Vivo's new V15 Pro brings notchless displays to the mid-range market

Vivo was the first smartphone maker to banish the awful notch trend that surfaced last year by creating the Vivo NEX with a pop-up selfie camera. It followed that recently with Vivo NEX Dual Display edition, swapping out the pop-up camera for a secondary rear display designed take selfies with the higher quality rear cameras. Now its back with a more affordable model launching in India with the same all-screen pop-up selfie approach of the original Vivo NEX.

The new Vivo V15 Pro brings many of the high-end features of the NEX to a wider audience including a fifth-gen in-display fingerprint sensor as well as a 6.4-inch Super AMOLED display with a FHD+ resolution of 2340 x 1080 pixels. Helping to bring the price down, it is fitted with a Snapdragon 675 octa-core processor. That said, it still sports 6 GB of RAM and 128 GB expandable on board storage. It also packs a hefty 3,700 mAh battery and is fitted with a 32MP front-facing camera as well as triple rear camera arrangement featuring a 48 MP main camera that is joined by an 8 MP sensor and 5 MP sensor.

The dual-SIM phone also picks up Bluetooth 5.0, dual-band Wi-Fi, and fast-charging. Curiously, another cost-cutting measure sees the inclusion of a USB 2.0 micro-USB port instead of the more typical USB-C port we see on new devices. It is available for pre-order now for the equivalent of US$400 and comes in Topaz Blue and Ruby Red. Another tick in the plus column is that it ships with Android 9 Pie out of the box, albeit with Vivo’s custom Funtouch OS 9 skin.