vivo V60 Review: Zeiss Optics Make It Shine, But Does It Really Rule Under ₹40K?

The vivo V series has quietly built one of the most loyal followings in the ₹40,000 smartphone segment. At a recent community gathering, I met a V-series user who said his vivo V40 Pro is already his second V-series phone, and he’s confident his next upgrade will be one too. That kind of brand loyalty is rare in a market where most users jump ship with every upgrade.

It made me wonder: has vivo cracked the code for repeat buyers in the V-series? To find out, I’ve been testing the all-new vivo V60, which landed at our desk earlier this month. As the successor to the V50, it brings refreshed hardware, a sharper design, and a stronger focus on cameras. After real-world testing, here’s our full vivo V60 review.

vivo V60 Review: Design and Build

The V60 is available in three colors: Moonlit Blue, Auspicious Gold, and Mist Gray. Moonlit Blue features a glossy glass back that feels premium but attracts fingerprints. Auspicious Gold offers a smooth, velvety glass finish that resists smudges, though the ZEISS branding looks a bit too loud. Mist Gray uses a plastic composite back, making it the slimmest and lightest option.

The V60 also stands out as the slimmest smartphone with a 6,500mAh battery. Thickness varies slightly by finish: Mist Gray (7.53mm), Auspicious Gold (7.65mm), and Moonlit Blue (7.75mm). Weight follows suit: Mist Gray (192g), Moonlit Blue (201g), and Auspicious Gold (200g).

Up front, you get a quad-curved AMOLED display with shiny plastic frames and gently curved edges, giving the phone a rounder, more ergonomic form factor. The glossy plastic sides feel smooth in the hand, but can pick up scratches over time. Despite this, the weight distribution is excellent, making it comfortable to hold for long periods.

The vivo V60 brings a refreshed and more refined design, moving away from the oversized camera module of its predecessor. Instead, it adopts a compact pill-shaped camera island with an adjacent ring and Aura Light, a setup that closely resembles the vivo X200 FE.

To minimise bulk, vivo has used an M-shaped telephoto arrangement, though the camera island is still large enough to make the phone wobble on flat surfaces.

vivo also claims the V60 is the most durable V-series phone yet. It uses Schott Xensation Core glass (also marketed as Schott Diamond Glass). The Schott Diamond Glass held up well in testing, showing less susceptibility to scratches. An internal cushioning structure adds further shock absorption.

The V60 is rated IP68 and IP69 for dust and water resistance, making it capable of surviving up to 120 minutes at 1.5m underwater. There’s even an underwater camera mode to make use of it.

The power and volume keys sit on the right spine within easy reach, while the bottom hosts the USB-C port, dual-SIM slot, and primary mic. The top edge houses the secondary mic and IR blaster, and the earpiece doubles as a secondary speaker for stereo audio.

The V60 has a slim bottom chin, an in-display optical fingerprint scanner, and always-on-display support. While the fingerprint scanner is fast and accurate, its placement feels slightly too low, and the unlock speed isn’t the quickest. There’s no notification LED, but the always-on display compensates by showing contextual info and alerts.

vivo V60 Review: Display

The vivo V60 sports a 6.78-inch AMOLED display with a 1080p resolution, a step down from the 1.5K panel on the V40. At the center sits a punch-hole cutout housing the 50MP selfie camera.

Despite the lower resolution, the V60 Screen is brighter than its predecessor and the competition. It is easily visible outdoors, even under direct sunlight, with 1500 nits of overall peak brightness compared to 1300 nits on the V50.

The V60’s panel impresses with features like a 480Hz touch sampling rate and up to 2160Hz high-frequency PWM dimming for reduced eye strain.

The display supports an adaptive 120Hz refresh rate, switching between 60Hz, 90Hz, and 120Hz depending on the content. Users can also lock it to either 60Hz or 120Hz. Importantly, the high refresh rate stays consistent across the UI and supported apps.

Color and video performance are strong, too. The panel supports 1.07 billion colors, the P3 wide color gamut, and HDR10+ playback on apps like YouTube and Netflix. A built-in visual enhancement mode boosts color and contrast in video apps, including YouTube, Prime Video, and Netflix. Users can choose between Standard (default), Professional, and Bright screen modes depending on preference.

vivo V60 Review: Speakers and Haptics

The vivo V60 comes with dual stereo speakers. They get fairly loud and deliver balanced mids, but audio quality takes a hit at maximum volume, where distortion and cracking become noticeable. For casual music, video, and gaming, they hold up well, just don’t expect flagship-level tuning.

Haptics on the V60 are decent and responsive, adding a layer of feedback while typing or navigating. However, there’s no option to adjust vibration strength, which limits customization manually.

vivo V60 Review: Software

The vivo V60 runs on Android 15 with Funtouch OS 15, which is still very much like any other vivo phone, customizable, and unapologetically non-stock.

It’s faster and less cluttered than older versions. Features like Priority Scheduling automatically optimise the system to speed up app launches, and RAM compression helps with multitasking. Animations are smoother too, with vivo’s Aqua Dynamic Effect giving the UI a touch of polish it didn’t have before. Still, it’s not minimalism by any stretch. If you’re used to Pixel or OnePlus, this will feel busy.

With every brand getting on to AI bandwagon, vivo is also bracing for it. The V60 is packed with tools like AI Smart Call Assistant for live transcriptions, AI Captions for translations, and AI Image Lab for photo tweaks like object erasing and shadow removal. Some of it is genuinely useful, some feels like box-ticking, and almost all of it needs a vivo account and internet access to work. It’s the direction every brand is heading in, but whether these AI tricks become everyday habits or just “demo features” is an open question.

For the first time in the V-series, vivo is promising four years of Android upgrades and six years of security patches. That’s the same commitment it makes for its flagship X200 series and a sharp jump from the V50’s three-plus-four cycle. It’s a clear sign that vivo wants the V-series to be more than a buy-and-replace in two years.

vivo V60 Review: Biometrics

The Vivo V60 sticks with an in-display optical fingerprint scanner, and frankly, it’s one of the more reliable ones in the segment. Setup is quick, recognition is fast, and it rarely misses just a tap, and you’re in. It’s the kind of biometric experience that doesn’t draw attention to itself, which is exactly what you want.

vivo V60 Review: Performance

The vivo V60 makes the jump to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 7 Gen 4, replacing the 7 Gen 3 from last year’s V50. The Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 uses a familiar 1+3+4 CPU setup: a single Cortex-A720 prime core at 2.8GHz, three more A720 performance cores at 2.4GHz, and four Cortex-A520 efficiency cores at 1.84GHz. The Adreno 722 GPU is the highlight here, promising 30% faster rendering than the 7 Gen 3, and it delivers when you push it in games.

The V60 comes in variants ranging from 8GB/128GB all the way up to 16GB/512GB. Our review unit had 12GB of LPDDR4X RAM and 256GB of storage, but here’s where things get sticky. vivo is still using UFS 2.2 storage in 2025 on a phone that costs north of ₹30,000. That’s slow, dated, and frankly a bottleneck for an otherwise capable chipset. It doesn’t kill daily usability, but if you’re moving large files, editing video, or gaming heavily, you’ll notice the lag. At this price, 256GB UFS 3.1 should be the baseline, not an upgrade to hope for next year.

On the numbers, the V60 puts up 981,381 on AnTuTu and 1,248/3,457 on Geekbench (single/multi-core). Those are decent scores for multitasking and photo editing, making the V60 feel more like an upper mid-ranger than a flagship killer.

In everyday use, the phone is smooth and reliable. Switching cameras, scrolling Instagram, or bingeing YouTube? No problem. The UI feels fluid, and I didn’t notice the kind of stutters you sometimes see in phones with heavy skins.

Gaming is where the Adreno 722 GPU earns its keep. COD: Mobile runs at 90fps, BGMI tops out at Medium + Extreme (frustratingly, higher refresh options aren’t unlocked yet), and Genshin Impact is very playable. Thermal management is strong: after 30 minutes of continuous play across BGMI, CODM, but never felt toasty. The large VC cooling system does its job, and in a 30-minute throttle test, the phone didn’t throttle at all.

The Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 makes the V60 quick, reliable, and even gaming-friendly. But vivo’s decision to stick with UFS 2.2 storage drags it down, and against phones like the Realme GT7 or OnePlus 13R, it feels outgunned. If raw power is your priority, you’ll find better value elsewhere. If you just want smooth, day-to-day performance with the occasional gaming session, the V60 holds its own.

vivo V60 Review: Cameras

The Vivo V60’s camera setup includes a 50MP Sony IMX766 primary, a 50MP telephoto borrowed straight from the flagship X200’s periscope unit, and an 8MP ultrawide. There’s a 50MP autofocus selfie shooter. All these cameras are tuned with ZEISS. But how does it actually hold up in daily use?

Daylight shots from the primary sensor are excellent, detailed, and vibrant without oversaturation, with the ZEISS filter delivering near-true-to-life tones. It handles tricky backlit situations gracefully, though softness can appear when zooming into the corners. At night, OIS and vivo’s “Ultra Dark Mode” produce bright, social-media-ready photos. However, compared to rivals like the OnePlus 13R or Pixel 8a, the V60’s low-light work can appear a little over-processed, with occasional grain and flares betraying its limits.

The telephoto lens is the star of this setup. At 3x optical zoom, shots are crisp, textures are nuanced, and the natural depth of field feels almost DSLR-like. Even pushed to 10x, it holds detail better than you’d expect. Low light is shakier literally, and the detail takes a hit, but in good lighting, the V60’s zoom is one of the best you’ll find in this price band.

And then there’s the ultrawide. At just 8MP, it’s hard not to call this a compromise. Yes, daylight photos are usable and colors are reasonably in line with the main shooter, but textures are flat, details are missing, and in low light, noise takes over. When Samsung and OnePlus are putting 12MP or higher ultrawides in this tier, vivo’s choice feels dated.

Portrait mode, meanwhile, is a mixed bag. Edge detection is fine but not flawless; hair strands especially trip it up, though face processing is flattering without going plastic. Vivo also packs in ZEISS bokeh styles and even gimmicky AI seasonal filters, but the fact that you need to hunt for these options manually makes them feel more like marketing add-ons than core features.

On the selfie front, the 50MP front camera is impressive. It nails detail and sharpness, especially in group shots with its wide field of view. The cooler tone works for some, but compared to the OnePlus 13R, which handles skin tones more naturally, the V60 can sometimes make you look a touch pale.

Video is where Vivo stumbles hardest. No 4K 60fps is recording, not on the main, not on the telephoto, not anywhere. You’re capped at 4K 30fps, and while colors and stabilization are solid, this limitation is hard to ignore at this price. The ultrawide is stuck at 1080p, which feels downright outdated in 2025.

Overall, the V60 does enough to keep vivo’s V-series reputation alive, especially with that excellent telephoto, but the ultrawide and video limitations are glaring misses. In a segment where rivals are nailing all-rounders, Vivo is still playing the specialist card: great zoom, great selfies, but compromises elsewhere.

vivo V60 Review: Battery Life and Charging

The vivo V60 packs a massive 6,500mAh battery, the largest ever in a V-series phone, and a clear step up from the V50’s 6,000mAh cell. vivo pulled this off using silicon-carbon tech, which crams more capacity without making the phone feel like a brick.

The Vivo V60 doesn’t just survive a busy day, it powers through it. With heavy use (think gaming, maps, endless multitasking), the phone comfortably lasts a full day without begging for a charger. Dial things back to more balanced use, and you’re looking at a day and a half, sometimes even brushing two days.

Numbers back it up, too. An hour of YouTube HD streaming shaved off just 3 percent. After a gaming session that includes BGMI or Call of Duty: Mobile costs the battery costs a mere 5 percent.

On the PCMark test, it clocked around 14 hours, which translates neatly to that two-day comfort zone.  

Charging is equally fast. Vivo bundles a 90W FlashCharge brick in the box (thankfully), and it’s as quick as the name suggests. From 20 to 100 percent in under an hour; 50 percent takes about half an hour. Add in reverse wireless charging, and the V60 doubles as a power bank for your earbuds or smartwatch.

Review Verdict: Should You Buy the vivo V60?

The Vivo V60 feels like a phone that knows its audience. It’s not trying to outgun the OnePlus 13R or Realme GT7 in benchmarks, nor is it pretending to be a low-light photography champ. Instead, Vivo doubled down on the things its V-series fans actually care about sleek design, massive battery life, and portrait photography that pops on Instagram.

Yes, there are compromises. The sluggish UFS 2.2 storage and average low-light camera performance keep it from being a true all-rounder, and power users will find more muscle elsewhere. But if your priorities are style, longevity, and photos that look great without effort, the V60 makes a stronger case for itself than most mid-range phones in 2025.

Should you buy it? Yes, if you want a performance monster, no. If you want a phone that looks good, lasts forever on a charge, and makes your social feeds shine, the Vivo V60 is exactly that phone.

Smartprix ⭐ Rating: 8.06/10

• Design and Build: 8/10
• Display: 8/10
• Speakers: 8/10
• Software: 7.8/10
• Haptics: 7.8/10
• Biometrics: 8/10
• Performance: 7.7/10
• Cameras: 8.2/10
• Battery Life & Charging: 9/10

First reviewed in September 2025.

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