Chinese smartphone manufacturer Vivo has finally launched the V1Max mid-range smartphone in India, after having announced it last month alongside the Vivo V1, which currently has an MSRP of Rs. 17,980 ($270). The V1Max, which is the phablet version of the V1, will come with a price-tag of Rs. 21,980 ($330). As for its availability, the company has announced that the device will go on sell from the first week of September throughout the country. While Vivo is not exactly a universally recognized brand in the country as yet, it is an up and coming brand in China and belongs to the horde of Chinese smartphone vendors that have opened shop in India since Xiaomi acted as a trailblazer last year. The V1Max sports a metallic-frame and has a thickness of only 6.9 mm. The phone comes with a dual speaker system featuring a Hi-Fi audio chip, according to the company.
Coming to the hardware specs, the smartphone comes with a 5.5-inch IPS display with a resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels. The handset is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 SoC, which has a 64-bit octa-core processor clocked at 1.4GHz and an Adreno 405 GPU. The handset comes with 2 GB of RAM and 16 GB of internal storage, which can be further expanded by up to 128 GB with the help of a microSD card. The phone runs on Android 5.0 Lollipop, with the Funtouch 2.1 UI on top, while the battery under the hood is a 2,720 mAh unit.
As for the imaging options on the Vivo V1Max, the phone features the same camera combination that is found on its smaller cousin, the V1. Which means, a 13-megapixel unit does duty on the phone’s rear and a 5-megapixel camera helps shoot the selfies. The cameras also come with face recognition and beatification mode, features that we’re increasingly seeing from manufacturers like Asus, Lenovo and Xiaomi, among others. Coming to the connectivity features, the handset includes support for 4G LTE, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Micro-USB, GPS and A-GPS. The phone also comes with interesting software features like Smart Wake 2.0 and Smart Screenshots. The later helps take long-duration screen shots and screen recording. It also helps annotate the screenshots by adding funny graphics, emoticons etc.