The vivo Y19s was quietly unveiled earlier today. No, this isn’t a sequel to the Y19 (because that one is from 2019), it is instead a follow-up to the Y17s from late last year. The new model is not a total upgrade, but brings several important improvements – a more rugged design, powerful stereo speakers and a larger 5,500mAh battery.
The Y19s grows slightly with a 6.68” LCD. It’s a 90Hz panel that’s decently bright (1,000 nits in high brightness mode), but still offers only HD+ resolution. The selfie camera is now inside a punch hole, but resolution drops to a measly 5MP.
The rear camera is mostly the same with a 50MP sensor and a helper cam. What’s new here – and it’s hard to miss when it starts cycling through the colors of the rainbow – is the RGB LED ring on the camera island. This can be used for notifications or to add a bit of flair to music.
Speaking of, the vivo Y19s is equipped with stereo speakers – in noisy environments, you can push them to 300% volume. A gimmick, sure, but a fun one. Something else that’s cool to see is the 3.5mm headphone jack on the bottom (next to the USB-C 2.0 port).
The phone has a drop-resistant design and is rated for IP64 – dust-tight and with basic water resistance. In addition, the device is MIL-STD-810H compliant. The battery is similarly durable and is rated to retain at least 80% of its original capacity after 1,460 cycles (that’s a daily charge for 4 years straight).
The capacity in question is 5,500mAh, which is a lot for a phone of this size. It should be enough for 8 hours of PUBG gaming or nearly 20 hours of watching YouTube videos, at least based on the official numbers. The battery charges at just 15W, so you better be patient. Note that the retail package includes a charger, except for units sold in the Philippines and Thailand.
The phone isn’t really built for gaming, as it is powered by the Unisoc T612, a 12nm chipset with a pair of Cortex-A75 cores and six A55, all running at 1.8GHz, plus a Mali-G57 GPU. The chip is paired with 6GB of LPDDR4X RAM and 128GB of eMMC 5.1 storage. The good news is that the card tray can hold two nano-SIMs and a microSD. The phone launches with FuntouchOS 14 (Android 14). The T612 is a 4G chipset, so there’s no next-gen connectivity.
vivo Y19s in: Pearl Silver • Glossy Black • Glacier Blue
The vivo Y19s isn’t available in any stores yet, so there’s no word on the pricing (but we can’t imagine that it’s an expensive model).