New Vivo Y500 4G with a powerful 8100mAh battery and 5000 nits screen

Vivo Y500 - old name, new model - this time outside of China

Vivo's Y500 smartphone series has expanded with the new Vivo Y500, which should really be called Vivo Y500 4G. This is a smartphone full of contradictions.

Starting with the fact that the new model bears the same name as the already known Vivo Y500, which debuted some time ago in China and has completely different specifications. First of all, the new variant does not support 5G networks - it has a Unisoc T7300 processor. On the other hand, this not-so-powerful processor is accompanied by a decent 8 GB of LPDDR4x RAM and 128 or 256 GB of internal storage, but unfortunately slower UFS 2.2. An even stronger spec is the 8100 mAh battery with 44-watt charging. The 6.83-inch AMOLED screen with a resolution of 2800 x 1260 pixels, a 120 Hz refresh rate, and brightness of up to 5000 nits also looks impressive for a smartphone with a Unisoc chip and LTE.

Vivo Y500
photo: Vivo

The screen runs Android 16 with the OriginOS 6 interface, accessed via an under-screen fingerprint reader. There are only two cameras, but they're decent: the front camera is 32 megapixels and an f/2.0 aperture, while the rear camera is a 50-megapixel Sony IMX852 sensor with an f/1.8 aperture, supported by a 2-megapixel background blur sensor. The smartphone also features a minijack and stereo speakers, and the casing is MIL-STD-810H military-grade durability and IP68 and IP69 waterproofing. As you can see, we have quite strong, mid-range specifications – excluding the weaker processor and lack of 5G support. Simply put, this is a smartphone designed for markets where 5G coverage is weak, and customers would rather spend the money saved on a modem on a better battery or screen. The Vivo Y500 has so far been released in Pakistan, where it costs the equivalent of $360 and $400 for the 8+128GB and 8+256GB versions, respectively.