The vivo X200 FE is vivo’s first attempt to fill a gap that’s been widening for years as smartphones have gotten bigger and bigger. It’s the rare Android phone that feels it has been made with the intention to bring diversity to vivo’s portfolio and give customers an option of a compact phone that packs premium hardware and vivo’s camera magic.
But you must be wondering what FE is in the name? Well, I asked vivo the same question, and it was told “FE” stands for Feature Edition, and based on the spec sheet, the name fits. With a 6.31-inch AMOLED display, a top-tier Dimensity 9300+ chip, and an impressive 6,500 mAh battery, in ultra-slim, 186-gram phone aims to deliver full-fat flagship performance in a genuinely compact form.
With Xiaomi 15 and OnePlus 13S already retailing in the market, does the vivo X200 FE have enough might to win our recommendation? Let’s dig deep and find the answers in this vivo X200 FE review.
vivo X 200FE Price & Availability
The vivo X 200 FE is available in two variants in India:
- 12GB+256GB – ₹54,999
- 16GB+512GB – ₹59,999
vivo is shipping it in Luxe Grey and Amber Yellow color options. Like most vivo phones, it comes with a case and charger bundled inside the box.
Pros
- Compact, Premium Design
- Outstanding Battery & Charging
- Excellent Display
- Pro-Grade Cameras
- Flagship grade Performance
Cons
- USB 2.0 and UFS 3.1 storage
- No wireless charging
- Ultrawide camera not in the same league as others
vivo X200 FE Review: Design and Build
As you look at the vivo X200 FE design, it is not the same as its other two elder siblings, i.e., X200 and X200 Pro. It has a classic glass-and-metal sandwich design but in a much handy chassis perfect for those who still appreciate compact premium phones. At just 8mm thin and 186g, the X200 FE feels light, dense, and balanced, noticeably more so than heavier rivals like the realme GT 7 Pro or iQOO 13 5G. Even against sleek contenders like the OnePlus 13s and Pixel 9A, vivo holds its own, trading off a gram or two for a battery that dwarfs them all.
The flat aluminum frame and matte-finished glass back feel refreshingly modern. At a time when brands are going for gradient-glazed phones, the Black Luxe model I tested walks the line between understated and fresh. If you’re feeling cheerful, Yellow Glow offers slightly more eyecatchy, while Black Luxe stays safely in executive territory.
But it’s not just good looks. The X200 FE is rated IP68 and IP69, giving it military-grade protection not just from water and dust, but pressurized jets and high-temp steam, which gives it an edge over the OnePlus 13s and Xiaomi 15.
When you look closer, the X200 FE features a razor-thin stereo earpiece grill at the top that nearly disappears into the bezel. It also packs an optical in-display fingerprint scanner placed slightly lower than usual, which is not exactly where your thumb lands. It proves snappy and reliable.
The camera bump is not exactly the same as the other two phones from the X200 series. Here you get to see a pill-shaped camera island, thanks to vivo’s clever M-shaped periscope design for the 3x telephoto lens.
Elsewhere, the phone keeps it classic. The USB-C port, dual mics, and main speaker live at the bottom, while an IR blaster on the rear adds a dash of old-school utility. The SIM tray is dual-slot, but no microSD.
In the hand, the X200 FE just works. It’s grippy enough, comfortably sized for one-handed use, and exudes a sense of quiet refinement. It makes a strong case for compact flagships done right — tough, tasteful, and efficient.
vivo X200 FE Review: Display
The vivo X200 FE comes with a 6.31-inch LTPO AMOLED display, which is one of the best in its class. With a 2640×1216 resolution, 10-bit color depth, and 120Hz refresh rate, the X200 FE’s display is great in everyday use. Text is crisp, animations glide, and colors pop without feeling overcooked. How does vivo manage that? Well, they opted for ZEISS Master Color Display tuning, which leans towards accurate, vibrant, and natural colors.
The X200 FE comes with HDR10+ certification, Netflix and YouTube HDR streams are fully supported, with clear, vibrant tone mapping that makes even dimly lit scenes feel rich with detail.
The display can reach an impressive peak brightness of 5,000 nits, which means it outshines direct competitors like the OnePlus 13’s 4500 nits and Xiaomi 15’s 3200 nits. It’s smooth, legible outdoors, and color-accurate.
Since it’s an LTPO panel, it supports dynamic refresh rate scaling between 1Hz and 120Hz, and it works. When I was reading an article on the Chrome browser, it dialed down to 1 nits, but as soon as I started doom-scrolling on X (formerly known as Twitter), the phone intelligently dialed in the right refresh rate.
In browsers and most games, you’ll get a full-fat 120Hz, provided you’re in the ‘High’ refresh setting. The ‘Smart’ mode oddly caps games at 60Hz and browsers at 90Hz. Most videos play smoothly at consistent 30, 48, or 60Hz rates. The X200 FE display supports 2160Hz PWM dimming, which makes it gentle on the eyes.
vivo X200 FE Review: Speakers and Haptics
The X200 FE features a familiar stereo setup, a bottom-firing primary speaker paired with the earpiece doubling as a secondary tweeter. It’s not a perfectly matched stereo array. The top speaker is smaller and sounds thinner. For most use cases, the stereo separation feels intentional, not lopsided.
On the haptics front, the X200 FE delivers a surprisingly refined experience. The vibration motor is sharp and tight. Typing feels responsive, subtle haptics enhance navigation, and there’s none of that muddy, rattling feedback you’ll still find in some mid-range competitors.
vivo X200 FE Review: Software
The vivo X200 FE ships with Android 15 and Funtouch OS 15. While visually a bit dated, the skin is clean, fast, and increasingly useful, especially with vivo’s growing portfolio of AI-powered features aimed squarely at modern workflows.
Google Gemini is well integrated. You can use it to summarize YouTube videos, schedule your day, and generate contextual replies in apps. It’s not quite a Google Pixel experience, but it’s surprisingly close in places. Circle to Search, Live Text, and Google Lens screen translation work seamlessly.
Other AI tricks include real-time call transcription and translation, on-device text scanning, and a clever set of image editing tools in the AI Image Studio, including vivo’s tools like magic erasers, seasonal photo backdrops, and subject repositioning takes imaging to the next level.
vivo’s DocMaster suite (coming soon) aims to make the X200 FE a pocket office, offering AI-assisted file editing, summarization, and rephrasing across multiple document formats.
In all, the vivo X200 FE’s software certainly refines it. If you’re coming from a Samsung or OnePlus device, you might miss some UI flair or feature polish. vivo is promising four major Android updates plus an extra year of security patches.
vivo X200 FE Review: Performance, Thermals & Benchmarks
The vivo X200 FE isn’t trying to be subtle. In its Feature Edition phone, vivo backs with MediaTek’s monster Dimensity 9300+ chip to lead the charge.
The Dimensity 9300+ ditches efficiency cores, instead stacking the deck with four Cortex-X4 performance cores (one at 3.4 GHz, three at 2.85 GHz) and four Cortex-A720 cores to complement.
The X200 FE feels snappy in exactly the ways you’d hope. Apps open instantly. Swapping between tabs in Chrome, juggling between Instagram, Spotify, and the Gmail app remained smooth. Even heavier tasks like 4K video editing or hopping into Microsoft Office are handled like the phone’s barely trying.
That powerhouse SoC is paired with the Immortalis-G720 MC12 GPU, which brings support for ray tracing and enough grunt to keep most mobile games running at their highest settings. Call of Duty: Mobile and PUBG Mobile hold steady at 90FPS without complaint. Genshin Impact ran and played beautifully for about 20 minutes at 60fps, but thermal throttling started to creep in. Frame drops aren’t devastating, but they’re noticeable if you’re paying attention. Gamers definitely will.
Here’s how the X200 FE stacks up on synthetic tests:
- AnTuTu v10: 1,869,318
- Geekbench 6: 2163 (single-core), 7149 (multi-core)
- 3DMark Wild Life Extreme (2160p): 4531
- 3DMark Solar Bay (1440p): 6397
It’s faster than Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 phones across the board, but trails behind the Gen 3 crowd and MediaTek’s own newer Dimensity 9400. In short: flagship-adjacent performance, but not quite flagship-topping.
But those numbers don’t always tell the full story. In daily use — watching YouTube, scrolling through TikTok, editing a few photos, sending too many Slack messages — the X200 FE runs cool and smooth. Thermal issues really only show up when you push it hard and keep pushing.
To be fair, vivo didn’t ignore the heat problem. The X200 FE features a 29,000 mm² heat dissipation system, with a large vapor chamber and thermal graphite. It’s doing its job.
When we did throttle stress tests, CPU performance dropped to 69% after running 50 threats for 30 minutes. That’s impressive for a compact phone with this kind of loadout. It gets warm, not dangerously so, but warm enough to make you reconsider playing another 20 minutes of Genshin while plugged in.
vivo X200 FE Camera Review: Photography and Videography
The vivo X200 FE doesn’t wear the “Pro or Ultra” badge like its more expensive X-series siblings, but it certainly borrows some of their camera DNA.
The rear setup is a triple-camera affair, anchored by a 50MP Sony IMX921 main sensor, backed by a genuinely useful 50MP ZEISS-branded 3x telephoto, and rounded out with an 8MP ultrawide. Around front, vivo offers a 50MP selfie shooter with autofocus, which all those upgrading from the V-series we be glad to hear, as it’s a rarity in this category.
AI & ZEISS features
vivo flexes its ZEISS-inspired modes that feel unusually well thought-out. There’s ZEISS Multifocal Portrait and Style Bokeh that simulates legendary lenses with surprisingly tasteful results. It also has Stage Mode made for concerts and live events, which it intelligently suggests by evaluating the scene. It actually works, capturing dramatic detail and ambience in diverse lighting conditions.
For the first time, vivo has also added Vintage Film Modes (including Classic Chrome and PROVIA), echo Fuji’s color science in a way that doesn’t feel forced.
Then, there’s also the AI Image Studio suite, which goes beyond basic editing and allows users to remove reflection, reposition the subject, apply automatic enhancements, and seasonal portrait backgrounds, all delivering better-than-expected results. Especially impressive? The AI Magic Move and Image Expander, which lean into generative AI without looking weirdly fake.
In Daylight
Photos from the main camera are vibrant, rich in dynamic range, and pleasingly consistent that with solid tuning, dependable auto white balance, and minimal noise. The 2x digital crop from the main sensor looks surprisingly good, while the dedicated 3x telephoto delivers genuinely sharp, contrasty images that feel made for portraiture.
But the ultrawide camera? It’s here, but barely. With a fixed focus and just 8MP to work with, its utility is limited, almost as if vivo didn’t want it to upstage the rest of the setup (or the X200 proper).
The selfie camera, however, steals the show. It’s one of the most detailed, flattering front-facing shooters in any phone under $700. With autofocus, a wide 20mm-equivalent field of view, and ZEISS-style bokeh effects, it’s Instagram-ready out of the box.
In Low Light
In the dark, the main camera continues to impress, exposures are balanced, details remain strong, and noise is kept under control without losing texture. The telephoto lens also holds up surprisingly well in low light, with vivo’s AI Telephoto Enhance algorithm pulling out extra definition and color depth where other phones would give up.
As expected, the ultrawide drops off hard, delivering soft and noisy images. The 2x digital crop from the main sensor remains usable even after sunset, which gives you options if you’re avoiding the ultrawide altogether.
Video
Video performance is a bit more uneven. While you get 4K@60fps from the main, telephoto, and even selfie cameras, a rare combo, the output often feels oversharpened and processed. Dynamic range and color are good, but there’s a noticeable lack of natural detail. Stabilization, on the other hand, is excellent across the board, with vivo’s Ultra Stabilization mode offering gimbal-like smoothness at 1080p.
While it doesn’t have the X200 Pro imaging powerhouse, it’s a surprisingly capable shooter that takes advantage of vivo-ZEISS engineering tango.
And yes, there’s ZEISS everywhere, from coatings to bokeh simulations, vivo wants you to know they’re playing in the imaging big leagues.
Overall, the vivo X200 FE’s camera system doesn’t try to be everything, but what it chooses to do, it does very well. The main and telephoto cameras are standouts, the selfie camera is arguably best-in-class at this price, and the AI tools are far from gimmicky. This is clearly one of the best compact camera phones in the world.
vivo X200 FE Review: Battery and Charging
The vivo X200 FE surpasses the competition with its 6,500mAh silicon-carbon (Si/C) battery, one of the largest in any phone of a similar compact body. vivo uses a C-PACK battery design, which allows the company to slim down physical volume and still squeeze in a high-capacity cell.
In our day-to-day usage, the vivo X200 FE battery outshines the competition. At the end of my day with more than six hours of screen-on time, it still had about 55 percent battery left in the tank. In those six hours, I played games, surfed the internet, did some doomscrolling on Instagram, and took some pictures of my neighbour’s kid.
Charging
The X200 FE ships with a 90W FlashCharge, which is solid considering the massive battery size. We managed to get a 25% charge in 17 minutes and go from zero to 100% in about an hour.
If you want to extend the lifespan of your X200 FE, you can disable fast charging and also set the top-up limit to 80% or 90%. Funtouch OS also has smart charging optimizations that learn your habits over time and adjust overnight charging speeds.
Review Verdict: Should You Buy the vivo X200 FE?
The vivo X200 FE feels like a phone designed for people who’ve been quietly waiting for a truly pocketable premium phone that doesn’t have many compromises. It offers a massive 6,500mAh battery, a capable triple-camera system with a genuinely useful telephoto lens, and a high-end selfie camera that could embarrass some flagships. With Dimensity 9300+, everyday performance is great.
Stacked against the OnePlus 13S, Xiaomi 15, or even Apple’s iPhone 16, the vivo X200 FE has a distinct appeal. It may not win every spec shootout, but it brings a cohesive package that just makes more sense for real-world use.
When compared to the vanilla vivo X200, you will notice that it offers a faster chipset and slightly better rear cameras. But the FE is easier to hold, more balanced, and arguably better for anyone who values comfort, endurance, and great selfies over pure benchmark performance.
Overall, the vivo X200 FE is a carefully tailored device for those who want a long-lasting compact camera phone that doesn’t scream “compromise.”
Smartprix ⭐ Rating: 8.5/10
- Design and Build: 8.5/10
- Display: 8.5/10
- Speakers & Haptics: 8/10
- Software: 8/10
- Biometrics: 8.5/10
- Performance: 8.5/10
- Cameras: 8.5/10
- Battery Life & Charging: 9.2/10
First reviewed in July 2025.
