The Vivo Y66 is priced at Rs 14,990 and features a 16-megapixel selfie camera with LED flash. We find out if it is worth your pout and money.
Chinese smartphone maker Vivo has made many significant attempts to ride on the selfie-rage in India. With most of its best-selling smartphones coming from the camera and music-centric category, Vivo has established a label of a ‘selfie smartphone maker’ for itself. Adding to the category of narcissism-inducing devices, the company recently launched the Vivo Y66 smartphone. Priced at Rs 14,990, the USP of the selfie-centric smartphone is, of course, the front camera which is accompanied by a dedicated flash. Does the Vivo Y66 have enough in it to convince power users to give a phone like this a shot? And will the phone get me to pout under the ‘Moonlight’ flash for a selfie? I try to answer the question through my review of the smartphone.
Design
The Vivo Y66 features a unibody design with gently rounded corners and minimal physical buttons. The smartphone is crafted out of plastic but the rear panel in a glossy finish can easily be mistaken for a metallic design. There are backlit capacitive keys on the front panel along with the camera sensor, earpiece, proximity sensor, and LED flash on the top. The power button and volume rockers are on the right while the left is reserved for the hybrid SIM+microSD card slot, which allows either two SIM cards, or one SIM card and one microSD card. At 7.6mm, the Vivo Y66 is sleek and given its plastic architecture is also lightweight. If you have been long used to a small-screen phone, the Vivo Y66 won’t feel too big to handle despite its 5.5-inch screen.
The Y66 comes with a fairly decent screen size, although this is just an HD resolution screen, which is a disappointment. While the viewing angles and the touch response are good, at the given price, competing devices such as the Nubia Z11 Mini S , Moto G5 Plus and Redmi Note 4 are equipped with full HD displays.
Manufacturers today heed to consumer demands of a smartphone that packs it all; from a phablet-like display experience to enviable designing. However, a lot of Vivo’s smartphones feature the same design philosophy where the antenna bands run on the top and bottom section of the rear panel. There is also no fingerprint sensor for additional security on the Vivo Y66. In an age and day of heightened focus on device security, it is surprising to see Vivo skip features which are slowly becoming industry standards. If design innovation is on your checklist while buying a new smartphone then you can easily overlook the Vivo Y66. With repetitive design language, there is essentially nothing awe-inspiring about the smartphone.
Hardware
When I gave my first impressions about the Vivo Y66, I mentioned how the MediaTek MT 6750 SoC was a decent configuration on paper for a mid-ranger. In the real-world, the smartphone does offer a lag-free experience, but only if you are a light to an average user. To bring out the differences, I ran a couple of benchmarking tests on the Vivo Y66 and compared the scores to those achieved by competing smartphones.
On the AnTuTu scale, Vivo Y66 scored 41192 points which is significantly lower than that of competing devices such as the Xiaomi Redmi Note 4, Lenovo P2, Moto G5 Plus, and Nubia Z11 Mini S which have all achieved scores of over 60000. The GFXbench test for graphic processing capabilities revealed a rate of 21fps hinting at the limitations of the 720p display on the Vivo Y66 when it comes to graphic-heavy content.
The smartphone runs Android 6.0 Marshmallow with FunTouch OS 3.0 layered on top. I kind of like the ‘Apple inspired’ custom Android skin, which makes the navigation intuitive and seamless for me. There’s 32GB of internal storage, of which about 20GB is user available. There’s an option to expand the storage up to 256GB through the hybrid slot which takes away the dual-SIM capabilities. In terms of battery life, the Vivo Y66, with its 3,000mAh battery, lasts through the average day for a light user like me, even with streaming music/videos during my commute.
In the sub-Rs 15,000 segment, the Vivo Y66 is a smartphone with light specifications and targeted at lifestyle users. For those looking at slightly more robust performance, competing devices offer a much sweeter deal.
Camera
The highlight of the Vivo Y66, as claimed by the company, is its camera and music capabilities. The smartphone carries forward the Moonlight Glow flash and selfie-centric module as present in other smartphones by Vivo. It is equipped with a 16-megapixel front camera with f/2.0 aperture along with a 13-megapixel rear camera with f/2.2 aperture. Let’s first talk about the USP of the Vivo Y66 – its front camera which is complemented by an LED flash.
The front camera does its job well by capturing natural colors in the standard mode, with crisp detailing. While there is a standard front camera photo mode, there is an additional Face Beauty Mode. The sole purpose of this mode is to make you look unnaturally blemish-free, fair, rosy, or white. If you dislike editing your selfies or do not like capturing selfies in the first place, this mode won’t come in too handy. But if you go overboard with buffing or whitening, then what you might end up with is an overly edited image that loses its naturalness.
Vivo claims that its Moonlight Glow LED flash helps capture better selfies in low-light conditions. I tried capturing a selfie in a dim lit room and the results were slightly grainy. While the purpose of offering more naturally illuminated selfies in the dark is accomplished to a certain extent, it compromises on the quality.
The output of the rear camera produces natural colors, albeit missing on details if you capture a zoomed-in shot.
While clicking in HDR, I witnessed slight lag in image processing. There are multiple filters which can be applied while capturing from either of the cameras, along with a pro-mode to adjust settings manually.
One of the most disappointing bits here is that the camera does not feature motion-capture or any image stabilization, which basically means you need to be extremely stable while capturing photos. While there are voice or gesture-based modes available to capture images, you can’t simply swipe open the camera and go about capturing the surroundings or yourself.
Here are some of the sample shots clicked from the Vivo Y66 in varied light conditions. (Click to see full resolution images)
Without flash:
With Moonlight Glow in Standard Mode vs Beauty Mode
Without Moonlight Glow in Standard Mode vs Without Moonlight Glow in Beauty Mode
The newest competitor in this price segment is the Nubia Z11 Mini S (priced at Rs 16,999) which is equipped with a 23-megapixel rear camera along with a 13-megapixel front camera which is capable of recording in full-HD. As noted in our review, the image quality produced by the smartphone is above average.
Verdict
On the whole, the Vivo Y66 checks a few boxes, while missing out on some key aspects. Essentially meant for lifestyle users, the Y66 is yet another addition to the crowding ‘selfie phone’ segment. While the company’s other recently launched selfie-centric smartphone, the Vivo V5 Plus offered dual front camera capabilities, the Y66 is more like a run-of-the-mill smartphone with more megapixels on the front than on the rear camera with the company’s added ‘Moonlight Glow’ frill.
What works in favor of Vivo is the offline availability of its products. In times when competing Chinese players are focusing on an online-only strategy, Vivo is offering its smartphones through offline retail stores. The Indian consumer market is still driven on how much the dealer recommends a particular product. For millennials, who are a selfie-obsessed generation, the Vivo Y66 fits right with its stylish, albeit repetitive design, front camera with flash, 4G VoLTE support, and a decent battery output. However, it is difficult to overlook the average performance of the smartphone where other competing smartphones are offering much more robust performance. If you are looking at more reliable options, you can consider the likes of Moto G5 Plus, Redmi Note 4, or the Nubia Z11 Mini S.