Vivo X21 review: This 'first' of a phone left us wanting more

The Vivo X21 may take inspiration from the iPhone X's operating system and screen notch, but it beat Apple's iPhone to one important thing: An underscreen fingerprint sensor.

7.6

Vivo X21

The Good

The Vivo X21's slim, thin design stands out, while its long battery life will easily last you a whole day. The camera is capable of taking pretty good pictures, too.

The Bad

The iOS-like copycat design is horrible to use, and the phone's underscreen fingerprint sensor takes longer to unlock your phone than a physical sensor.

The Bottom Line

The Vivo X21's cool underscreen fingerprint reader offers a glimpse into what a future phone can be, but it's not compelling enough to buy for the tech alone.

In fact, the Vivo X21 can claim distinction for being the world's first phone to sell with a fingerprint reader baked into the display, though other phones have since used it as well, including devices from Huawei, Xiaomi and another from Vivo itself.

An in-screen (or underscreen) display is cutting-edge technology that's been rumored to come to iPhones and Samsung phones for well over a year. Putting the sensor on the display frees up space on the front and lets you unlock your phone without picking it up to use the reader on the back. Unfortunately, the particular sensor Vivo uses isn't as fast as a physical reader -- so don't buy the X21 just for that.

Fetching a cool S$800 (which converts to about $600, £440 and AU$800), the X21 isn't cheap, but it is a pretty decent phone on its own, as long as you can put up with its copycat iOS skin and its iPhone X-ish looks.

You should get the X21 if you're a fan of clean design, a large display, solid battery life and showy fingerprint tech that will stop your friends in their tracks, but skip it if you're looking for fast performance and tired of the recent slew of iPhone X copycats.

The Vivo X21 isn't officially available in the UK, US or Australia right now, but there appear to be third party retailers that offer the phone for sale online in those markets. Just make sure it'll work with your local GSM bands.

The Vivo X21 is an iPhone X clone with a cool feature

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Vivo X21's underscreen fingerprint reader is slow, but battery life is great

Phone tech hasn't really changed much in recent years, with dual (or triple) rear cameras the last big game changer. Under-display fingerprint scanning has potential to free up more real estate on the phone, but based on my experience, it's a lot slower than the instant unlocking you get with a rear or home button scanner.

That's because when you put your finger over the scanner, which is made by Synaptics, the screen has to light up your finger before it can scan it, and this takes some time. When your finger doesn't quite match up, you have to repeat the whole process, which is frustrating, especially given how instantaneous the "older" solution is. Perhaps Qualcomm's upcoming under-display ultrasonic scanner could be faster, but we'll see. For now, though, being an early adopter won't give you a speed advantage.

Of course, if you really can't wait to unlock and use the X21, then you're better off with the face unlock feature to instantly gain access to the X21; but note that like most face unlock tools on Android, this is convenient but not secure enough for mobile payments.

In dim-lighting conditions, the X21 has an infrared light to scan your face. When you unlock the phone though, you'll get frustrated with the phone's poorly made iOS-inspired Android 8.1 skin called FunTouch. The control panel is now a swipe up from the bottom, but because the home button is in the way, you may accidentally hit that instead.

There's also no search feature on the settings page, which I hated, as it made scrolling through to turn stuff on or off a pain. If you put aside these bugbears, you'll find the rest of the skin pretty usable, especially if you're switching from an Apple phone.

On the camera front, the dual rear 12-megapixel and 5-megapixel cameras take pretty decent shots as seen below, though selfies can feel terribly fake due to an aggressive beauty mode that smooths and whitens your skin (a popular feature in Asia). Portrait mode shots also create terribly unrealistic depth of field, which overly blurs the background, and at times, doesn't quite blur the right area.

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Battery life was a bright spot, though, lasting 15 hours and 40 minutes in our video loop tests, while performance from its midrange Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 chip held up to most of what I threw at it, including some Asphalt 8 gaming. Check below for the benchmark tests.