March 7, 2024 will go down in history as the day that two photography legends, ZEISS and Leica, go one on one up against each other, in the world’s fastest growing smartphone market. Not directly per se, and not in the way you’d think, but through partnerships they’ve made with two Chinese OEMs— Vivo (ZEISS) and Xiaomi (Leica). Vivo will launch the V30 Pro at noon, while Xiaomi will launch the Xiaomi 14 on the same day (the timing of launch is unspecified at the time of writing).
The Xiaomi 14 is not a big surprise. It was launched last year in China and recently— at the MWC 2024— Xiaomi launched it in global markets, too, alongside the top-shelf Xiaomi 14 Ultra. The TL;DR version is, it’s a flagship phone with guts to stand toe-to-toe with the Samsung Galaxy S24 and iPhone 15 Pro. The Vivo V30 Pro is a relatively new entrant. It was announced today itself, though without any pricing details. We can keep second guessing but we can be sure about one thing. It is a midrange phone and it will be priced more affordably, at least compared to the Xiaomi 14.
The Vivo V30 Pro and Xiaomi 14 are poles apart. But it’s the Vivo that would be more interesting to camera-geeks. This is because something like this has not happened before. Each of the modern-day brands (all are Chinese for some curious reason), whether it is Oppo, OnePlus, Huawei, or Xiaomi, has reserved their camera partnerships for high-end models. The OnePlus 12 and 12R have virtually the same design, but only the 12 is Hasselblad-worthy. At this point, it’s almost a dead giveaway.
But the V30 Pro is different, a first-of-its kind product that —at least on paper— promises to shake up the industry by doing something that no other brand has tried so far. It doesn’t guarantee anything, of course, but at its worst, it could be a case study of how these partnerships could turn out to be, a few years down the line, and how brands manage it across different price points.
Vivo’s association with ZEISS goes a long way and I think that the X100 Pro is one of the best camera phones that you can buy in 2024. If anything, it makes me more excited about the V30 Pro, because if it is even half as good, it will —hopefully— be a start of something new, something that I expect others to follow eventually. And I have a feeling that it will work for Vivo, too. More people will be able to buy the V30 Pro and when they do and if they like it, maybe they would want to switch to an X-series phone at some point. The possibilities are endless and that is why, I am more excited about the Vivo V30 Pro than I probably am for the Xiaomi 14, because there I know what to expect, but here, I don’t know. That’s a feeling you don’t usually get from a lot of smartphones these days. So, good on Vivo for pulling a rabbit out of its hat.
And especially good on Vivo for not keeping things short-changed on hardware (these partnerships come at a cost and so, the math presumably will be tricky). The V30 Pro has a gorgeous slim and light design, a 6.78-inch 1.5K 120Hz AMOLED display with 2,800 nits of peak brightness, MediaTek Dimensity 8200 processor with up to 12GB of RAM and 512GB of storage, Android 14, 50MP triple rear cameras (and 50MP selfie with 4K recording), and a 5,000mAh battery with 80W fast charging.
Watch this space for full coverage (including review) of the Vivo V30 Pro.
Follow FE Tech Bytes on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook.
