Vivo has unveiled a very recent flagship in the market – the X70 Pro 5G. Inspired by the successful X60 series, the X70 Pro 5G brings quite a handful of upgrades in terms of hardware and software. The price of the device, however, remained very close to its predecessor. For me, who has not reviewed a Vivo phone in a while, reviewing the X70 Pro (from here onwards, we are ditching the 5G) was certainly an exciting experience. Here's my take:

The phone is all about the display, sheer performance and camera. And also, the battery and the unique price range. Let's start with the form factor and display: one word to describe it: terrific! The phone is slim, lean and weighs only 184g. Our review unit was Aurora Dawn, not the much-hyped cosmic black colour one. The display of the phone was a 6.56-inch 2376*1080 FHD+ E5 AMOLED display. Quite the mouthful, isn't it?

For a layman, the phone has a big screen that curves out on the edges. The display is HDR10+ compliant, hence the colour rendition was sharp, punchy and vibrant. The display is extremely bright too- even during broad daylight. The responsiveness of the display was splendid, thanks to the 120Hz display.

X70 Pro runs on Funtouch OS 12 which is based on the market-hardened Android 11. Funtouch has made leaps and bounds of improvement since I last reviewed a Vivo phone. The near-stock UI experience is not quite there yet, but I was still amazed by the dynamic options, refreshing animations and granular control on several aspects of the UI. The

The performance of the phone is quite great. The MediaTek Dimensity 1200-vivo paired with 12GB RAM was able to handle multitasking as well as gaming loads quite easily. We tested Call of Duty Mobile and Genshin Impact, and the phone was able to run them without any hiccups.

The phone packs an impressive 4,450 mAh battery. I tested the phone for weeks and not a single day it required in-day charging after hours of abuse. The reasons I think for such an exceptional battery life are the E5 AMOLED display which is very efficient in battery usage; the upgraded SoC of the phone; and the optimised Funtouch UI. However, if you are an avid gamer then these figures do not apply to you.

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The star feature of the phone is the camera- and it's spectacular. Vivo has partnered up with Carl Zeiss to get a special coating on their lenses. The coating supposedly improves image clarity and reduces glare. The main camera, a 50 MP sensor, comes with Gimbal Optical Image Stabilisation for added accuracy like many DSLRs. The focus on the phone is blazing fast and it was able to keep the focus steady despite a bit of hand movement.

The night mode of the phone is probably one of the best ones we have seen in a while. The gimbal OIS helps a lot to capture objects like the moon and stars or even distant objects. The enhancement is almost in real-time making it easy for most to take photos in dark.

The phone, to date, remains in an ideal sweet spot in terms of pricing. The phone is priced at Tk. 72,990/- making it one of the few android phones that you can find in the 60-80k range. For the price, you get almost a flagship level of performance making the phone a value-buy.