vivo V40 Lite 5G review

Written by Cristina Joy ValerioPublished • November 16, 2024

Short URL: https://www.yugatech.com/go/mmnu

Back in September, vivo launched the vivo V40 5G to our local shores. Fast forward to the end of October and the company unveils the V40 5G’s little sibling, the vivo V40 Lite 5G.

So, how does the vivo V40 Lite 5G fare with everyday tasks? Is it similar to its predecessor, the V30 Lite 5G? It’s time to find out in this review.

Vivo V40 Lite 5g Yugatech

Table of Contents

Design and Construction

The vivo V40 Lite 5G still has its slim design that’s seen in most vivo phones nowadays. You can slip this guy in your pocket with ease since it’s 7.99mm thick at most.

You can spot the vivo logo right below the phone and its oval camera island right on top. Beside it are two small LEDs for the flash, giving you a total of three lights seen on the back if you count the Aura Light below the cameras. Unlike the V40 5G, the Lite version brings back the square sensors with a ring light in the same shape too. We’ll get to the camera specs in a moment.

Vivo V40 Lite 5g

Our review unit for the vivo V40 Lite 5G came in Silver, but there are two other colorways to choose from: Black and Violet.

The vivo V40 Lite 5G comes with a plastic back panel with a metallic high-gloss frame. You can see some of your fingerprints on the frame because of that so take note of that if you plan on not using a case for your phone.

It comes with the usual rubber case which I opt users to take advantage of. This is to make sure that you don’t get any scratches on your device. It does have an IP64 rating for dust and splash resistance, but you can never be too safe with your gadgets.

Vivo V40 Lite 5g Cameras

Overall, you get a smartphone that has a very minimal design. It’s very sleek and isn’t too loud which is what I like on my devices.

For I/O, you have the volume buttons and power button on the right side, the USB Type-C port, SIM card tray, and most of the dual stereo speakers at the bottom, and the rest of the speakers on the top. Why did I say that about the speakers? We’ll get right to that.

Vivo V40 Lite 5g Bottom

Display and Multimedia

For display, the phone has a 6.67-inch FHD+ AMOLED panel which caps at a refresh rate of 120Hz and has up to 1,800 nits peak brightness.

Vivo V40 Lite 5g Screen

Even with the sun blazing outside, you can be sure that the vivo V40 Lite 5G is able to display what you’re viewing on its screen without too much trouble. I enjoyed catching up to the manga chapters I missed and checking out videos from my favorite streamers.

It is able to produce true-to-life colors and deep blacks along with really thin bezels that are unnoticeable when you’re watching a movie.

Vivo V40 Lite 5g Display

In the audio department, however, you get Hi-Res dual stereo speakers that are very loud. I want to point out that the bottom of the device is louder than the top. If the bottom side gets covered or cupped by your palm when you hold it, it tends to muffle most of the audio. It was a bit of an ick for me, but a phone stand takes care of that problem. Still, if you’re on the go and want to watch something without earphones, take note of that bit.

For biometrics, you have an in-display fingerprint scanner. Fingerprint detection takes almost no time to read your fingerprint as it takes less than a second to unlock the device.

Cameras

This is where the vivo V40 Lite 5G shines: its camera. You get a 50MP main camera together with a 2MP depth sensor at the rear. Meanwhile, a 32MP selfie shooter is right at the front.

It’s a big difference compared to its predecessor, the V30 Lite 5G, which has a triple-rear sensor and a 50MP front camera. Still, just because it has less than one lens doesn’t mean that it’s worse.

Vivo V40 Lite 5g Aura Light

Although it isn’t ZEISS-certified like its older sibling, it’s still able to capture the subject that you’re focusing on in great detail. And I really mean in great detail as the smartphone takes portrait shots beautifully. It’s able to detect and blur out the background to make sure that you or the subject you’re capturing is the main focus. You can also choose the kind of bokeh you want in your shots by going through the menu.

The images are sharp and has vivid color reproduction along with nice bokeh especially in portrait mode. It’s also able to focus on non living subjects like figurines so I appreciate that. You can spot details of the subject in the photo whether it’s day or night.

Vivo V40 Lite 5g Ph

The Aura Light and its two LED flashes come in clutch when it comes to taking night shots. Not only can you have the Aura Light on constantly while taking photos or videos, but you can also change the light’s temperature. Of course, if the room is pitch black, the V40 Lite 5G will still struggle.

Unfortunately, both the front and back can only record up to 1080p@30fps. You can see the camera attempting to stabilise the video as I’m walking in our sample videos below.

You can check our sample photos here to see for yourself.

Front camera:

Rear camera:

OS, Apps, and UI

Next, the realme 13+ 5G uses Funtouch OS 14 based on Android 14.

Vivo V40 Lite 5g Os

It has a LOT of bloatware and you get a notification of an ad every now and then which can be very annoying. This can be disabled in the Settings through App Notifications.

Vivo V40 Lite 5g App Notifications

You have the usual features like Split Screen mode, floating windows, and Game Boost when opening a game application. The OS is able to run smoothly without any stutters when I had my hands on the device.

One thing I want to point out is vivo’s photo editing features like AI Erase and AI Photo Enhance. It’s simple to edit photos and post them online with how you want it to look.

Vivo V40 Lite 5g Photo Edit

Performance and Benchmarks

Powering the device would depend whether you get the 4G or 5G variant of the vivo V40 Lite. The 4G variant comes with a Snapdragon 685 chipset. The unit we have, as the title of this article states, is the 5G version so we’ll talk about that.

The V40 Lite 5G is powered by a Snapdragon 4 Gen 2 chipset with an Adreno 613 GPU. To get into more detail, this processor was made back in June of last year. It’s got two Cortex-A78 clocked at 2.2 GHz with the rest being six Cortex-A55 cores with speeds up to 1.95 GHz.

Vivo V40 Lite 5g Chipset

You get either 8GB or 12GB of LPDDR4X RAM and two configs of UFS 3.1 storage: 256GB and 512GB. If that RAM isn’t enough for you, you do not have to worry. The RAM can be doubled, giving you a total of 16GB or 24GB respectively through Dynamic RAM Expansion.

Vivo V40 Lite 5g Philippines

We played Wuthering Waves, Honkai Star Rail, Zenless Zone Zero, Pokemon Unite and Mobile Legends on this device. When it came to the MOBAs, the V40 Lite 5G was able to handle the graphics of the phone with ease at its highest settings as I never experienced any form of lag one bit from it.

Vivo V40 Lite 5g Processor

As for the more graphic intensive titles, even at the games’ lowest of settings, there were evident stutters and lags for the most part. Although it could take Honkai Star Rail’s turn based gameplay a bit decently, you can notice the hiccups when it came to activating the characters’ Ultimates. Still, it can get the job done if you need a device to get through your dailies.

Of course, you can see our benchmarks here to know more about how the vivo V40 Lite 5G fared.

Antutu v10.3.6 – 448,783

Antutu Storage Test v10.3.4 – 61,017

S.Read – 10,412

Speed: 1047.0MB/s

S.Write – 11,138

Speed: 970.7MB/s

R.Access – 25,707

R.Speed: 426.0MB/s

W.Speed: 276.0MB/s

AI Read – 13,760

Speed: 344.0MB/s

3D Mark: Wild Life – 664

Average frame rate – 3.98 FPS

Geekbench 6 CPU

Single: 920

Multi: 2,188

GPU OpenCL: 409

GPU Vulcan: 623

PCMark Work 3.0 Performance – 12,122

Battery Life

Wrapping up the review, the vivo V40 Lite 5G packs a 5,000mAh battery with support for 80W FlashCharge support via USB Type-C wired charging. It takes almost an hour to get the device up from 20% to 100%. It’s not a long wait time for it to charge.

Vivo V40 Lite 5g Charging

The V40 Lite 5G can handle lasting the whole day when I used it. I played some games on the phone, but mainly took photos and videos white scrolling through my social media accounts and the Internet.

In our proprietary video loop test, where we run a 1080p video at 50% brightness with zero volume and in airplane mode, it gave us a result of 22 hours and 41 minutes.

The device was able to pump 12 hours and 41 minutes of activity on PCMark’s Battery Test.