It’s a tough call for smartphone brands while designing budget phones. An important toss-up involves whether focus should be on gaming or the camera. You can’t have it both ways on a budget phone. And that’s what Vivo T1 5G has to address.

First, T1 is the new series from Vivo which addresses the youth. It’s meant for a crowd that likes gaming and streaming, so no wonder that the company has gone all out on the processing department, ensuring performance doesn’t suffer.Good gaming performance.

Well-designed, it takes inspiration from the Vivo V23 series by making the sides flat, which makes the phone easy to handle and definitely stunning to look at. Though the back panel is made of plastic, it doesn’t appear cheap and the colour-shifting pattern under sunlight is an eyeful. The rear camera module is quite slim and almost merges with the panel, leaving very little in way of bump. What I would have liked is a hole-punch display instead of a dew-drop notch, which is very 2019.

Powering the phone is Snapdragon 695 5G processor, which is known to be an affordable but capable option. There are a few tweaks that Vivo has made to get the best out of the processor. For example, you get a screen refresh rate of 120Hz (you can also leave it at 60, 90 or opt for ‘smart switch’) and the touch sampling rate is 120Hz in normal mode and 240Hz in game mode. Add to that a multi-layer cooling system to control the temperature. That’s not enough. Game Space gives you the option to explore all the titles in one place while ultra-game mode gives you the option to block notifications and lock screen brightness while all SoC resources are allotted based on the frame rate and temperature of the device.

All this means you get a very good gaming experience on a budget phone. Even the 6.58-inch LCD full HD+ display is quite good and there is a loud bottom-firing speaker, though I would have liked a dual stereo speaker set-up.

Camera does the trick but…

Corners have been cut in the camera department. The main 50MP snapper is very good, with excellent colour reproduction and it doesn’t struggle taking frames with bright exposure. Night photography too works well with the night mode, which gives a brighter output. But there is no ultra-wide snapper here, which is an interesting strategy, and the 2MP macro camera is meh. Videos can be shot at 1080@30fps but frames can be a bit shaky.

Brownie points are won…

Unlike most new phones in this segment, this one comes with Android 12 out of the box and Funtouch OS. Android 12 means you have a good privacy dashboard, which shows the apps that have access to camera, microphone, location, and so on. There is a privacy indicator — green or orange dot in the corner of the screen — to show if the camera or microphone is being accessed by an app. And the 5,000mAh battery is enough to give you a day and a half of power, though high-levels of gaming will sap power.

If you are looking for a budget phone with a better camera set-up, there are options from Samsung and Redmi. If it is gaming on a budget phone, then this one makes sense. Vivo wanted to go all out with performance and it has, turning in a stable big-hitter with the T1 5G.

At a glance

Device: Vivo T1 5G

Price: Upwards of Rs 15,990 (4GB+128GB)

High notes

• Excellent gaming performance on a budget device• The display is well-tuned• Good battery performance

Muffled notes

• Ultra-wide angle camera missing• Tear-drop notch is very 2019