menu, Home and Back – are below the display and these are not backlit.
The Vivo Y55L is an octa-Core 64-bit Qualcomm Snapdragon 430 processor coupled with Adreno 505 GPU and 2GB of LPDDR3 RAM. It runs on Funtouch OS 2.6 based on Android 6.0 Marshmallow out-of-the-box. The internal storage is 16GB, and it is expandable up to 128GB with microSD card.
On camera front, the Vivo Y55L packs an 8-megapixel rear camera with LED Flash and a secondary 5-megapixel front-facing camera with screen flash. We tried the two cameras during our brief time with the device and both of these seem average to us. The only impressive part was the front facing screen flash that allows you to take selfie in no-light condition.
Overall, the Vivo Y55L is an average smartphone for consumers looking for a device in offline market. While Vivo does bring in the premium quality design and materials at this price point, but the phone misses out the essential fingerprint sensor and good set of cameras at the same time. Since Vivo is a dominant player in the offline market, we are sure that it will see some good numbers there. However there are so many better options available in online space. The Vivo Y55L will be made available across all retail outlets in the country starting October 15th. We will also be getting you the full review really soon, so do stay tuned and keep reading.