BLU Vivo Air hands-on

BLU has been making some waves of late at CES, where they announced a staggering 7 new smartphones running Android. One of them in particular, the BLU Vivo Air, stands out profoundly more than the other models because of its incredibly ultra-thin design of 5.1mm. It doesn’t necessarily break any records, but it’s still something that’s noteworthy. Best of all, too, is the fact that this Android smartphone will be sporting a retail price of $199 when it launches stateside in mid-January.

Design

Whoa, this smartphone is extraordinarily svelte and lightweight, which is barely noticeable as we hold it in our hand. For something so skinny, it’s quite pleasant to know that the BLU Vivo Air doesn’t come off fragile or anything. In fact, it feels pretty solid for the most part, as its unibody aluminum magnesium body is strengthened by the addition of Corning’s Gorilla Glass 3. As much as we praise it for it razor thin construction, it begs the question of whether or not there’s any sort of compromise to its battery.

Display

Complementing its skinny construction is its 4.8-inch 720 x 1280 AMOLED display, so it’s pretty detailed, crisp, and clear. Naturally, it bears all the hallmarks of the display technology – like its over saturated color reproduction and exceptionally wide viewing angles. From a straight-on look, the screen glows with a lot of iridescence to capture the attention of our eyes, but we wonder how it handles against direct sunlight.

Interface

Running Android 4.4 KitKat out of the box, we do notice that it’s running BLU’s customized skin – where they’ve eliminated the traditional apps panel, so everything is placed directly on the homescreen. From the looks of it all, the interface is pretty much a minimalist one that doesn’t try to overpower us with a ton of software tricks or features. Until we’re able to spend more time rummaging around it, we’ll save our reservations for now.

Processor and Memory

Powering the BLU Vivo Air is an octa-core 1.7GHz MediaTek MT6592 processor with 1GB of RAM, which seems to provide the phone with some snappy responses with basic functions. On paper, it’s nothing menacing in comparison to what else is currently out there on the market right now, but for what it’s worth, we’re pleased by the phone’s general performance so far. Nevertheless, we can only speculate what the performance will be like with more processor intensive things like heavy multimedia and gaming.

With its 16GB of internal storage, that’s more than plentiful enough for most users.

Camera

Somehow, even with its super skinny construction, the company is able to tack on an 8-megapixel rear camera with LED flash. Hopefully, snapshots will have some reasonable detail and quality to make it a usable thing, but its video recording performance taps out at 1080p @ 30FPS.

Expectations

BLU surely has something enticing here with the Vivo Air! We’re already digging its crazy thin construction, lightweight feel, and solid feel in the hand, but what’s even more mind boggling is that the company is going to be selling it for $200 when it launches – and that’s the full, outright cost of the phone! Needless to say, we’re eagerly waiting to check out this phone!