Vivo X500 Pro Max Review: A superb flagship that needed more time

Introduction

The Vivo X500 Pro Max combines a huge 7800mAh battery, a sharp 1440p 144Hz display and a versatile Zeiss triple camera with MediaTek’s Dimensity 9600 Pro chipset.

On paper, that makes it one of the most capable camera phones around. But how does it fare in day-to-day use, and is it a worthy successor to the X300 Pro? Here’s how I got on.

Design

• Two-tone grey finish with glitter-like sparkles
• IP68 and IP69 rated
• Programmable shortcut button

I’ve been mesmerised by the design of the X500 Pro Max, at least in its grey variant. The finish feels like a kind of optical illusion.

In some light, from the right angle, it looks like a single, soft, matte gray finish. From another angle, you can see the two-tone finish where the top third appears lighter because of its dot-matrix pattern that catches the light. With light reflecting off it in the right way, you’ll then start to see glitter-like sparkles across the back, designed to look like the starry sky at night.

While glitter isn’t for me, I do really like the styling and colour choices. The metal, ridged rim around the outside of the camera gives it the aesthetics of a compact camera. There’s a purposefulness to it that’s impossible not to admire.

Otherwise it’s got all the usual hallmarks of a flagship phone: flat aluminium edges that are softened at the top and bottom, with rounded corners to make it as comfortable as it can be.

For a phone with such a big battery, it’s impressively slim. It’s not super slim, but about the same thickness as most mainstream smartphones – but with a much more capacious battery inside. It’s also IP68 and IP69 rated against water and dust getting inside.

One of my favourite physical features, though, is the shortcut button. You can program it with two separate functions depending on whether you double press or press and hold it. And because you have to either press and hold or double press it, it’s not easy to accidentally trigger an action.

Unlike Oppo’s Snap Key, this button can be set to do just about anything. There are some preset functions like opening the camera, turning on the torch or using the AI captions function. But you can also program it to not only launch any app you want, but any shortcut function that’s built into that app.

I program mine to use Shazam’s ‘Shazam Now’ feature, to instantly recognise music when it’s long-pressed. But the sky’s the limit really. You could have it go to add a new event in your Google Calendar, open a new Chrome tab, start a timer, compose a message or anything else you’d find useful to have quick access to multiple times a day.

Screens

• 6.85-inch 1440p LTPO display
• 2000 nits across the whole panel
• Speakers are a little tinny

Among the strongest areas of this phone is the display. It ticks all the right boxes in terms of specs like refresh rates, peak brightness levels, supported colours and even pixel density.

Like with many manufacturers, the bold 4400 nits peak brightness claim isn’t the number to focus on. Rather, the fact it can hit 2000 nits across the entire panel in its highest brightness mode is. It means typically, regardless of the level of ambient light around you, the display is easily visible.

What I really appreciate about Vivo’s display, however, is the tuning. In its default state, you won’t find the colours looking oversaturated, or skin tones looking too warm or too pale. It’s a really nicely balanced display, and that makes it ideal for watching videos, browsing photos and, crucially, for using as the monitor or viewfinder in the camera app.

What you see on the screen is largely what you’ll see in the photo once you’ve snapped it. If you decide to use any colour tweaking or filters in the camera, you’ll get a great view of what it’s going to end up looking like.  

Added to that is the fact that it’s got pin-sharp details thanks to its 1440p resolution, and LTPO tech to ensure that it can adapt and refresh at a rate that’s suitable for whatever is on the screen, even if it’s a static page, and it’s hard to fault.

It’s a shame then that it’s not paired with a stunning pair of speakers. The stereo system is clear enough, but lacks presence and balance to make it a truly great audio experience. It’s a little tinny, with not enough bass.

Cameras

• Strong daytime results across all three lenses
• Zoom lens can be slow to focus
• Night and Landscape mode didn’t work as expected

As always seems to be the case with Vivo, a lot of this phone is geared towards it being a very good camera phone. Although the sensor sizes, megapixel count and focal lengths are largely the same as last year’s Pro model, this new system is said to have improved sensors, focusing and HDR processing abilities.

For the most part, at least in the daytime, it is a very good system. Whether you’re shooting with the ultrawide, main or 3.5x telephoto camera, you’ll get a strong in-focus image with little grain or noise. Plus, the built-in photography styles or colour processing options give you flexibility in how saturated, contrasty, or flat those images are.

I tend to lean more on the ‘Refined’ option here, with the default ‘vivid’ mode seeming a little bit too colourful and saturated for my liking, but you might prefer that one.

When there’s good light around, the ultrawide camera is surprisingly strong in terms of the lack of distortion and warping at the edges, and in matching the colours, shadows and highlights of the main camera.

Similarly, the zoom camera is great at punching into scenes with shots even at the 10x or 240mm equivalent focal length still seeming pretty sharp and clear. And there isn’t a huge amount of that artificial smoothing and sharpening you often see from smartphone cameras.

Similarly, it’s a very good camera for close-up macro-like shots. Again, using the zoom range to get closer and enlarging objects that are within 15-20cm of the lens, and focusing cleanly on them without too much trouble.

One issue I came across, however, was with that zoom lens. Oftentimes when I’d be out taking photos, I’d switch to that zoom lens, and for the first couple of seconds it would be completely out of focus and blurry before locking on to the scene.

I was a little disappointed by the night time and low light performance. If only because, like the focus on the zoom camera, it just felt like it wasn’t working properly.

With Vivo phones, there are two modes you can use at night time. Either leave it in automatic mode and it’ll recognise it’s night time, shoot a 1-2 second exposure, stabilise any hand-shake and clean up noise to give you the classic night mode type shot.

The other mode is ‘Night and Landscape’ mode. In this mode, historically, Vivo phones would do a longer exposure and give you a much brighter, more vibrant scene. Except with the X500 Pro Max, it didn’t work. It would snap an instant shot, as it would in daylight, leaving me with a really dark scene where you can’t make anything out. Especially with the ultrawide and zoom cameras.

It’s the type of behaviour – along with my zoom camera taking time to focus – that says to me the phone has some bugs that need ironing out before it’s ready for public consumption.

When you do take photos in its automatic mode at night time though, you’re generally rewarded with the same level of proficiency as you’d get in the day time. Because it’s not relying as much on heavy AI or machine-learning processing to de-noise, up the contrast and boost sharpness, the end result tends to be something that borders on realistic. Even at night time. At least, it is with the ‘Refined’ setting chosen in the camera styles.

Any movement in the scene will turn into a bit of a blur though. It doesn’t seem to try and make moving objects like people and cars look frozen in time, which is great when you want that long exposure-like effect in your night time photos. Not so great if you’re out at a bar or club in the evening and taking photos of friends or taking selfies.

Performance

• Same Dimensity 9600 Pro as the Oppo Find X10 Pro Max
• Aggressively throttled under sustained load
• Network optimisation tools hurt Wi-Fi

Measuring performance on this particular Vivo left me a little perplexed, to say the least.

It’s got the same MediaTek Dimensity 9600 Pro chipset and GPU as the Oppo Find X10 Pro Max. In theory, it should be capable of performing at really high levels, but looking at our test data, it seems as though Vivo is aggressively holding it back or throttling it to keep the phone temperature cool.

Perhaps this is Vivo’s way of dealing with the fact that MediaTek’s processor is made up of so-called ‘only big cores’. But in reality it feels like having a car with a big, beefy V8 engine in it, but also a limiter that stops it driving over 60 mph.

Just as an example, when we run it through Geekbench, its CPU scores are closer to the likes of the Pixel 11 series than the identically powered Find X10 Pro Max. And this is with the performance mode enabled. Perhaps more damningly, it doesn’t outscore its predecessor, the X300 Pro.

In graphics tests which run demanding visuals at the highest frame rate possible, it can hit very high peaks. But as soon as we run stress tests where it has to run repeated loops of those scenes back to back, it doesn’t take long for it to throttle the performance and bring it down (once again) to the levels of a Pixel 11. And for those who don’t know, Pixel 11 is not what you’d consider a phone with a powerful chipset and GPU.

Because that swing between its best-performing loop and lowest-performing loop is so vast, it ended up running the Wildlife Extreme Stress Test in 3D Mark’s benchmarking suite with the lowest reliability score I’ve ever seen on a phone.

With the identically-powered Oppo, we didn’t see this in testing, but it does seem to run warmer to the touch than the Vivo. This suggests Oppo’s thermal management isn’t as aggressive as Vivo’s, and will let you push the phone harder, for longer.

The fact that Vivo’s phone has a higher resolution display can’t be ignored either. It’s 1440p, and so has roughly a million more pixels to refresh on that screen in games that support that higher resolution.

What this means in real everyday usage is that if you’re the type of phone user who wants to play the most graphically demanding games at their richest settings, you might be fine for the first couple of minutes, but after that you’re going to struggle to get the same detailed and rich scenes to run smoothly in games like Genshin Impact.

For most games though, you’ll likely not struggle at all. My own particular game of choice right now is Destiny Rising. Leaving that in its automatic graphics setting, it was generally okay, but didn’t seem as sharp as I’d like to see it, and within the graphics settings menu the option wouldn’t allow me to choose higher frame-rate options, and so didn’t feel particularly smooth or responsive.

I never had the feeling that my touch input was immediately actioned, as it might be on a more fine-tuned and optimised device. I was a little disappointed.

Even in the handful of games that supposedly support 144fps gaming, it didn’t seem any better, and that was with the highest performance mode enabled and enhanced gaming performance.

There were even times when scrolling through menus and lists in the software that I noticed some stutter and lag that I wouldn’t expect to find in a top tier smartphone.

I had something of a network performance quirk. Using Vivo’s own performance-boosting tools, which, just like previous models, seem to make Wi-Fi performance worse instead of better. At least when sat using a single network.

Baked into the network settings in the software, you’ll find features enabled that should keep your connection solid. These features are specifically designed to connect to and download using whatever the strongest network near you is. It could be that it prioritises a Wi-Fi network that has a better connection, or switches to using mobile data if that’s better. But with these enabled, my Wi-Fi performance at home was significantly worse.

I’d often try to load pages in apps, or videos on YouTube and it would struggle to connect and download. Almost as if it couldn’t decide which network to use. In the end, I switched all these supposed optimisations off, and my network connection was solid, flawless even.

I suspect if you’re someone who’s moving around a lot, switching between different known networks and your 5G connection, this might work better for you. But if you mostly use the same networks all day every day, it will benefit you to disable these features.

Software

• Easy home screen customisation
• AI isn’t forced on you
• Useful Workbench multitasking

There’s a lot to appreciate about Vivo’s software, at least, once it’s been tamed, and home screens have been cleared of preinstalled software, widgets and folders after the initial set up.

Vivo makes it really easy to customise your Home Screen by expanding app icons or folders to fill more space. You can replace icons with logos for any individual app, or plaster stickers on it if you want.

There’s no aggressive presence of AI, so you won’t find it shoved down your throat at every juncture. Vivo, seemingly, is happy to let you download and use other companies’ AI tools, rather than spend a lot of money trying to build its own tools that do those same things worse (unlike a lot of other companies). That, to me, is refreshing.

I also quite like Vivo’s approach to multitasking. Like its latest foldable, the Vivo X Fold 6 – on which this feature is most usable – there’s a Workbench interface. With this, you have one main screen with a handful of other apps just off to the side in miniature screens.

It’s super useful for any time where you want to be hopping between or cycling between multiple apps, but don’t want to have the one you’re currently in reduced to a half-screen split-screen view.

My biggest gripe is that Vivo does have a lot of features that aren’t immediately obvious. It takes a lot of digging through the settings menu to find some of those, making the process a little convoluted.

Battery life

• 7800mAh battery
• Around two days for most users
• 90W wired charging fills it in 61 minutes

Where some of Vivo’s performance management is actually quite useful is in battery life. Launching even into some of those more demanding games, it can be quite conservative in its battery drain. I suspect largely because it’s not pushing its graphical performance to the absolute max.

As an example, on the day where I wanted to take a look at some of those more intense titles, I spent about 27 minutes playing Destiny Rising, played a quick 6-7 minute round on Free Fire and launched Honkai Impact 3rd to download the necessary files. Of those three, it was downloading the big files – not even playing – Honkai that used the most battery. In total, I drained about 6% of the battery. Without the heavy downloading demand, pure gameplay accounted for just 3-4% of the drain.

It’s a big battery in this phone, and so because of all the aggressive optimisation designed to keep it running cool, most people I’d suspect would get about two days from a full charge.

I’m a pretty light user and typically never go above 3 hours mixed usage in a day. For me, two days wasn’t even that difficult to achieve with this 7800mAh battery. I suspect even the most demanding users constantly moving, using GPS, WhatsApp, music and navigation in an urban environment with multiple calls should still manage a full day with it fairly comfortably.

One thing I was really impressed by was the refill speeds once empty. Despite its massive capacity, the 90W wired charging makes light work of getting it topped back up again. In our tests, the Vivo FlashCharge adapter got it up to 50% filled in under half an hour, and took 61 minutes to do a full 1-100% refill.

Should you buy it?