Vivo V17 Pro Review: Widest Wide-Angle Selfie Camera Phone

Written by Cheryl Tan

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Forget having to squeeze into frame for a selfie, the new V17 Pro from Vivo ensures that you’ll get everyone in the shot without having to walk backwards while asking people to squeeze closer together.

To our knowledge, only the Google Pixel 3 and 4 phones have wide-angle selfie cameras with a 97-degree Field-of-View (FOV) and a 90-degree FOV respectively. The V17 Pro’s 8MP wide-angle selfie lens has a whopping 105-degree FOV, allowing you to capture more in the shot.

But more on that later, let’s talk design first. The phone comes in either Crystal Sky or Glowing Night, and the unit we got for review is the Crystal Sky colour. It’s absolutely gorgeous. Depending on the viewing angle, you might see hints of pearlescent pink at the sides and corners, or just a beautiful pastel blue across the whole back.

You get the quad-camera array set vertically in the middle of the phone, with a 48MP main camera, 8MP wide-angle lens, 2MP super macro lens and 2MP depth lens.

Vivo’s phones mostly have their pop-up camera module and the V17 Pro is no exception. Instead of the smaller single-lens module seen in the V15 Pro, this one is a wider, more rectangular module to accommodate the normal 32MP lens and the 8MP wide-angle lens.

Next to the pop-up module is the 3.5mm headphone port, which I do appreciate Vivo retaining. The earpiece, light and proximity sensors are also hidden on the top of the display.

As a result, you get an uninterrupted 6.44″ screen with 91.64% screen-to-body ratio. Using a Super AMOLED display with 100% DCI-P3 colour gamut, colours are rich and vibrant. Viewing content on this phone won’t be an issue.

Opposite the power button and volume rocker is Vivo’s Smart Button, similar to Samsung’s Bixby button, that will pull up Google Assistant or Vivo’s Jovi Image Recogniser. Thankfully, Vivo allows you to remap the button to do nothing.

Let’s talk about the main point of this phone, the cameras. Selfies look fine for the most part but do get a little washed out under bad lighting. The real draw here is the wide-angle selfie lens, and boy does it impress.

But the rear cameras do a great job as well. Macro mode works well and retains enough detail.

Night mode surprised me though. The colours and how much the photo was brightened turned out very nicely. You do lose a bit of detail here, but all in all, I’d say the brightening effect competes very well with most other phones.

Photos shot with the main camera without it being in 48MP mode (pixel-binned to 12MP) are also good, with great colours and excellent detail. Overall, it’s an impressive performance from a phone at this price point.

The V17 Pro is running on a Snapdragon 675 processor, with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. Unfortunately, Vivo has decided against including a MicroSD slot so you’ll be stuck with the 128GB of onboard storage.

The 4,100mAh battery ensures you’ll be able to get a full day’s worth of usage from a single charge. Battery charging time is excellent as well with Vivo’s fast charging tech.

This phone is definitely a good competitor in the mid-range phone market, and for people who love taking selfies with their friends, it’s almost a no-brainer to get this for the convenience that the wide-angle selfie lens provides.

More information about the Vivo V17 Pro (S$599) is available on Vivo’s website.