Vivo V9 review: iPhone X lookalike delivers good value
Vivo's latest delivers a decent package for the price (just don't judge the copycat looks)
Android fans had a ball last autumn poking fun at the iPhone X’s notch. Well, the jokes on them -- or rather, us, because I was one of them -- because 2018 is the year of smartphone notches.
Virtually every significant new phone hitting the market this year, other than Samsung’s Galaxy S9 and the Xiaomi Mi MIX 2S, will have a little chunk of screen missing at the top to accommodate the selfie camera, earpiece and proximity sensor. Huawei’s doing it with the P20 series, and LG’s upcoming flagship will almost certainly do the same.
But while Huawei and LG at least tried (or will try) to keep its own hardware design language intact everywhere else, Vivo doesn’t see the need to pretend. Its recently released V9 is an iPhone X clone, down to the choice of wallpaper and retail packaging.
Once I got over the initial bad taste of a major company this brazenly copying another company’s product, I enjoyed the V9 quite a bit.
Size does matter
The best part about the V9 is easily its screen-to-body ratio. The notch may be a design compromise, but it does add more display real estate without increasing physical bulk. That, coupled with the V9’s even taller 19:9 aspect ratio, allows it to fit a 6.3-inch display into a body that’s surprisingly compact and easy to use with one hand. Samsung’s phones are already super sleek, but Vivo’s V9 feels noticeably more compact than the Galaxy Note 8, and both phones have similar screen sizes. The V9 isn't quite as edge-to-edge as the iPhone X though: It has a chin at the bottom of the display.