Vivo X200 Pro review – The one to beat

More and more Chinese smartphone makers are bringing the good stuff to South Africa, and we’re glad to say that Vivo has finally boarded that train. The arrival of the Vivo X200 Pro is significant in more ways than one, delivering a sublime product that’ll be the one to beat in 2025 (despite its 2024 international release), as well as presenting a fresh face in the South African gene pool currently dominated by Samsung and Apple.

At the risk of sounding like someone who’s just watched Maximising Alphaness (thanks Silicon Valley), your biggest enemy truly is yourself. The Vivo X200 Pro is a lot of things – an excellent photographer, Mountain Dew-drinking gamer, and even a decent cinephile – but it is definitively not worth the price tag. Vivo fell upon its sword when it announced the R40,000 South African price tag despite the $800 U.S. price. That’s the same as an iPhone 16, by the way.

And in this corner…

The X200 Pro is stunning. There’s only so much you can do to a rectangular hunk of glass short of reinventing the smartphone. It hasn’t gone quite that far, sticking with the design ideology introduced in the company’s X100 Series, with a few changes scattered here and there. It’s nixed the curved display, replacing it with something flatter (though still hangs onto the rounded edges), culminating in an exceptionally comfortable smartphone.

It might not seem so on paper what with the 228g weight and somewhat obtrusive camera bump that proved to be the X200’s biggest flaw – a necessary evil that’ll become clear once we touch on the camera tech involved. But looking past all that, the added heft and general philosophy went a long way to help deliver on the ‘premium’ feeling Vivo has pushed so hard. We’ll admit it worked on us.

Our review model turned up wearing the Titanium Grey colourway, despite its wholly aluminium coating along the edges. It’s a glassy affair ’round the back where you’ll find Vivo’s logo, the massive camera array, and the flashlight on the top right. Button selection is similarly nominal, with nothing more than a power button and volume rocker on the right-hand side.

While the X200 Pro dominates in many key areas, we’d like to see an extra button that could introduce a whole new level of functionality. We’re not talking about a straight copy of Apple’s new Camera Control (though that would be welcome). Just an extra button… somewhere. Please.

Instead of following the new flagship industry standard and using Titanium in its construction, Vivo has opted to focus on other areas of durability with IP68 and IP69 dust and water ratings. This makes it entirely dust-free (internally) and means it can take high-pressure water jets to the chest and walk away muttering “‘Tis but a scratch!”. We’re willing to take Vivo’s word on this one.

Visually delightful

Up front is a 6.78in 2,800 x 1,260 AMOLED display that did not disappoint, thanks partly to the 120Hz dynamic refresh rate and support of Dolby Vision and HDR10+. It delivered a bright experience no matter where we were, although the claimed 4,500 nits peak brightness only really comes into play in certain scenes in HDR content. As for the dynamic refresh feature, it’s designed to keep things smooth with whatever you’re up to, automatically adjusting itself as you go.

It’ll even drop to as low as 0.1Hz which we admittedly didn’t notice, and can only assume it’s to keep the Always-On Display happy when summoned. The “Smart Switch” proved adept at this when bouncing around between apps but came short when it was time to boot up a game, capping the max refresh rate at 60Hz. To take full advantage of the 120Hz display, you’ll need to switch the setting to ‘High’ at the cost of battery life and make sure that your game supports a high refresh rate.

The display is coated in ‘Armor Glass’ that Vivo reckons is eleven times more resilient to a drop, something we’re slightly unwilling to test properly. It survived a small fall or two, however, and lived to tell the tale with no cracks or blemishes to speak of.

A real gamer

Fortunately, Vivo’s placed just as large a significance on the innards as the excellent display, opting to go for MediaTek’s Dimensity 9400 SoC, 12/16GB of LPDDR5 RAM, and a choice of storage. That 12GB RAM is reserved for the 256GB model – something we’re still not sure if Vivo will sell locally. The same goes for the 16/1TB model. Our review device is the 16/512GB model.

As such, the X200 Pro handled just about everything we threw at it with nary a complaint. It didn’t matter if we were mindlessly bouncing between apps, streaming Dark on Netflix (gotta find some use for that HDR, right?) or even gaming, the X200 Pro took it. And took it well. It’ll even be handy for a spot of video editing if that’s your sort of thing – though you’ll always get better results with a dedicated PC.

Gaming, specifically, was a bright spot for the X200 Pro. It churned out high, consistent refresh rates for some of the more demanding games without even breaking a sweat (though there was a slight, unalarming rise in overall temperature). It crushed 3DMark’s twenty-minute Wild Life Stress Test without any hitch, holding onto a manageable refresh rate, even if it did begin to drop near its end.

We saw similar results after running the X200 Pro through Geekbench 6, pulling in the sort of scores that firmly place it above the rest of the competition – 2,424 in single-core performance and 7,188 in the multi-core test. It will be interesting to see how it holds up to this year’s devices with the Snapdragon 8 Elite or whatever Apple’s new chip is called in the iPhone 17 series.

We never exactly had problems with the industry standard 5,000mAh battery, but there was always a concern of hitting danger levels after a fair bit of usage throughout the day. The X200 Pro alleviates those concerns, opting for a far larger 6,000mAh juicer that made it to bedtime with some change to spare. It’s made better by the 90W charging spec, trouncing Samsung’s immovable 45W efforts. Admittedly, it takes a step backwards from the X100 Pro’s 100W charging spec, presumably a balancing act Vivo is playing between big batteries and how long they hold their charge over the years.

Seeing as how Vivo hasn’t exactly broken the mould, we’ll only briefly mention the company’s recent interest in AI, or as it likes to call it: Amplified Intelligence. The X200 Pro is loaded with the sort of features we saw in Apple Intelligence – better image editing, transcription abilities, and generative text edits in the Notes app. Vivo has not revolutionised the space, providing some mightily similar functionality to all the rest. But it’s here.

Enter the Zeissgeist

The Vivo X200 Pro is excellent in nearly every aspect, but it stands out as the smartphone camera for the moment. It’s kitted out with Zeiss’ tech – branding you can’t miss smack-dab in the middle of the quad sensor line-up, featuring a 50MP main sensor, a 50MP ultrawide snapper, and the clear star of the show, a 200MP telephoto shooter.

Regardless of your shooter of choice, you’ll be left with some excellent shots – particularly in the daytime. But it’s the telephoto lens that stands above all the rest, excelling with a certain vibrancy that makes everything pop. We captured some superb macro and portrait shots which caught every single strand of hair it saw and effectively blurred the background, with only a few complaints about colour accuracy under very specific lighting conditions.

Night shots are similarly excellent across all three sensors, though it does stumble with certain low-light-level images, like those involving the night sky in the late afternoon and early evening, making everything look slightly cooler. It’s nowhere near being a deal-breaker seeing as it’s not far off from the real thing and only presents itself under specific low-light conditions.

In contrast, Vivo’s left the 32MP front-facer wholly the same. That’s not a bad thing. It’s not a good thing, either. It’s… fine – providing more than enough clarity across the spectrum, though occasionally running into a few issues with low-light selfie shots. The colours aren’t the issue in those situations, but rather the sharpness of the images captured. The subject tends to get an ‘artificial’ look we weren’t all that fond of.

Vivo X200 Pro verdict

The Vivo X200 Pro does just about everything right, from gaming to an excellent camera, except for perhaps the most important one: the price. That isn’t a problem in China or the US, where the X200 Pro will run you about the same price as an iPhone 16 Pro, with a better camera and chipset to boot. But the South African asking price of R40,000 is simply too high for many to stomach and could be better spent elsewhere for similar specs.