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I truly believe that the makers of the Vivo T3 Ultra forgot that this is a mid-range smartphone. This beast of a device somehow manages to club together a powerful system on a chip, an exceptional portrait camera (thanks to AI, obviously) and a battery life that has me wrapped around its proverbial fingers.
The Vivo T3 Ultra came to me via my colleague and I was happy to review it. Little did I know that I would be smitten by this smartphone’s performance. The following is my experience with Vivo’s new addition to the T lineup of mid-range smartphones. Keep reading to know more.
My first impressions of the Vivo T3 Ultra began with a completely blank canvas as I had no experience with a Vivo T series device prior to the T3 Ultra.
The device gives a good first impression thanks to its elegant build, aesthetically pleasing design and slim profile. The smartphone is merely 7.58mm thick and weighs only 192 grams. It is flabbergasting how they managed to fit in a 5,500mAh lithium-ion battery in such a sleek body.
That being said, the trend of slim and sleek smartphones is on the rise. More and more mid-range smartphones are opting for this form factor. You take the Honor X9b, the Lava Agni 3 or the iQOO Z9s Pro, all of them have a very similar structure. The same can be said about curved displays.
The Vivo T3 Ultra looks exactly like the Vivo V40. Everything is identical right from the camera island to the thickness of the smartphone. The back of the device has a frosted metallic finish which is great for preventing harsh fingerprints and you can also see the Aura Light just below the lenses. The Vivo badging can be seen at the bottom left corner of the back panel. At the top edge, we can see the words ‘PROFESSIONAL PORTRAIT' printed in white ink. At the bottom, we have the USB type C port, the SIM card slot and the speaker grill.
The T3 Ultra comes with a 1.5K resolution display with 120Hz refresh rate. The 6.78-inch screen offers a peak brightness of 4,500 nits which is surprising because the display absolutely crashes and burns under harsh sunlight. I had to get really close to the screen to try and see what was on it. Texting under the sun was pure nightmare fuel. The display in itself isn’t bad as we get a 445 PPI pixel density, an AMOLED panel and a very responsive 20:9 touch screen. The colours are vibrant, immersive and rich just as they should be. However, brightness under sunlight leaves you wanting for more.
The Vivo T3 Ultra uses a MediaTek Dimensity 9200 Plus system on a chip that manages to get a score of over 1,200,000 on AnTuTu and a multi-core benchmark score close to 5,000 on Geekbench 6. It still boggles my mind how this mid-range smartphone from Vivo, so easily, gets scores that put it close to flagship devices. It is completely understandable, though. The MediaTek Dimensity 9200 Plus (an overclocked version of the Dimensity 9200) is, in actuality, a flagship SoC that was launched in May 2023 and it competes directly with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 and the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.
The Dimensity 9200 Plus has a prime core offering processing speeds up to 3.35GHz and an Arm Immortalis G715 GPU. The ‘Plus’ essentially means that it offers 10 per cent better CPU and GPU performance than the Dimensity 9200. Not only this, but the 9200 Plus has a dedicated NPU for tasks like super-resolution and AI-noise reduction in photos.
The Dimensity 9200 Plus also has a dedicated chip for the camera, which, needless to say, leverages AI to enhance the imaging. There’s UFS 4.0 storage, LPDDR5X memory, 8K 30FPS video support, H.264 and HEVC video codec support, Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth v5.3.
Coming to the practical benefits of these features in the 9200 Plus SoC, there are numerous ways how this chipset makes life easier for the user with the T3 Ultra.
With the overpowered 9200 Plus at its core, the Vivo T3 Ultra offers a buttery smooth user experience. Hopping from app to app goes uninterrupted and never once did I notice any lag. It didn’t matter how many apps I had running in the background, the phone worked perfectly. This included some heavy games such as Call Of Duty: Warzone, Honkai Impact and the new Indus Battle Royale Beta as well (game review coming soon).
I’ve never been a fan of virtual memory so I’ll judge the T3 Ultra solely on the 12GB it gets as RAM. The LPDDR5X memory does a good job and performs better than what you’d expect from a mid-range smartphone from Vivo. Once I got the phone, I installed all my standard go-to apps and each and every one of those apps launched smoothly and without a millisecond of delay. The switching from app to app is done in a very seamless fashion which adds to the overall user experience.
The smartphone handles video playback like a boss. 4K videos play without breaking a sweat which brings me to the next pointer, heat dissipation. The phone does heat quite a lot when put under pressure. During the AnTuTu test, the T3 Ultra’s temperature increased by 14 degrees Celsius. It felt like it was taken out fresh from an oven. However, during my time gaming and streaming content on the T3 Ultra, heat was never an issue.
The Vivo T3 Ultra runs on the Funtouch OS 14 which is based on Android 14. Now, despite the fact that Funtouch OS has come a long way, I still did not find it on par with some of the best operating systems in the business like One UI, Nothing OS and Oxygen OS. However, likeability is always subjective and some people might actually prefer Funtouch OS. One major gripe about this phone’s software is the bloatware. There are a bunch of third-party apps that just do not sit well with me. You also get access to the V-Appstore, Vivo’s own app store which lets you download apps that are otherwise unavailable on the Play Store like AnTuTu. Overall, the software is decent but there is scope for improvement.
Vivo markets this phone as a device that can deliver ‘Professional Portrait’ shots and I have to agree with this claim. The T3 Ultra delivers some of the most stunning portraits I’ve seen on a smartphone in recent times. Safe to say that these portraits were miles ahead of the portraits I took with the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 recently. Just a side note, both these phones are miles apart in pricing too.
The primary camera in the T3 Ultra is a 50MP Sony IMX921 sensor with OIS (optical image stabilisation). Photographs from this sensor are the best ones you’re going to get on this phone. Colour reproduction, sharpness and saturation are all on point, in my opinion. The 1/1.56-inch sensor does a commendable job. I really wished this calibre of imaging was replicated during nighttime photography as well but unfortunately, that is not the case. The lossless 2x zoom is decent and captures plenty of detail. However, if you’re a purist and prefer optical zoom in your photos, you will most likely not be using this mode. The 8MP ultrawide camera on the T3 Ultra is good too. There is ample distortion but it is not a bad thing. In fact, I love a good amount of distortion in my ultrawide shots as it makes them stand out.
What truly impressed me about the T3 Ultra camera is the portrait mode. It is infuriatingly impressive how well the camera works given the price tag on the smartphone. The 50MP primary camera captures plenty of details for portraits. The image quality is much better than I had anticipated. There is also an option to adjust the bokeh (blur) in the gallery app which means you can adjust the background blur as per your liking. As a mirrorless camera user, I felt these photos were taken with a 50mm G Master or a Sigma 56mm Art lens. A few of the portraits I clicked are posted below.
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In the video department, the Vivo T3 Ultra manages to capture up to 4K 30FPS video. It is not the best in the segment and hence, do not expect professional-grade videos from this device.
Despite not having the Zeiss tag on its cameras, the T3 Ultra is capable enough of taking some detailed photos and spectacular portraits. The video capabilities, however, are sub-par and not at all impressive.
The Vivo T3 Ultra is a phone that dazzled me with its performance-centric approach and crisp photographs. There isn’t anything that the phone cannot handle, courtesy of the flagship Dimensity 9200 Plus chipset.
There is one aspect of this smartphone that bothered me a lot and that is its display. Do not get me wrong as the display is great to use. There are, however, two things that caught my attention –
Both the features mentioned above are fine but they lack certain things that make them fall short of expectations. For instance, the curved AMOLED display is sometimes unresponsive around the edges. This causes issues while typing or selecting text. Similarly, although the brightness of the display looks fabulous in closed areas, it proved to be insufficient under direct sunlight. Another thing that Vivo could have done better with the T3 Ultra is that they could have offered a variant with more storage.
When it comes to hardware, this smartphone is stacked with top-of-the-line gear making it a pseudo-flagship device. The processor, combined with the battery life and camera of the Vivo T3 Ultra makes for a great daily companion. Vivo has managed to nail performance to the core in this smartphone and that itself is a huge reason to go for it.
At Rs 31,999 (for the 8GB + 128GB variant), the Vivo T3 Ultra poses as a great option for power users, i.e., consumers who need their smartphone to always be at the top of their game, be it user experience, processing power, photography, videography or battery life.
The T3 Ultra is priced as follows -
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