vivo X Fold 2

Statistics from a market research firm, iResearch, indicate that shipments of foldable phones in China are expected to grow 154 percent year-over-year in 2022, with shipments expected to reach 5.5 million units in 2023. Given the overall downturn in the smartphone market, we believe that foldable phones are emerging as a new growth area and they are actually becoming more and more practical.

Update: vivo X Fold 2 is available on Giztop.

The Vivo X Fold series is one of my favorite foldable lines since we did see interesting features exclusive for foldable models on them. Well, the latest flagship, Vivo X Fold 2, still has unique advantages over the competition.

Design

We got the red variant, thankfully, which is my favorite color variant in the series. On this Vivo X Fold 2, the dark red is pretty charming, and the design here even makes the classical favor even stronger.

This time the back cover is made of two different materials, the right quarter is made of glass with a pattern similar to traditional Chinese ink painting, and also looks like a burning flame. This not only makes the back cover more beautiful and elegant but also allows the camera DECO on the left to be visually centered, which is quite a brilliant design.

But as a foldable model, its rear camera module really protrudes a lot. To visually not ruin the unity of the back, Vivo gives the module a stepped design, and the base ring is also given a texture sculpted to resemble a camera lens. But the little Zeiss logo stands out a bit.

There’re triple lenses equipped on the X Fold 2. The 5x telephoto lens we saw on the previous X Fold Plus has been removed and replaced by a ring-shaped fill light.

Here are the exact figures of the dimensions of the Vivo X Fold 2. We don’t really feel the difference in the thickness, which claims a 1mm reduction here. So as a phone, it’s still a bit bulky when folded in hand.

Compared to its predecessor, its weight has been drastically reduced while its width and height remain unchanged, which is the most effective way to make a foldable phone more practical.

The volume and power buttons are solid and there’s another mute trigger learned from iPhone. It’s not often seen on Android models, but I really like it.

Screen & Dispaly

The vivo X Fold 2’s display consists of an 8.03-inch inner screen and a 6.53-inch outer screen, both of which are made of E6 panels from Samsung with 2K+ resolution, supporting HDR, Dolby vision and up to 120Hz refresh rate. Apart from the gap in size and resolution, the only difference is that the inner display’s brightness can be boosted up to 1800nit for a partial area, which is slightly higher than the outer one.

A great point is that both of them have a hole-punch selfie camera on the top. Users can take selfies regardless of the folding states.

Thanks to the new hinge, the crease in the middle of the inner screen looks not perceivable, but you can still spot it when viewing it from the side. Thankfully, we wouldn’t use the phone in that way. But I can still feel it with my fingers across the screen.

The ultrasonic fingerprint reader has always been one of the most unique selling points of Vivo’s flagship models, and on the Vivo X Fold 2, we could double pleasure of the best unlocking experience, both on the inner and outer screens. It removes the dilemma we had with foldable models. Now you can easily unlock the phone regardless of the folded state.

Camera

How to bring the best camera to a foldable phone is probably the biggest challenge for all brands, as there isn’t enough space here for them to cram in a super sensor like the imx989 or a periscopic telephoto lens, but sensor size doesn’t dictate everything about photography. In most scenarios the coating on the lenses and the camera system is more important for post-processing of photos.

From these samples we can see that X Fold 2 photos have very nice colors and excellent dynamic range, although it can’t get a more impressive bokeh effect and photos have unpleasant noise in low light.

 I still prefer to use it to capture what’s happening around me on the street because you can expand the preview window on such a big screen, and the size and the edges make it look like a photo frame. So I can’t help but try to use it to frame the people in front of me or the clouds in the sky. A lot of fun here.

Origin OS

The new Dock is one of my favorite features. You can call out any app by long pressing the bottom of the screen. With this Dock, you can switch between different apps as fast as using a tablet, and you can also drag these icons to create a split-window Multitasking or a floating window.

I think their next step should be to break down the barriers to exchanging resources between apps. For example, I could be browsing social networks and chatting with my friends via split-window multitasking, and I should be able to drag text, images, or even videos from one window to a text box in another, but unfortunately, we haven’t been able to do that on a foldable phone, at least until now.

Here’s another commendable improvement for Vivo, they’ve brought us a very powerful cross-platform office suite that allows users to connect phone and tablet to your PC, so you can control your phone and share files directly from your PC.

You can even share the keyboard and mouse on all connected devices as if having multi-screen work on a united working station. It’s really crazy. If you remember, Apple had worked very hard to bring Universal Control to the Mac and iPad after several announced delays, but now Vivo allows you to do the same on any PC that supports Bluetooth and WiFi.

What’s even more incredible is that Office Suite also supports reverse control. You can use your phone or tablet to control a connected PC. You can even use the touch screen, though remote desktops are nothing new. Vivo Office Suite is a completely free piece of software, which I think is still a great value considering the quality of its graphic interface and the low latency.

Specs & Performance

As for performance, the Vivo X Fold 2 is powered by the Snapdragon 8 gen2 chipset. As the other 8Gen-2 foldable models will only get available in a month’s time at the earliest, the X Fold 2 probably is the most powerful foldable phone for now.

But perhaps because the compact body get heated up easily, the X Fold 2’s peak performance is somewhat limited, both in daily use and in gaming, the main cores will only run at a lower frequency, which for most people doesn’t pose a problem. But if you are a Genshin Impact gamer, an average frame rate of 55 at the highest graphics setting is a worrying performance.

So I would recommend the iQOO series for gaming, and I hope Vivo can further unlock the performance of the X Fold 2 via OTA, as I found that the heavy graphic loading with the phone unfolded didn’t make the body get very hot.

Battery & Charging

The Vivo X Fold 2 has a 4,800mAh dual-cell battery, and in our 5-hour typical use test, it only had 2% power left, so if we exclude the power consumed by playing Genshin Impact for an hour, it still has enough battery life for a full-day use.

The 120-watt wired charge still has a significant lead over the competition, as you can charge it over 50% in just ten minutes, and a full charge takes less than 30 minutes. Another surprise is that it also supports up to 50W wireless charge.

Verdict

So that’s the Vivo X Fold 2. Maybe its hardware and performance improvements aren’t as huge as expected, but I think Vivo made the right choice because for a foldable phone, a thin and light enough body is the most important thing, followed by super fast wired and wireless charging and the software.

Compared to other brands, Vivo has put the most effort into the software. So I’d still put it at the top of my list of foldable phone recommendations for now.

Get Vivo X Fold 2 with a coupon code (GTD23) at Giztop: Buy Now.