vivo X200 Ultra review

6.82-inch OLED display that's hard to beat

The X200 Ultra is equipped with a 6.82-inch display that won't leave you wanting. It's an LTPO OLED panel with adaptive refresh rate in the 1-120Hz range, has a 1440p resolution (510ppi pixel density), 10-bit color support, and Dolby Vision compliance.

In our brightness testing, the vivo maxed out at just over 1,800nits in auto mode, essentially the same result as the X100 Ultra and the X200 Pro, earning a spot among the brighter panels out there. It's a bit more conservative when it comes to allowing you to get nits at your own discretion - we measured 566nits at the top end of the slider.

Refresh rate

The X200 Ultra will readily dial down to 1Hz when idling, regardless of which refresh rate mode you select - Standard will impose a 60Hz cap, while the default Smart adaptation and High modes will both go all the way up to 120Hz. In High mode you can go ahead and apply 60Hz limits on a per-app basis. Somewhat counterintuitively, you can get 90Hz/90fps in browsers when in Smart mode, but High will cap them at 60Hz. The phone will also maintain a high refresh rate for games that can go above 60fps.

Streaming and HDR

The X200 Ultra supports HDR10 and Dolby Vision, as well as the mostly Chinese HDR Vivid standard. There was no HDR capability in Netflix, which is to be expected given the China-only status of the phone, even if our Chinese X200 Pro did support HDR in Netflix. Either way, the Widevine L1 compliance does ensure FullHD playback. YouTube, meanwhile, was happy to serve HDR content, including in PiP mode.

The phone fully supports the Android Ultra HDR standard for photos so it records metadata in the images it captures and it displays them with enhanced highlights in both its own gallery app as well as in Google Photos. It also recognizes other compliant images in Chrome and displays them accordingly.

vivo X200 Ultra battery life

The X200 Ultra got a bit of an upgrade in battery capacity to 6,000mAh, and we appreciate the extra 500mAh over the X100 Ultra. It's a silicon-carbon type of battery, as before.

The new model marked a small improvement in the overall Active Use Score, with the only tangible increase being in the gaming test. The video playback runtime is marginally longer, web browsing turned out slightly shorter, and so too did the call time. All things considered, the X200 Ultra is trailing behind the competition, though we'd still consider it to be a dependable daily companion.

Our new Active Use Score is an estimate of how long the battery will last if you use the device with a mix of all four test activities. You can adjust the calculation based on your usage pattern using the sliders below. You can read about our current battery life testing procedure here. For a comprehensive list of all tested devices so far, head this way.

Charging speed

The X200 Ultra is rated for 90W charging and that's also what the bundled adapter is specced for. In our testing, we got a fleeting 20-second stint at around 72W and the power then dropped to 52W, before settling at around 33W. Charging power ratings don't mean much, no.

The X200 Ultra took around 49 minutes to get from flat to 100% (with some 8 minutes on top of that before it stopped drawing significant power and got to a full state). At the half-hour checkpoint, the battery indicator was showing 64%. The results are on par with the previous model and this year's Pro, and we wouldn't call them impressive - while that's more or less a recurring theme with recent models, the Find X8 Ultra, for example, can still charge notably faster.

The X200 Ultra also supports wireless charging, with vivo speccing it at 40W if you're using the company's 50W vertical charger.

There are a number of battery health measures implemented on the X200 Ultra. For example, the 'Super fast charging' is disabled by default and that means waiting 6 extra minutes for a full charge. You can limit the charge to anywhere between 80% and 100% (in 5% increments) and have the usual habit-based optimization that only tops off the charging right before you'll be needing it. There's also a 'Direct drive power supply' option that prioritizes supplying power to the phone to meet its current needs without charging the battery to avoid heat build up, if you're using the phone for more critical tasks at that moment (like gaming, obviously).

Speaker test

The X200 Ultra uses a conventional stereo speaker setup with one bottom firing unit and another driver up top that also serves as an earpiece for voice calls. The two speakers only output their respective channels and the phone switches these automatically to match its orientation in space.

Bottom speaker • Top speaker • Earpiece

The X200 Ultra earned a 'Very Good' rating for loudness in our loudspeaker test - a notch above the previous model and on par with the X200 Pro. Oddly enough, the three sound quite differently, and the X200 Ultra isn't necessarily the best of them - we're not particular fans of its somewhat clunky output. It's not bad, it's just not particularly great either - the Xiaomi 15 Ultra sounds a lot bigger, while the Find X8 Ultra is nicely clean and neutral if a little quieter.

Use the Playback controls to listen to the phone sample recordings (best use headphones). We measure the average loudness of the speakers in LUFS. A lower absolute value means a louder sound. A look at the frequency response chart will tell you how far off the ideal "0db" flat line is the reproduction of the bass, treble, and mid frequencies. You can add more phones to compare how they differ. The scores and ratings are not comparable with our older loudspeaker test. Learn more about how we test here.