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Introduction
Vivo seems pretty adept at bringing out smartphones faster than any other brands, because now just six short months since the Vivo V30 Pro and Vivo has launched the V40 Pro which may look familiar but makes significant improvements when it comes to the performance, the battery life and also that camera tech. So, come with me and see what Vivo V40 Pro has to offer.
Design
The actual design of the Vivo V40 Pro will be very familiar if you are accustomed with Vivo’s recent smartphones. It’s having a great 6.78-inch big display just like the V30 series, although thankfully it doesn’t feel any more cumbersome to clutch than other recent smartphones. Because that screen does actually subtly curve around both edges, the bezels are minimal at best, they’re pretty much non-existent and of course not everyone gets on with this sort of curvy design.
Thankfully I haven’t had any issues with screen responsiveness even when I’ve been clutching the phone pretty tight, it’s still been pretty responsive. Actually, that’s not entirely true one time when I was using the camera, the shutter button wouldn’t activate until I slightly adjusted the way I was clutching the phone. But apart from that full week usage, no issues.
This phone weighs 200 grams, so not too hefty, it’s pretty skinny stuff. The frame is unfortunately constructed from plastic not metal which takes away some of the premium vibe apparently. The rest of the phone is constructed from shot alpha glass rather than Gorilla glass. But no scratches or any damages so far after a week of mishandling like being stuffed into Pockets with other phones. you do get pre-installed screen protector slapped on there which certainly helps.
This phone is IP68 water and dust resistance, so you can certainly take it to the bathtubs, sinks or anything thing that can potentially damage it. This right here is the white model but you can also grab the Vivo V40 Pro in silver or blue and there are actually hints of little blue flexes of it here in the white model. Again, it’s kind of got bathroom tiles kind of vibes like a lot of Vivo phones. It’s pretty subtle design overall and it’s very shiny but also seems pretty resistant to fingerprints marks, so that’s definitely a bonus. This thing has been quite heavily handled after fish and chips, suppers, barbecues all kinds of stuff and it’s survived looking pretty much box fresh.
Software
Now, there’s not really been any changes when it comes to the software side of things. It’s still Android 14 with a good bit of FunTouch OS slapped on top my favourite of all of the launches purely because of its silly name it doesn’t mess around too much with the Android formula. You’ve still got your apps tray, you’ve got your discover feed, got your notifications bar that you can drag down from anywhere.
It’s got a bit of a different vibe from standard stock Android and yeah unfortunately you do get a fair stack of bloatware shoved on here. Stuff like Agoda, Facebook, Lazard etc. are linked in here and quite a few of Vivo’s own bits as well including its own app store, its own browser, so it’s pretty dense.
FunTouch isn’t always the smoothest sadly, but overall to be fair it hasn’t been behaving badly. I haven’t seen much in the way of bugs or general lags and if you love to customize your phone, you got tons of options stuffed in here like wallpapers, themes and always on displays. we dive on into Dynamic affects, you can adjust everything from the fingerprint icon animations right down to the animation that plays when you insert a USB cable.
As for the software support, well Vivo doesn’t really disappoint in that area. You got three OS upgrades for this phone so Android 15, 16 and 17 and then also four years of security support. So, it’s not the absolute best out there not as good as a OnePlus or a Samsung or a Google, but certainly doesn’t let itself down either and on the storage front you’ve got a choice you can either settle for 256GB or double up to 512GB and as usual it’s not expandable via micro-SD memory cards.
Display and audio
Now, no changes when it comes to the display tech versus the old V30 series. It’s once again a 6.78-inch AMOLED display with 2800 X 1260 pixel resolution slapped on this big phone, so those visuals are nice, crispy and sharp whether you’re editing photos or just watching content on Netflix or Disney Plus or whatever. As always you can fiddle around with the colour output inside of the display settings, but I like the default colour, it was fairly neutral overall. You got full HDR 10+ support as well but no Dolby Vision.
As usual I don’t believe the Vivo V40 pro has LTPO Tech slapped on here. That refresh rate maxes out at 120Hz, you can only manually set it to 60Hz or 120Hz that’s it and thankfully I’ve had no issues using the Vivo v40 Pro outdoors that auto brightness will Max it out quite happily as soon as you set foot outside, it keeps everything nice and clear.
It’s once again a stereo speaker output on this device, there’s no Dolby Atmos support or anything. You just have super audio inside of the sound settings which tweaks the quality based on what you’re up to. Haven’t really noticed any proper difference to be honest. We’ also got audio super resolution to just boost the quality of low resolution audio and those stereo speakers are proper loud and decent quality too. The earpiece speaker is actually probably just as powerful as that bottom speaker, so it’s quite well balanced audio and decent quality even at that maxed out volume which yeah certainly will do the job even in quite a noisy household.
Performance
Now, let’s stroll away onto the subject of performance and the Vivo V40 Pro is once again powered by MediaTek but that old Dimensity 8200 chipset has been upgraded here to a Dimensity 9200+ and review model has by 12GB of RAM, so everyday task is running fairly smooth. There are little bits of juddering from FunTouch OS.
But when it comes to gaming the Vivo V40 Pro absolutely smashes it out the park. The likes of Zenler Zone zero runs absolutely charmingly well, nice fluid frame rate even when you set it on the 60 FPS setting at the highest possible graphic settings and everything maxed out. Touch responsiveness is absolutely fine.
There is a vapor chamber stuffed inside of the V40 pro just like the previous generation. This does help to keep the phone from overheating, although it certainly does get quite warm after just about 20 minutes of gaming. Thankfully it doesn’t uncomfortably get warm and I certainly didn’t see any kind of throttle in here whatsoever.
So, the Dimensity 9200+ is a really powerful processor and if you’re a gamer you’ll certainly enjoy the V40 pro. As usual you do get that FunTouch gaming mode in there. You can boost the performance when you need to, you can reject calls and block notifications, so you’re not Disturbed, got the usual options for recording the gameplay and everything if you don’t suck at games like I do. So, the performance certainly gets a massive thumbs up.
Battery
When it comes to the battery life the Vivo V40 Pro has actually been boosted for this model to 5500 mAh, one of the biggest out there. I swear it doesn’t matter what you do on this thing you will not be able to kill it within a single day. Just as an example so far this morning I’ve had the screen on for an hour a quarter and that battery percentage has only ticked down to 97%. I’ve reviewed some smartphones recently where it would be down to 97% by now.
Even if I just left it on the always on display the entire time and I found I can happily make it through two full days on a single charge and that’s with plenty of video streaming, plenty of camera use, Spotify streaming in the background, everything I usually do. So yeah, straight up the Vivo V40 Pro is one of the best phones of 2024 for battery life.
Even if you do just completely forget to charge the V40 pro, you will find you’re running on power saver mode, well no worries just plug a cable in it for like half an hour and that’ll give you a full days’ worth of charge easily, because you got 80W wired charging support on here. However no Wireless charge support on here, one of the very few criticisms you can actually level against it.
Cameras
Let’s finish this lovely Vivo V40 Pro review with the cameras. What you’ve got here is a triple 50 MP camera setup headlined by Sony’s IMX 921 sensor with Optical image stabilization and Vivo’s camera app is rather full-on loads of different options to mess around with including the ability to swap between Vivid textured and Zeiss natural modes. This does make quite a significant difference to your photo textured in particular highlight and whatever is central in your pick and that’s on top of all of the other filters you get slapped on here.
Then of course as always, you’ve got that aura light flash as well which you can manually tweak from warm to cold. This is now brighter than previous generations and it can also automatically scale from warm to cold depending on the ambient lighting. I found that even in quite strong lighting the Vivo V40 Pro Auto mode generally selects an appropriate ISO level, shutter, speed etc. to produce quite Rich tones, especially if you leave it on that default Vivid mode.
Despite the pixel binning, my test shots were dense with finer details, so they look good even when you crop in and when the lights are low. Any motion does generally result in quite fuzzy blurry pics, but the zoom still works pretty well, not too much grain creeping in there either. But one of the undoubted highlights of the Vivo V40 Pro Camera is the portrait mode. Again, you’ve got an absolute plethora of options here, far too many to be honest including various bokeh style effects and also, you’ve got some suggested presets including a bit of landscape portrait, Street portrait all at various focal lengths.
You’ve actually got a choice of focal lengths down here as well. So, 24 mm for a pulled back dramatic portrait, 50 mm which is probably my favourite for getting a portrait without being right in your subject’s face and all the way up to 100 mm which zooms in quite far, but still gets you a nice crispy snap of your subject and I was very happy with some of the results I saw captured by the V40 pro. That portrait sense is also pretty good for just generally zooming into a scene, although you don’t want to crop in much more than four times, because then things start to look a little bit well disturbing really.
As for that 50 MP Ultra-wide-angle shooter well again this is perfectly fine for fitting more into frame. The Vivo V40 Pro does max out at 4K resolution. There’s no 8K option but you can shoot 60 frames per second at Ultra HD and I got to say I was once again pretty impressed by the home movies pumped out by the V40 pro. Even in quite tricky lighting conditions this Smartphone performs really well and manages to keep the visuals pretty bright in low light. You can even zoom in a little bit and things don’t get too grainy.
Optical image stabilization is decent as well, so you can move around a bit, pan and such forth and no worries there, it doesn’t get too jittery even at 4K level and the audio pickups is pretty decent too as long as the sound isn’t too full on in crowds. Things can get a bit distorted but not much chunkiness even when it’s quite blustery.
Then on front you can also shoot 4K resolution footage using that selfie camera and yeah, once again pretty good even with strong contrast. Although the stabilization not quite as good as with those rear cameras. The selfies on this phone are also really good, so if you take a lot of selfies, you can definitely go for this phone.
Verdict
So, that’s it for Vivo V40 Pro and my review of what I reckon of it after having my SIM slapped in there for a full week and I got to say I really like it. Still a massive FunTouch fan despite it’s not that refined. The performance in this thing has been pretty solid, the battery life has been absolutely incredible, the camera is a lot of fun to use especially that good old portrait mode, great if you got kids, cats whatever.
Let me know what you think about the Vivo V40 Pro in the comments bellow.
