vivo NEX

This is after about 3 months of usage. Ran out of room for in-depth, but I'll put what I can.

Pros:

Camera: This is a very good camera, particularly for detailed shots. Under good lighting conditions I would put it as comparable to the Galaxy Note 9 and iPhone XS, though it does lack a telephoto lens, so it won't get as much detail in zoomed shots. It has a manual mode, though I don't care for it nearly as much as LG's manual mode. The automatic settings work well enough most of the time. Night time performance is not as good, but still passable. I never really take selfies (which makes this phone perfect for me as I never have to worry about the motor on the pop-up camera wearing out) but I did take a few for reviewing purposes and they turned out well enough. Beauty mode is enabled by default.

Battery life and charge speed: This phone's 4000 mAh should get pretty much anyone through the day. I try to keep it between 20% and 85% charge to minimize the degradation of the battery, and even then there is still plenty of battery life to do just that. A 30 minute charge would get you around 40-45% charge and probably last you most of the day if not all of it.

In-display fingerprint scanner: It's not as fast as a regular scanner, but it does work well.

Headphone jack: It's crazy that this phone has a 4000 mAh battery, in-display fingerprint scanner, and motorized pop-up camera, yet still has room for a headphone jack. Yet companies like OnePlus claim they've ran out of room. It's also a Hi-Fi DAC. I'm not sure if it's as good as LG's quad DAC, but it does sound good.

UI: Funtouch OS is very nice to use. It does feel like a sort of knock-off of iOS, but not in a bad way. I find that having notifications at the top and the control center at the bottom is much less cluttered. It lets you choose between gestures and navigation buttons, and even lets you pick the older designs for the buttons. The gestures are very simple to use and I found them preferable to buttons. It also has some really convenient software shortcuts, like double tap to wake/sleep for LG fans, slide up when the screen is off to access the camera, and slide left/right while the screen is off to skip songs. The keyboard has very quick access to the clipboard which is a huge boost for me as I send a lot of pre-written responses.

Cons:

Questionable software: Funtouch OS is good, but some of the other software with it is not. The default SMS app is horrible and group messages do not function properly at all. You will probably need to download a different app (Verizon messages works well). However, the text message notification sound only applies to the default app, so you will be stuck with what you set your app notification sound to. If you turn Developer Options on, there is a red warning bar obscuring the time, signal, etc until you turn them off. The default browser is not that good, but some actions will not let you use a browser from the Play Store.