Design, build quality, handling
The vivo V70 has a new design this year. It is smaller and rounder on all sides. It clearly takes after the vivo X300 series.
Overall, it’s a welcome change and a nice refresh. The curvy display was starting to show its age design-wise, and a flat display with rounded frame corners is certainly more in tune with the current trends.
The color selection is truly wild this year. You get a whopping six color options, some of which have a glass back, while others have a fiber-reinforced plastic one. Not all markets get all of the color options, though.
The phone’s back side is unassuming. Nothing audacious or that eye-catching, to be frank. Just a mundane camera island. It is a fairly compact camera island given the hardware it contains, including the periscope telephoto, the signature customizable LED ring flash, called the Aura flash, and there was even enough room left over to fit a small ZEISS logo.
Our Alpine Grey model is a curious shade. Depending on the lighting, it appears a light brown color or a diluted rose shade. In reality, it has a light grey back panel and a slightly darker grey frame. All of the color options actually get a nicely color-matched middle frame.
That frame is one of the clear highlights of the V70’s design. It is now aluminum instead of plastic, as has been the case with V-series devices. It both looks and feels way more premium.
Speaking of premium, the bill of materials also includes Schott Xensation Core glass on the front. This is very much in keeping with vivo’s tradition of using Schott products.
The vivo V70 is excellently built with practically no flex to the chassis or hollowness. Just like its predecessor, it still has an IP68/IP69 ingress protection rating. This should allow for up to a 30-minute dip in up to 1.5 meters of fresh water.
The button layout is perfectly standard. You get a volume rocker and a power button on the right-hand side. Both nicely positioned height-wise and also very clicky and responsive. No complaints there. The left-hand frame is pretty empty. You only get some antenna lines, which are clearly visible all around the phone’s frame.
vivo V70
The top side of the frame is pretty empty. There are a few holes for things like the secondary noise-cancelling microphone and the IR blaster. There is no speaker grill inside the frame; instead, the earpiece/speaker is behind a slit between the screen and the frame.
The bottom side of the frame has the speaker grill in question along with the Type-C port, the main mic and the SIM tray, which takes two SIM cards. Again, nothing out of the ordinary.
The display bezels are pretty thin. There are no visible sensors above the display either. Everything is nicely hidden away underneath the display.
One of the upgrades this year is a new ultrasonic fingerprint reader in place of the old optical one. It is solid when it comes to speed and reliability, so no complaints there.