March Blitzkrieg VIVO

    Welcome to iCover Blog Pages! Competition, like history, does not tolerate the subjunctive mood. And anyone who dares to claim their place in the sun when coming to any competitive market is simply obliged to offer the attention of a skeptical and satiated with gigahertz and megapixel audience something that she has never seen before. It can be a product of excellent quality, offered at a vanishingly low price, or an intriguing legend in the style of Freedom 251, or a carefully crafted bouquet of exotic innovations or an answer that has long been waiting for, but for some reason has not received from the current leaders of the market. One way or another, but something in the new products of the incoming brand should pleasantly surprise and be remembered, or else, no one will notice the failure and collapse of the hopes that have not come true.

    VIVO, which entered the smartphone market in 2011, has no need to look for ways to attract the attention of a respectable audience. By tradition, almost every announcement of its new product comes as a surprise, if not at a price, then at the level of the proposed “technological special effects”. March 2016 for VIVO turned out to be extremely prolific - 2 models of the middle and premium segments with the most advanced characteristics at the time of the announcement were announced right away. About them, and a little about the company itself, we will tell in our article.



    It just so happened that recently, manufacturers of the Middle Kingdom have been increasingly claiming leadership rights in the mobile device market. Confidently dispelling the myth of mediocre technical solutions, clumsy design, insignificant functionality and crooked firmware, such monsters of the modern mobile market as Huawei, Meizu, Lenovo and others confidently compete, and in some parts of this endless marathon they defeat such unconditional market authorities like Apple and Samsung. It is becoming increasingly difficult for the titans to gain a foothold at the top of the rating, and attempts to change leaders desperately made by their Chinese colleagues are becoming more insistent and more confident. And, if so far, although with difficulty, it’s possible to endure the battle in terms of functionality, build quality, materials and firmware optimization,

    Another surprise and cause for excitement on March 1, 2016 was presented by the Chinese company VIVO. About how she came to such a life and how she could surprise the priests from Cupertino and Seoul, and ordinary connoisseurs of good quality smartphones, we will briefly describe below.

    Vivat “VIVO”


    Perhaps many of us are familiar with VVK products. BBK Electronics, one of the largest manufacturers of audio, video equipment and TVs in China, owes its birth to such world-titled brands as OnePlus, OPPO and VIVO. Despite the bloodline, the companies not only managed to declare their own and independent place in the global high-tech market, but also grew to mutual and quite fierce competition in the smartphone market. One of the three - VIVO is in the center of our attention today.

    VIVO company was founded in 2009 in the Chinese town of Shenzhen. The inspirational name, according to the authors, should be associated with the life-affirming “Vivat” - an exclamation that was greeted by Julius Caesar in the ancient Rome far from the IT world or actually “Life”, “Living”, if we turn to Latin.

    Having introduced its first line of smartphones in 2011, over four years, the company has managed to attract more than 1,600 specialists and open 4 research centers in Nanjing, Shenzhen, Dungan and Indian New Delhi. The quality of products manufactured by the company complies with the requirements of ISO9001.



    Following the path of offline marketing, VIVO concentrated its main efforts on retail sales and the organization of effective advertising campaigns. In 2015, the number of smartphones sold by VIVO reached 2 million, and in accordance with plans for the current year, the company plans to triple this figure.

    The company’s official representative offices are open today in Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Thailand and Myanmar, but VIVO places the main emphasis on promoting the products on the Indian market as the fastest growing and most promising market in the world. Last year alone, the company's smartphone sales in the Indian market doubled, accounting for a total of 2% of the total smartphones sold over the country. Despite the significant lag in sales volumes from the absolute leaders of the smartphone market, according to the dynamics of its development, VIVO is recognized as one of the fastest growing companies in the world.

    The compelling success of the company is largely due to the volume of investments in high-quality and effective advertising, for the production of which it attracts the best professionals. In 2015, VIVO became the title sponsor of the Indian Premier Cricket League, a popular game in the countries of the British Commonwealth, while moving PepsiCo to second place. VIVO invests millions in the Hollywood companies Universal Pictures, 20th Century, the MTV music channel, makes vivid and memorable videos with scenes from the Martian, The Outcast Tribe, and the animated animated film Minions.



    In countries where VIVO official representative offices are located, company advertisements can be found literally on every corner and in various manifestations. The efforts and investments are paid off many times, providing the brand with an impressive growth rate.

    Nevertheless, VIVO's advertising budgets in its market segment are far from the largest, and if the company's products had nothing more than just quality and talented commercials, it would have been provided with a place in the technological sump sooner or later. But this did not happen. We touch on the VIVO line and the fact that it, in fact, unites it.

    All VIVO smartphones, according to the classification proposed by the company itself, can be attributed to one of three categories:

    1. Premium class. Devices with integrated Hi-Fi equipment and top-end hardware, which, in turn, is divided into three series: Xshot - camera phones, Xplay - high-performance smartphones, X - super-thin smartphones.
    2. Smartphones with the “V” index of the middle price segment, focused primarily on the youth market.
    3. Budget devices with an index of Y.

    It would not be an exaggeration to say that almost all smartphones announced by VIVO at the time of the presentation were at least one parameter, but they exceeded competitors existing at that time. And taking into account such statistics, we can assume that this condition is mandatory in the company's marketing strategy. So in 2012, users met with the Vivo X1, which set an absolute record for the thickness of the case (6.55 mm) and became the first smartphone with a HI-FI audio chip.

    image

    For the sound quality in the model, the Cirrus Logic CS4398 DAC and the Cirrus Logic CS8422 sampling rate converter, providing a signal-to-noise ratio of 100 dB, were responsible. However, for their $ 400 users then got a 4.7-inch screen with a resolution of 960 x 540, a dual-core MT6577T 1.2 GHz chip, 1 GB of RAM and 16 GB of ROM, a 2000 mAh battery, which, of course, even time was far from a sensation.



    The list of VIVO personal records over time has been replenished:

    • Vivo Xplay 3S - a smartphone with the world's first QHD resolution display (2560 by 1440 pixels) with a density of 515 PPI and a diagonal of 6 inches.

    image

    • Vivo X5 Max - one of the thinnest smartphones in the world at the time of release (4.75 mm);



    • Vivo X5 Pro - the world's first smartphone with biometric identification by the iris;



    • Vivo Xplay 5 Elite is the first smartphone, with 6GB of RAM, officially unveiled on March 1, 2016.



    According to unconfirmed rumors, VIVO is currently working on a smartphone with discrete graphics.

    Judging by the number of decent reviews, many users of VIVO smartphones have folded their strong opinion on the company's products thanks to the Vivo Xshot model introduced in 2014. This strong middling has still not lost its relevance due to the diversity and completeness of the functional filling.



    The Xshot hardware package includes:

    • IPS display 5.2 ″ resolution of 1920 × 1080;
    • 4-core Snapdragon 801, 2.3 GHz;
    • 2 GB RAM chip and 16 GB internal memory plus microSD memory card support;
    • Modules supporting standards 2G, 3G, 4G (TDD-LTE 1900/2300/2600; FDD LTE 1800/2600 MHz), Wi-Fi 802.11a / b / g / n / ac;
    • 13MP main camera and 8MP front camera, Sony IMX214 sensor, autofocus, dual LED flash, LED flash (front), • 4K / 30FPS video;
    • Sensors - proximity and light, accelerometer, gyroscope, electronic compass;
    • Audio unit - DAC Cirrus CS4398, ADC TI TLV320, amplifier Maxim MAX97220;
    • 2600 mAh battery.

    The brand qualities of VIVO smartphones are decent build quality and materials, a stylish, instantly recognizable design (when they don’t want to copy leaders), advanced technologies, and the progressive shell of Android Funtouch OS. One of the “non-Chinese” shortcomings of many representatives of the VIVO lines was still the price until the last moment. And here a pleasant exception to the emerging trend was the March announcement of a pair of VIVO flagships - Vivo Xplay 5 and Vivo Xplay 5 Elite.

    Doublet from VIVO


    A pair of devices of the Xplay series - Vivo Xplay 5 and Vivo Xplay 5 Elite was announced on March 1 at the company's press conference, as promised earlier.



    The eldest Vivo Xplay 5 Elite model received an all-metal case made of magnesium-aluminum alloy, rounded with 5.43 "diagonal Super AMOLED display and Quad HD resolution with Gorilla Glass 4. The device was equipped with an advanced single-chip Snapdragon 820 system, 6 GB of RAM and Hi-Fi 3.0 audio system, which is supported by two ESAC28 DACs and OPA1612 operational amplifier. Headphone jack - standard 3.5 mm. There



    is no memory card slot as unnecessary - 128 GB of flash memory more than compensates for its lack. lay 5 Elite was the first smartphone to bring 6 GB of RAM to its board.

    The battery with a capacity of 3600 mAh with support for the fast charging algorithm is responsible for the battery life. The 16MP main camera with the Sony IMX298 image sensor with 6 lenses, a phase-detection AF system, and a dual LED flash provide the high-quality shooting. The resolution of the front camera is 8MP.



    To complete the experience, the back panel of the device was equipped with a fingerprint sensor, which allows you to unlock the device in 0.4 seconds, and with the display on - in 0.2 seconds.



    The pre-installed boxed version is Android 5.1 Lollipop with support for the latest Fountouch release, which, provided that the optimization is carried out qualitatively, will fully reveal many of the device's capabilities. Vivo Xplay 5 Elite is available for sale in China since March 8 this year. The cost of the flagship is $ 655.



    Compared with the older version, Vivo Xplay 5 loses 2 GB of RAM - up to 4 GB, comes with a single-chip Snapdragon 652 chip, the same 3600 mAh battery, but a less progressive audio system as part of the CS4398 DAC and AD45257 amplifier. The cost of the younger model, which is also on sale since March 8, is about $ 565.

    Via vivo



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