Vivo Y27L: An ideal phone for casual users

It is no secret that the Indian mobile market is a very price-sensitive one. No wonder the budget segment often sees the most action. The Y27L from Vivo joins this segment to fight for a slice of the pie.

For starters, it is a compact device and look sturdy. The magnesium alloy metal back cover sits easy with the curved-edge slim body, which weighs in at 137 g. The 4.7-inch IPS display sports a resolution of 720x1,280 pixels, which is a fairly decent resolution by itself, but fades in comparison to the displays found on phones with similar price tags. 

The phone, however, has a thick bezel and sports dual SIM slots, which support 4G LTE. The  device runs its custom FunTouch OS on top of Android 4.4 KitKat, offering a friendlier user interface to manage in a simple yet smarter manner. 

The phone is powered by a 64-bit quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 processor clocked at 1.2-GHz with 1 GB of RAM. While using the phone for daily tasks was satisfactory, the limited RAM  proved to be a bottleneck when I tried to multitask.  The phone seemed to freeze up when I tried to switch between running apps. The phone has inbuilt storage of 16 GB, which can be expanded via a microSD card, with cards up to 128GB being supported. 

Another disappointment is the Y27L’s low battery capacity of 2,260 mAh. While the device runs heavy games like Modern Combat, too, it drains the battery in no time. Playing this game with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth turned on, the battery drained in just 30 minutes. 

The smartphone is equipped with an eight-megapixel (MP) primary camera with LED flash and a 5MP front-facing one, which besides offering regular features like night, panorama and Face Beauty modes, boosts the Bokeh mode, which allows one to take photographs highlighting the focused object and blurring the backgrounds. Both the rear and front shooters take good pictures in almost all light conditions. 

Despite its limited RAM and low battery capacity, the phone scores on good multimedia performance, an excellent camera and a very friendly user interface, making the Vivo Y27L, priced at Rs 12,980, an ideal smartphone for users with limited needs.