China's Vivo is another player trying to conquer foreign smartphone market and it is focused on two things: to make the thinnest devices possible with the best picture quality available.
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Vivo is bad news for all digital camera manufacturers because there's no need to buy a separate digital camera anymore if you are not a professional photographer. The Vivo Xshot features a 13 MP camera at the back with a fast F1.8 lens and optical image stabilization, and an 8 MP selfie cam to the front, along with 4K video and high-end audio as added pot-sweeteners. Such a big resolution for the front camera will be cheered by all selfie lovers and there are plenty of them around.
The Vivo Xshot sports a minimalist design with a metal frame and metal buttons and a smooth curved back designed to be comfortable used by one hand operation. And everything is focused on taking pictures: The device has a two-stage physical camera button on the side, with a half press to focus on the object and full to fire the shutter. A double click will shoot a burst of five photos which is an excellent addition for all amateurs on in situations of live events.
There is a 6-piece, large aperture F1.8 lens at the back that allows the light through to a 13 megapixel second-generation stack sensor module from Sony. If you don't have the hand made of stone, don't worry, if you move the camera when pressing the button the two motor optical image stabilization system will move the lens to compensate for any jitter. This combination, along with ArcSoft image processing algorithms, promises good low light performance and clear picture quality even in hand of a nervous user.
The Xshot has a dual-color LED flash for improved color balance and to prevent color shifting which can happen on one-color flash and it will also keep toe-to-toe with the OnePlus One and Oppo's Find 7 in the video recording department, being capable of 4K (3840 x 2160) video recording. The front camera has its own LED flash for good-looking selfies and webchats, and you can also take nice group pictures because there is an 84-degree wide-angle lens.
Vivo has joined forces with Cirrus Logic to develop a high-end music chips and is full of technologies from Texas instruments which, together with Maxim headphone amplifier, provides rich sound which all music fans will greet with a smaile. The device supports playback of OGG, FLAC, AAC, WAV, and MP3 files. For all that to happen there is Android 4.3 with a proprietary Funtouch user interface and that is hiden in 146.45 x 73.3 x 7.99 mm (5.8 x 2.9 x 0.3 in) body, and at 148 g (5.2 oz).
To make the picture complere, there are a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor with 2.5GHz Quad-core CPU, fast 3GB, of LP-DDR3 RAM running at 1866MHz, big 3100 mAh battery, Bluetooth 4.0 and Wi-Fi. There's no doubt that the Xshot is a device to go if you are a photo-inclined user. ■
