Vivo is the latest Chinese smartphone vendor making inroads into the Kenyan market having made its intentions known years back. Sitting fifth on the list of leading smartphone vendors globally, the company went in history as the first to debut in-display fingerprint scanner on a mainstream device and recently announced 120W super-fast battery charging, the first of its kind.
There are a couple more firsts as well and apparently, the company is said to be working on the world’s first smartphone with over 100% screen-to-body ratio. But before we get a glimpse of it, Vivo Kenya has been busy making sure that we know it has devices coming soon into the market.
Undeniably, Vivo Kenya is keeping cards close to its chest. While it has been teasing the arrival of several devices, it isn’t giving out their names. We’ve seen a device with an all-screen design in a couple or so instances, suggesting the selfie shooter pops up like the Huawei Y9 Prime 2019 and Oppo F11 Pro.
It is a world of beautiful sceneries. Keep the best moments with #vivoSmartphone #ComingSoon pic.twitter.com/u2MMXgijNi
— VivoKenya (@Vivo_Kenya) July 4, 2019
However, more recently, the company has been busy showing off images, a few specs and features of devices we’ve narrowed down to one or both the Vivo Y12 and Vivo Y15. These two were released in June and May 2019, respectively.
This is how we arrived at the conclusion that Vivo may make its debut in Kenya with the Vivo Y12 and/or Vivo Y15:
For the better part of July, Vivo Kenya has been on Twitter teasing images of a device with a waterdrop display notch. There are obviously a number of Vivo phones with this design, but the one(s) in question has a triple-lens camera on the back and a fingerprint scanner to accompany it. The company further revealed that this one has a massive 5000mAh battery unit and a 6.35-inch display screen with a 19.3:9 aspect ratio. Furthermore, the device(s) in question is powered by a 12nm chipset clocked at 2.0GHz, which we narrowed down to the MediaTek Helio P22. With these details, including the revelation that the device(s) run the latest Funtouch OS 9 (atop Android 9 Pie), we narrowed our search to two devices – the Vivo Y12 and Vivo Y15.
The Vivo Y12 and Vivo Y15 are identical from the outside. The two are also mostly identical on the inside apart from one or so tweaks. For this reason, it’s likely that Vivo will only bring one of them to Kenya, but we don’t know which one at this point.
Other specs include an HD+ screen resolution, triple-lens 13MP + 8MP + 2MP main camera, 16MP (Y15) or 8MP (Y12) selfie camera, 3/32GB or 4/64GB memory for the Y12 and only 4/64GB for the Y15, Bluetooth 5.0, 3.5mm audio jack, microUSB port, and so on. As you may have noted, the only notable difference is the front camera and memory options.
We don’t know when exactly Vivo plans to begin selling phones in Kenya or even their pricing strategy. “Coming soon” can be anywhere from days, weeks or even months. What we do know, though, is that in India the Vivo Y12 currently begins at INR 11,990 (about Kshs 18,100) while the Y15 is priced at INR 13,990 (about Kshs 21,100).
