Vivo Y55s Review: Good Battery Life In A Small Package

A successor to the Y55 lineage, the Y55s comes into market at about the same price range a 3 GB RAM selling point with better battery life and rear camera to boot. With a new price tag of PHP 8,490, this handset has entered a very competitive price range.

Vivo Y55s review

In our first impression, the Y55s has the looks and build that we love from Vivo. However, under the hood is where things get interesting. Let's find out!

For our review part 1: Vivo Y55s Unboxing and First Impressions

Display Quality

The Y55s showcases a 10 multi-touch, 5.2 Inch HD 1280 x 720 resolution w/ 2.5D curved glass at 282 ppi. The screen’s sharpness and brightness are not as great as what we are accustomed to with Vivo phones, but it features good levels of color contrast and tone. Viewing angles are okay too.

Audio Quality

Single speaker below

The handset can really be a great companion in commutes. the audio quality is great especially when listening through the earphones. On speakers, better play the songs a tad lower than the max volume as that is the sweet spot. Going higher up would result in some slight distortion and muffling of the audio.

The phone can put out some good tunes!

The stock earphones surprisingly work well for music and making calls. The mic however pics up a lot of noise and may be best used under quieter environments. I was even able to use the stock on a Skype meeting and got no negative feedback.

Microphones are good for calls. Acceptable enough for casual recordings.

Battery Life

Good battery performance

This is the most loveable part of this phone. This phone's battery is good that it lasted about 10 hours of normal day activities before reaching the 15% battery warning. this included, texts, calls, web searches, music, some GPS navigation, Skype calls, and the casual Facebook games. The benchmark scores are outstanding with 9 hours and 26 mins!

To get this result out of a 2,730 mAh battery is remarkable!

In terms of charging, the phone needs to be plugged in at approximately 3 hours to get to full charge if the battery is depleted. From my perspective, this may be longer than the usual charging times we encountered but it is an even enough trade given the gains.

Camera

The rear camera

At the back, the Y55s showcases a 3 MP f/2.2 w/ AF and LED flash. which has selfie, beautify, panorama, and very good pro mode. The rear camera shots are pretty good and the day shots, macro shots came out clean and vibrant enough for those day to day use.

Camera UI

It still has the PPT mode for taking pictures of presentations and documents for those people who prefer doing this rather than taking notes.

The camera can do the job!

In terms of picture quality, this shooter offers a great deal in the camera department for the price range. It manages to get great shots with excellent color, tone and sharpness regardless of the entry-midrange specifications.

We also enjoyed its manual and HDR modes that you would really appreciate for this phone to have especially on low light. As long as you're in a well lit environment you won't have a problem at all.

Rear Camera Samples

Daylight shot

Close-up daylight

Indoor sample

Indoor close-up

Night shot sample

For the selfie cam, is a 5 MP f/2.2 w/ screen flash. It is not the best one out there but it is still a capable option given the you would be shooting in a well lit place. Given the specs, it is also not ideal to be used for huge group selfies as the small frame would need to be compensated by positioning.

Selfie Camera Samples

Daylight groufie

Indoor sample

For videos, the handset can record in 1080p behind.

Performance

Acceptable benchmark scores

The Y55s is powered by a 1.2 GHz 64 Bit Snapdragon 425 quad core processor (downgraded version of Snapdragon 430 of Y55) with 3 GB of RAM allows for a lot of multi tasking to run smoothly and without a hitch. 

However, as you can see on the be 36,002 and 1,868 benchmark results from Antutu and Geekbench, this is no longer an ideal phone for those high octane games as the device tends to slow down. 

We tried playing Asphalt 8 Airborne with high settings and at certain points lags will be experienced.

Vivo's FunTouch OS skin

On the software side, the Y55s run the FunTouch OS with Adroid 6.0 marshmallow. It has no app drawers and very minimal bloatware. There are different gestures that could be enabled to speed up your day to day tasks.The FunTouch OS makes the aesthetics have more of an iOS feel.

The settings panel is brought out by sliding up from the bottom. However, this leave little room for customization. Widgets are useable in the main screens and not limited to the notification panels.

The Y55s follows the tradition of having more of an IOS design because of the FunTouch OS running with Android 6.0 Marshmallow, and may require some getting used to if you are more familiar with the usual android environment.

In terms of connectivity, the phone hangs on to signal well and is able to connect to 4G and WiFi excellently. Has a good selection of your usual security protocols but a fingerprint scanner would have been nice given the price.

Pros - Simple minimalist build, remarkable battery life, less bloatwares, focused more on multi tasking

Cons - Plastic construction, no Gorilla Glass protection, no fingerprint sensor, downgraded processor, software capabilities could have been stronger

Verdict

The Vivo Y55s is a sufficient day to day phone. It does not live up it's predecessors which were gaming powerhouse but I do not think it has to. This handset has been made with the focus being more directed at day to day activities and multitasking. With a price of PHP 8,490, I would want more from it like a fingerprint scanner or at least have it as Gorilla glass.

All in all, the Y55s is a solid phone for those who would focus more on casual-work related tasks with a few small games on the side. the minimalist design and build may not play to everyone's taste but there may be some out there that would appreciate this phone.

Pro tip, the Vivo V5 Lite is the better Vivo selfie smartphone under PHP 10K.

Build / Design: 3

Display: 3.25

Audio: 3.5

Battery: 4

Camera: 3.5

Performance: 3.5

Average: 3.5 / 5