vivo X300 Ultra review

Display

Not a lot has changed in the display department coming from last year's X200 Ultra, but that is not us complaining. That phone already has a pretty great display. For the X300 Ultra this year, vivo basically decided to upgrade the refresh rate from 120Hz to 144Hz.

Other than that, you get a familiar spacious 6.82-inch OLED panel, with high 1440 x 3168-pixel resolution and a really sharp pixel density of around 510 ppi. The display also supports 10-bit color and is Dolby Vision and HDR10+ certified. There is also 2160Hz PWM dimming to reduce eye strain.

We did our standardized brightness testing and measured around 621 nits by maxing out the manual slider on the X300 Ultra. That is definitely not enough to be comfortable outdoors, so we suggest you just leave the auto brightness mode enabled. It works well and delivers an excellent max brightness figure of around 1,935 nits with a 75% white pattern and a peak of 3,328 nits with a 10% pattern. More than plenty for an excellent outdoor experience as well as superb HDR viewing.

The minimum brightness we measured at point white was just 1 nit.

The OLED panel on the X300 Ultra uses LTPO tech to achieve dynamic refresh rates between 1Hz and 144Hz. The phone will actually continue doing dynamic refresh rate switching and will consistently drop down to 1Hz when idling, regardless of which refresh rate mode you chose. There are three refresh rate modes to select from.

Standard mode imposes a 60Hz refresh rate cap. Smart mode and High mode will both automatically go up to 120Hz, but there are some differences in behavior between the two. Counterintuitively, in Smart mode, certain apps like browsers will reach 90Hz/90fps on their own, but the same will only cap out to 60Hz in High mode. Once in High mode, you can enable a 60Hz refresh rate cap on a per-app basis, if that is what you want. We tried high refresh rate gaming and had much better luck pushing past the 60fps mark when gaming on High mode rather than Smart mode. From what we can gather, the 144Hz mode is actually only available for a handful of supported Chinese games through a special "frame interpolation" menu.

The vivo X300 Ultra has HDR support on its display for Dolby Vision as well as HDR10+ and the mostly Chinese HDR Vivid standard. In our Chinese unit, we did get HDR content served to us on YouTube, and this was also true for our international unit.

On a more positive note, the phone supports the highest possible Google Widevine L1 DRM protection, allowing streaming apps to serve up FullHD content.

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.

Battery life

The vivo X300 Ultra has an upgraded battery capacity compared to last year's X200 Ultra. The X300 Ultra is equipped with a 6,600 mAh battery.

The vivo X200 Ultra never actually shone that brightly in the battery department, so there was some headroom for improvement in the new model. Not to mention the 10% uptick in battery capacity.

While still not jaw-dropping, the vivo X300 Ultra certainly does a lot better in our Active Use Score test than its predecessor, scoring almost 16 hours.

It is perhaps worth noting that these Active Use Score numbers were achieved with our international unit. We did test the Chinese unit too and got numbers which were quite in line with those above, with some small variations, so we won't be publishing those separately.

Charging speed

The vivo X300 Ultra ships with a 100W FlashCharge adapter, which uses a Type-C to Type-C cable. The vivo X200 Ultra had a 90W charger with a USB-A port.

We are not sure if the change in charger port is supposed to be considered a generational upgrade or if there was some other reason for moving to a USB-C charger for the X300 Ultra. Whatever it was, we appreciate the move as we prefer using Type C to Type C cables for everything these days.

The actual charging is done using USB Power Delivery (PD) with PPS profiles. In particular, the charger supports: 5V@3A, 9V@3A, 12V@3A, 15V@3A, 20V@5A fixed output and a PPS range of 5V-20V@5A. The X300 Ultra ships with an e-marked passive Type-C cable rated for up to 5A. However, the side of the cable itself says 9.2A.

Charging on the X300 Ultra is quite fast, as expected. It got from 1% to 36% after fifteen minutes on the charger and then 66% after thirty minutes. A full charge took 46 minutes. Overall - a bit faster than the X200 Ultra and keeping up well with the flagship crowd in general.

Of course, there is wireless charging support as well at a rate of up to 40W.

The vivo X300 Ultra has a basic set of battery health and protection features. You can set an upper charge limit to protect capacity, and optionally, you can also let the system decide when to pause and resume charging based on your usage habits. There is bypass charging support as well, which is great for things like prolonged gaming sessions.

Speakers - loudness and quality

The vivo X300 Ultra has a stereo speaker system. There is one bottom-firing regular speaker and another one up top that fires both up from the few speaker holes on the top frame, but also forward above the display, doubling as an earpiece. The two speakers only output their respective channels, and the phone switches these automatically to match its orientation in space.

Vivo seemingly didn't change a lot about the speaker setup this year. Just like the X200 Ultra, the new X300 Ultra manages a Very Good loudness rating. It sounds clean with good mids, but some distortion in the highs. Vivo did try to improve the tuning a bit this year, at least to our ears, but the X300 Ultra still falls a bit short of the competition in this category, in our opinion. You can get a richer and bigger soundstage elsewhere.

The X300 Ultra includes quite a few audio extras and features. You get a full equalizer with presets and sliders. There is also "Super Audio," which upscales audio on the fly. It only applies to speaker output. Frankly, we aren't quite sure how it differs from "Audio Super Resolution," which is also present and claims to do similar things.

Then there is "Holographic audio" and "Spatial audio" - another pair that we aren't quite sure how to differentiate. "Sound customization" can be used to create a unique profile to your liking based on things like your age. "Audio redirect" can pipe the audio from a particular app to a particular connected Bluetooth audio device, which is pretty neat. And finally, there is a "Mobile KTV" feature that claims to emulate the behavior of a professional in-ear monitor and is deeply integrated with certain creative apps like TikTok for what that's worth.

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.

Connectivity

The X300 Ultra is a dual-SIM, dual-standby device. It supports simultaneous SA/NSA Sub-6 connectivity on both of its Nano-SIM slots. Unfortunately, our Chinese unit does not have eSIM support, or if it does, it's not as open as we are used to and can only be used through a Chinese carrier for downloading travel Data SIMs of their own. However, our international unit does offer eSIM functionality, and you can add an eSIM card any way that you like.

Location services include GPS (L1+L5), BDS (B1I+B1c+B2a), GALILEO (E1+E5a), QZSS (L1+L5) and GLONASS. So you are getting a pretty full stack right there.

Local connectivity is handled by dual-band Wi-Fi 7. So, unfortunately, you don't get access to the still largely unutilized 6 GHz spectrum. Quite an unfortunate omission on an otherwise stacked phone.

The Bluetooth 5.4 radio supports a slew of codecs, including aptX HD, aptX Adaptive, aptX Lossless and LHDC 5. Naturally, there is LE support as well.

There is NFC on board, as well as an IR blaster hidden somewhere on the camera island.

There is no FM radio receiver and no 3.5mm jack.

The Type-C port is actually backed up by a USB 3.2 Gen 2 data connection, which tops out at a theoretical 10 Gbps transfer rate. There is also DisplayPort over USB Alt mode, which is a nice little extra. Of course, OTG and Host are supported as well.

The vivo X300 Ultra has a pretty full set of sensors under its belt. It has an ST lsm6dsvc accelerometer, a vivo vsen_gyro gyroscope, a vivo qmc6309h magnetometer and compass combo, an ams tcs3743 ambient light and hardware proximity sensor combo. There is no barometer.