Should you buy the Vivo Y55?

The Y55 is the newish midrange device from Indian manufacturer Vivo. The phone is a mid-range device with a low-end price but does it have enough going for it to make it worth your money? Read on to find out. First of all, some background about the Y55 and Vivo. Vivo is an Indian manufacturer that has gained a lot of popularity in the past year with a range of phones that are targeted at the young population of India. Phones like the Vivo V5 with its 13 megapixel rear camera and 20 megapixel front camera are targeted directly and unapologetically at the young, selfie loving crowd. The Y55 has no such standout feature and is a decent option for almost anyone looking for a budget Android device. It has almost every feature that is popular in the Indian market nowadays. So, it has two SIM card slots, both with the ability to connect to 4G networks. It also has expandable memory via an SD card slot that is dedicated, instead of being a hybrid slot, like many of its competitors.

This means that Vivo Y55 buyers do not need to choose between having expandable memory on their phone or using two SIM cards simultaneously. They can have both. The phone is slim, with a flat back, which makes it looks really great with the designer cases that Indian case and accessory makers are selling. It also has a fingerprint reader for secure, painless unlocking without having to resort to a passcode.

So, on the hardware side of things at least, the Y55 has a lot going for it, or at the very least, it has no major drawbacks. It is a nice enough looking phone too though a little anonymous looking. This is easily fixed by buying a Vivo Y55 case from one of the many online case sellers in India. Some case makers even offer the option of custom cases for the phone, in addition to the thousands of designer covers they have for sale.

The skinned Android problem.

Hardware-wise then, the Y55 is a sure-shot winner or at least a very good contender for your money. However, it is when you consider the software side of the equation that things start to go pear shaped for the Y55. Even though it is now 2017 and Google has released the latest version of Android, Nougat 7.0 sometime last year, the Y55 still ships with Android 6.0 Marshmallow. To make matters worse, the version of Android that the phone ships with has Vivo’s own skin on top of it, the unfortunately named FunTouch OS, which is as horrible as it sounds. What this means is that not only do you not get the benefit of Google’s own beautifully designed software, you have to make do with software and apps made by Vivo’s much worse designers and software engineers.

This also means that we can pretty much guarantee, that as with most low-end Android devices from no-name brands, the Y55 will never get an update and will never run Android 7.0 Nougat.