Vivo V11: smallest smartphone notch yet, in-display fingerprint reader updated, excellent battery life
More cutting-edge than Samsung, much longer battery life than the iPhone X and its camera gives you a digital facelift – Vivo V11 looks a winner if pricing is right
The iPhone X isn’t quite a year old yet, but in that time, Chinese phone maker Vivo and sister company Oppo have seemingly already gone through the entire notch life cycle.
They were among the earliest to “borrow” the notch idea (the tiny black cut-out on top of the edge-to-edge screen) with releases in February, and they both introduced radical handsets that avoided the notch with a pop-up mechanism a couple of months ago.
Now they each have new phones with an evolved notch, one that is so small no one should really have a problem any more. This review is of the Vivo V11.
Design and hardware
The V11’s hardware is, at once, a brazen iPhone X-copycat. We’re not talking just about the notch, but also about the back camera module’s location and the overall shape of the device. Yet it’s also full of innovations that make the current top phones from bigger names like Apple, Huawei and Samsung look dated.
For example, the V11 has a fingerprint reader embedded underneath its display, and this second-generation version works noticeably faster and is more accurate than the first Vivo device (X21) that used this feature back in May. This is cutting-edge tech that Samsung definitely wanted for its phones but could not get done (very credible rumours suggest Samsung’s next flagship handset, the Samsung Galaxy 10, will have this feature).