Vivo has been in India for quite some time and has released devices in different price segments. Off late, they have been looking to cater to the selfie trend and they have launched the Vivo V5 and V5 Plus with selfie cameras. To bring selfies to lower price segments, the company also launched an affordable variant, the Vivo Y66 with 16MP selfie camera.
The phone comes with similar hardware as that of Vivo V5 but with some features missing. The device is priced Rs 14,999 and in this post, we take a look at the device in detail.
Design and Build:
When it comes to design, the Vivo Y66 is no different from the Vivo V5 launched last year. The design is definitely one of the good aspects of the device and has a unibody design but it might be mistaken for metal finishing. The device has a plastic back panel with good finishing. There is certainly an inspiration from iPhone in the design department, but it looks good. The phone has curved edges all round and feels good to hold. The device is also relatively slim and lightweight for a 5.5-inch phone and this adds to the usability of the phone.
The power and volume keys are on the right side while the SIM tray is on the left side. It has a hybrid SIM card slot. At the bottom, there is audio jack, micro USB charging slot, and the speaker unit. We have the gold variant of the phone which comes with front panel finished in white. The front panel houses the 5.5 inch HD display, the 16MP front camera, selfie flash and also the usual set of sensors. Below the display, you will see the three capacitive navigational buttons which are backlit. One of the missing features of the phone is the fingerprint scanner. Overall, the phone feels good in hands with good design and build quality.
Display:
Vivo Y66 features a 5.5 inch HD display with 1280 X 720 resolution. While most of the device in this price segment have moved to Full HD (1080P) panels, Vivo has used an HD panel for this price segment. Although it is an HD panel, the color quality looks quite good and the sharpness levels are also decent. The company ships the device with a screen guard installed. TVivo Y66 has 2.5D glass but it misses out on Corning Gorilla Glass protection. The viewing angles are also good.
While we are disappointed to have an HD display in this price segment, the HD display quality isn’t bad.
Software:
Vivo Y66 runs on Android 6.0 Marshmallow and has a custom UI called Fun Touch OS. Fun Touch OS is a custom UI from Vivo and feels similar to other Chinese OEMs with no app drawer and packs multiple home screens. The notification center is implemented similar to iOS and has Control center which can be accessed with a swipe from the bottom of the screen. The control center houses the options for multitasking and also quick toggles.
Looking at the settings of the device, you can see a plethora of options like gestures, smart multi-screen, one-handed mode, super screenshot and more. There are lots of options to make the device customized for your use.
The phone also comes with theme manager where you can download additional themes, wallpapers, fonts and lock screens. There is also a phone manager app which has options to clean the phone, battery manager, app manager, privacy options and more. The global eye protection mode allows you to get warmer colors on display, specifically for reading.
While the software offers lots of options, it is not a user-friendly one for first timers. But once you get used to it, the device feels good to use.
Performance:
Vivo Y66 is powered by a Mediatek chipset, the MT6750 Octa-core clocked at 1.5Ghz. It is a Cortex A53 chipset which is coupled with Mali T860 GPU and 3GB RAM. This is the same processor which was available on Vivo V5 as well. While the processor is not a powerful one, it does the tasks pretty well in day to day usage and we hardly noticed any lags or issues. It responded well to the tasks it was thrown. The gaming performance of the device is was just decent with a few frame skips. The benchmark score for the device is a moderate 40396 and not like the Snapdragon 625 or a 652.
The phone comes with 32GB storage and around 23GB is available to the user in the first boot. The 3GB RAM on the device is quite good for day to day tasks and overall we were pretty happy with the performance offered by Vivo Y66 although we would have expected a more powerful chipset in this price segment.The speaker performance is also quite decent.
The call quality of the phone is good and it supports VoLTE in India, so you can use it with Jio SIM cards. The phone also offered micro SD expansion option, but it is a hybrid slot. The biggest let down for the device is the lack of fingerprint scanner at this price segment. For a phone priced below Rs 15,000, the fingerprint scanner is one of the important features and Y66 misses out on this.
Camera:
The USP of the Vivo Y66 like any other Vivo smartphone is the selfie camera. It comes with a front 16MP shooter with moonlight selfie flash. On the rear, there is a 13MP shooter with LED flash. The camera interface of the phone is quite good and there are some good options and features available including a manual mode for shooting. There are filters, slow motion and fast motion available. There is also 1080p recording available for both front and rear cameras.
Now talking about the selfie experience, the front camera performed quite well with the selfies and the overall clarity of the front facing camera was quite good. If you are looking for a selfie focused smartphone, then the Vivo Y66 won’t disappoint you.
The rear camera is a 13MP shooter which shoots some decent pictures with good color quality. But the sharpness levels are way too low for the rear camera and you could see some noise even in daylight shots. The low light captures also had noise and the overall camera performance from the rear camera is strictly average. Here are some of the samples taken with the camera.
Battery:
The phone comes with 3000mAh battery and the performance is quite good. We tested the phone with social networking apps, calls, browsing, gaming and using the camera and found that the battery can easily last through a day of usage. While the battery performance is good, there is no support for fast or quick charging and the default charger shipped is a 1A.
There are some good battery modes to choose from the phone manager app to get the better out of your battery.
Verdict:
Without a doubt, the Vivo Y66 is a phone for selfie lovers and it produces great selfies at this price segment. But the Vivo Y66 just ticks the selfies aspect and there are many aspects where the phone fails to impress especially the processor, lack of fingerprint scanner and also out-dated Android 6.0. At Rs 14,999, Vivo is asking a premium price for this selfie smartphone. If selfies are your primary aspect, Vivo Y66 will impress you, if not there are better alternatives in this segment.
This version is different from its previous version.