vivo V27 5G Review Philippines: Stylish AND Competitive

Review Verdict: vivo has made the right moves with the V27 5G to make it a compelling mid-range phone in the under Php 25k segment in the Philippines. Its processor of choice is good, and the whole Aura Light Portrait system does deliver its promise.

Pros

-Good performance from the Dimensity 7200

-Polished implementation of its Aura Light Portrait System

-Gorgeous back panel

Cons

-Single speaker

-Ultra-wide camera could benefit from an upgrade

vivo has been making improvements to the V-series, and the V27 5G focuses on all of those improvements with its camera performance and an interesting processor of choice. The V27 5G has all the makings of a compelling upper mid-range phone—but does it deliver its promise?

Design

Like the V25 Pro, you get a slim and curved body with the V27 5G thanks to its curved AMOLED display. The frame is plastic, while the back is made of glass. The V27 5G still has a color-changing back, though vivo improved its Photochromic tech. Under direct sunlight, the light green, jade-inspired back panel transforms to a lush emerald green color, and it makes the V27 5G shine from the crowd.

The camera bump is bigger, and the LED flash this time has a ring shape and is part of vivo’s Aura Portrait system. Brands tend to overlook the LED flash, and vivo found potential to make good use of it by making it adapt to lighting conditions better for better portrait shots—more on that later.

Like its predecessor, you have all of the buttons on the left, along with a USB-C port, SIM card tray, and loudspeaker at the bottom.

Display and Speakers

The V27 5G inherits the curved AMOLED display found on the V25 Pro, though it is larger at 6.78 inches. It has all the premium display features you’d expect: 120hz adaptive refresh rate, an in-display fingerprint scanner, punch-hole for the selfie camera, and an excellent brightness range that makes the phone usable outdoors.

The V27 5G’s display is an excellent one, and we loved watching videos and playing games with it. The viewing angles are consistent even on the curved areas, and we didn’t encounter any problems with accidentally touching the edges of the display.

While we love the V27 5G’s display, we feel underwhelmed that vivo only provided this upper mid-range phone with a single speaker. While it does sound decent, we wished the V27 5G came with stereo speakers—especially since a number of mid-range phones are already implementing it as a standard feature.

Cameras

Aside from the ring-shaped LED flash, the biggest upgrade of the V27 5G is its use of a 50-megapixel IMX766V sensor—which is first found on the X60. You do get OIS with the main camera, along with EIS to keep your photos and videos blur-free.

Despite lacking Zeiss branding, the V27 5G’s main camera performs very well in all lighting conditions. It feels close to what we experienced with the X60 a few years ago, and it’s nice of brands like vivo to make some of its flagship hardware accessible to its mid-range offerings.

Both the main camera and LED light plays an essential role in vivo’s Aura Portrait Algorithm system, where it utilizes them—along with a few software tricks—to give subjects a flattering soft light. We were intrigued by this feature, and safe to say the V27 5G delivered its promise—we normally avoid using the LED flash because it produces harsh lighting, but that’s not the case here.

Of course, the V27 5G is not a bonafide V-series phone without an excellent selfie shooter.—in this case, it’s a 50-megapixel one with autofocus. While it’s the same one used on the V25, the V27 5G allows you to shoot 4K or stabilized Full HD (which vivo calls SteadiFace) selfie videos. This makes the V27 5G a solid all-around phone for creating content.

If we were to nitpick the V27 5G’s camera performance, we wished vivo used a newer sensor for the ultra-wide camera.

Don’t get us wrong: the 8-megapixel ultra-wide does take good photos (albeit not as detailed as the main camera), but this sensor has been used by practically all phone brands for the past few years. We look forward to seeing a higher-resolution ultra-wide camera with the next V-series phone.

Internals and Battery Life

The only difference between the V27 5G and the Pro model (which will not be sold in the Philippines) is the processor. Instead of the Dimensity 8200, the V27 5G used a Dimensity 7200–which we best describe as a toned-down version of the well-regarded Dimensity 8100.

We’ve discussed in detail how the Dimensity 7200 performed, and we’re quite impressed at how stable the thermals are—and how it offers a significant leap in GPU performance compared to the Snapdragon 778G (and its variations) and Exynos 1380. Based on synthetic benchmarks, the Dimensity 7200 is an excellent choice for a mid-range phone and is just as competitive as its more powerful sibling.

Just like the Dimensity 8100, the Dimensity 7200 is decent for gaming, being able to run some of the popular titles in the market at the highest graphic settings with ease. While the Dimensity 8100 does perform better, the Dimensity 7200 is a competitive processor of choice in the V27 5G’s price segment.

Being a new processor (the V27 5G is the first phone to utilize it), the Dimensity 7200 still has room for improvement in terms of optimization. Otherwise, it is another excellent mid-range processor from MediaTek.

The V27 5G has a 4600mAh battery, but the phone itself is power efficient: despite setting the refresh rate to dynamic, we were able to clock in 15 hours and 31 minutes of battery life, which is impressive for its battery capacity. Changing speeds is faster at 66w, and it just takes around 40 minutes to top up the battery to 100%.

Wrap-up and Conclusions

With the V-series constantly evolving through the years, the V27 5G is one of the most polished offerings vivo has for the line despite not being a Pro model. While the V27 5 G’s main highlights are its cameras, vivo made an excellent decision in outfitting the phone with a Dimensity 7200 processor.