Review Verdict: We’re happy that vivo is bringing its flagship phones to the Philippines after a 2 year hiatus, and the X200 appears to be a promising flagship—as long as vivo gives a palatable price tag to it.
Pros
- Great battery life for a flagship
- Very capable processor
Cons
- Very top-heavy
- Pricing is a crucial factor
The X80 Pro was the last vivo flagship that was made available in the Philippines. Fast forward 2 years later, vivo is bringing back its X series phones to the country with the X200 and X200 Pro. We got our hands on the X200 ahead of its official launch on December 15, and it seems that it has what it takes to be a proper 2025 flagship.
vivo X200 First Impressions Philippines: Design
Just like the Find X8, the X200 follows a similar design language with a large circular module placed in the center to house its three ZEISS-branded cameras. vivo makes the X200 different with a smooth, shiny silver decorative rung surrounding the camera module. While the X200 is supposed to be more compact than its predecessor, the phone is very top-heavy—perhaps mainly due to all the camera hardware on the top part of the phone.
Being a flagship, the X200 boasts an aluminum frame, though vivo chose to go for the glossy route unlike with the Find X8. That means you’ll most likely use the X200 with a case if you’re annoyed with smudges. You also get a glass back panel, with our review unit being the Aurora Green colorway that has a muted shade of green. What’s interesting is that the Aurora Green colorway appears to be exclusive to global units—the China version has Blue, Black, Gold, and White as colorways to choose from.
Unlike the Find X8, the X200 is curvier, making it not resembling the iPhone. There’s also no alert slider present, so you only get the usual set of buttons and ports, along with an IP68/69 rating that’s becoming the de facto standard among flagship phones.
vivo X200 First Impressions Philippines: Display
The X200 has a 6.67-inch 120hz AMOLED display with a micro-quad-curved design that’s also becoming a popular design choice for flagship phones. We find it underwhelming that vivo chose to not use an LTPO panel with the X200–though that did not affect its otherwise stellar battery life (more on that later). You do get a few flagship features like 4500nits peak brightness, an optical fingerprint scanner embedded on the display, and 2160hz PWM dimming.
Being a flagship-grade AMOLED panel, colors are vibrant and accurate on the X200, and its peak brightness makes it very usable even outdoors. You get Widevine L1 for Full HD streaming on Netflix, along with support for HDR10 content to maximize the display’s potential for watching high-resolution content.
vivo X200 First Impressions Philippines: Cameras
vivo’s X series stand out for their ZEISS-branded cameras, and the X200 is no exception. Aside from utilizing ZEISS T* coating for all three lenses, you get a solid setup that consists of three 50-megapixel shooters. The main shooter uses an IMX921 sensor and has a f/1.57 aperture and OIS, while the ultra-wide camera has an f/2.0 aperture and autofocus. Rounding up the lineup is a periscope camera with a 70mm focal length equivalent, f//2.57 aperture, autofocus, and OIS. Unlike other phones, the X200 uses the telephoto camera for macro photography instead of the ultra-wide camera.
What makes vivo’s X series phones stand out is that they use ZEISS T* coating for improving light transmittance and reducing reflections, which should translate to better image quality. We will be taking the X200 around for a few snaps, and we will get back to you on its camera performance for our full review.
vivo X200 First Impressions Philippines: Internals and Battery Life
The X200 is powered by a Dimensity 9400 processor, and the variant that’s arriving in the Philippines has 16GB LPDDR5X RAM and 512GB UFS 4.0 storage. Echoing our experience with the Find X8 (which has the exact configuration), the Dimensity 9400 sets the benchmark on what we should expect on flagship chips for 2025–or until we get a Snapdragon 8 Elite phone officially available in the Philippines soon. MediaTek’s Dimensity 9000 series chips pack serious power, and are proven to give Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 chips a run for their money.
Our unit comes with Android 14-based FunTouch OS out of the box, and keeping the lights on the X200 is a 5800mAh battery that uses vivo’s BlueVolt tech. While PCMark’s battery benchmark test crashed on us, we got a screen on time of 15 hours and 50 minutes, which is a great figure for a flagship phone and further proof that MediaTek has improved significantly in making the Dimensity 9400 power efficient following the early snafus they had with the Dimensity 9300. Charging the battery is done via 90w wired charging—you don’t get any support for wireless charging.
vivo X200 First Impressions Philippines: Wrap-up and Initial Conclusions
The X200 has all the makings of what we should expect on a flagship as we move towards 2025. You get a premium build, a solid set of cameras, and a bigger than usual battery that proves to provide a great battery life to complement its flagship internals. This biggest question is how much vivo plans to price the X200 in the Philippines: the Find X8 retails for Php 55k locally, and the X80 Pro was priced close to Php 60k back in 2022. It is up to vivo Philippines to give the X200 a palatable price to make it a compelling flagship locally.
