A flagship to challenge most top smartphones in 2025

With the new vivo X200 Pro ( ₹94,999), the company is addressing that void by the ‘ultrafication’ of the Pro, bringing in some of the best features of the X100 Ultra to the Pro variant this time around. I used the X200 Pro for a couple of weeks, and here’s why I think this is the camera phone to beat in 2025.

Design language

For a while now, vivo has impressed with its design language, especially with its flagship smartphones. The X200 Pro doesn’t stray too far from that familiar design language. But as we’ve seen with the latest iteration of Pixel smartphones, the X200 Pro ditches the curves for a distinctly boxier design with flat sides (the edges are still rounded though); pretty much iPhone-esque.

That said, it looks rad. The texture on the rear glass panel is smooth and delightful. It’s not glossy, and hence does not attract fingerprint smudges, and the aluminium siderails exude elegance.

The camera housing at the back is huge—you need to fit those cameras somewhere! For a lot of casual users, the massive camera island can be a turn off. At 228 grams, the X200 Pro is one of the heaviest phones I’ve used recently—a dozen grams more and it would weigh as much as the foldable smartphone I carry. That said, the weight distribution despite the oversized camera bank at the back is pretty good and the phone doesn’t feel too unwieldy.

The vivo X200 Pro packs in the same 6.78-inch OLED display as its predecessor, but this time around, the display is significantly brighter (vivo claims a maximum peak local brightness of 4,500nits). Thankfully, there are built-in eye protection features as well, like the anti-fatigue mode and the automatic blue light filter.

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There’s nothing to complain here. The colour calibration and the contrast level are top notch, and while the phone offers the option to customize the colour balance, the default settings worked just fine for me. While most flagship smartphones opt for a Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset, the vivo X200 Pro continues to place its faith in high-end Mediatek chips. The X200 Pro is powered by Dimensity 9400, a brand new 3nm chip from Mediatek, and with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of UFS 4.0 storage onboard, you really don’t have to worry about multitasking. It’s fantastic in everyday use with no lags, even handling extensive gaming without breaking a sweat. It does throttle extended gaming sessions, but still outperforms most other flagship smartphones powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon. The X200 Pro packs in a huge 6000mAh battery (the X100 Pro had a 5400mAh battery). However, the single-cell design of the battery means it doesn’t charge as fast as the dual-cell X100 Pro. It takes about 50 minutes to charge from zero to 100%—not stellar, but not too bad either. It can go over 70% in half an hour which is a good enough juice up for an entire day. The X200 Pro also support wireless charging, of course.

Thankfully, unlike other major smartphone brands, the X200 bundles a 90W charger along. A bundled charger ensures the most optimized charging experience as envisioned by the product designers and, of course, saves you a couple of thousand bucks.

While vivo has aced hardware for a while now, the company’s customized UI layer, Funtouch OS has often left a sour taste in the mouth. The X200 Pro is powered by Funtouch OS 15 based on Android 15. Incidentally, once I got past my biases against Funtouch, I did experience the improvements and refinements that vivo has managed in the last couple of years. It’s clean, and optimized well, especially for a powerhouse like the X200 Pro. And, on point, it has a bunch of AI-powered utilities for things like audio transcribing and translation as well as marquee Android features like Circle to Search.

I hope vivo will continue to build on this fluidity but also bring in more intuitiveness and imagination to Funtouch OS as it goes forward.

Additionally, vivo is still conservative with its update promises. The X200 Pro will receive four Android OS updates along with six years of security updates. Both Google and Samsung now offer seven years of updates, and vivo really needs to up its ante to posture as an ace flagship player.

The camera

The vivo X200 Pro gets a new 50MP Sony sensor with a 1/1.28-inch sensor—it isn’t as big as the 1-inch sensor on the X100 Pro. While vivo insists that it should work as good as the old one, maybe a compromise was made for product design or segmentation reasons.

However, once I got my hands on the camera, I realized that the photos in daylight conditions are detailed with vibrant colours and excellent dynamic range. The exposure’s on point mostly. There’s some impressive tuning which allows the X200 Pro to eke out such impressive photos with a sensor that is smaller than its predecessor. It’s incredible in low-light conditions as well. The colours and the details are accurate.

The highlight this time around is the 200MP telephoto lens—it goes up to 3.7x via optical zoom and has OIS. The telephoto lens shines with portraits… there’s beautiful bokeh effects, accurate edge detection and segmentation, and precise skin tones. The company’s collaboration with Zeiss is evident in the portrait shots and tonal balance of the photos.

The 50MP wide-angle lens is unchanged from the last year. It does a decent enough job and delivers usable photos but is clearly the most unremarkable piece of the optical setup on the X200 Pro. It’s not the widest nor the sharpest, and therefore, for most scenes, I preferred to opt for the main camera itself.

On the front, the selfie camera is the same as the X100 Pro and pretty ordinary. The 32MP front-facing camera is serviceable but doesn’t do justice to the brilliance of vivo’s imaging prowess.

The vivo X200 Pro has one of the best camera packages, and it could just sell itself as a “portrait camera phone." For those who take a lot of selfies or create self-facing videos, the front-facing camera might not be the best bet though. Apart from the optical components, vivo also offers a ton of options in its camera interface to make its camera shine even further. There’s a plethora of shooting modes and filters that one must explore and experiment with.

My only quibble about vivo’s imaging choices is it’s overt processing which is evident when you zoom into a shot or click a tricky scene where the camera cannot make sense of the subject and the landscape. It’s not a showstopper, mind you, but takes away the natural imperfection of a scene to deliver a heavily processed output. As I joked with a friend, vivo’s cameras hit the processing peddle wildly as soon as they spot skin of a human or the spots on the moon.

Should you buy it?

The vivo X200 Pro doesn’t come cheap. At ₹94,999, vivo isn’t shying away from claiming a place on the flagship table.

But the sticker price shock aside, vivo packs in enough and more to justify the purchase. The X200 Pro sports one of the best camera packages available today. I’m headed to a family wedding next week, and totally expect myself to click a zillion portraits of my relatives using the vivo X200 Pro—all this while my Pixel 9 Pro stays in my jacket’s pocket.

And that highlight aside, I mostly liked everything else about the phone as well, especially the battery life. It’s not perfection… but there’s enough to keep me interested.

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