Vivo X Fold 3 Pro review: do not underestimate the challenger

There was a time when Samsung's foldables had the whole playground to themselves. Not anymore. The Pixel 9 Pro Fold and OnePlus Open have shown they mean business, and now, the Eastern brigade—Vivo, Xiaomi, Honor—are stepping in with serious heat.

Enter the Vivo X Fold 3 Pro. As the name boldly declares, this is Vivo’s third-generation foldable—and make no mistake, it’s a proper flagship. Big, but surprisingly thin. Light, but without the usual compromises in build or camera. This thing comes ready to flex, both literally and figuratively.

The X Fold 3 Pro doesn’t tiptoe around specs. It’s packing everything you’d expect from a premium slab in 2025—but in a book-style foldable shell. The kind of device that says, “Yes, I multitask. And I look good doing it.”

Now, before you reach for your wallet, here’s the catch: this one’s not officially coming to the U.S. A global version exists, sure—but if you’re planning to import, make sure to do your homework on carrier compatibility. Otherwise, you might end up with a $1,500 paperweight. And yes, pricing starts right around that mark—premium territory, but that’s just the price of playing in foldable flagship land these days.

So, while Samsung’s dominance is being chipped away one hinge at a time, Vivo’s X Fold 3 Pro might just be the most complete challenger yet—if you’re willing to jump through a few hoops to get it.



At PhoneArena, we put smartphones through a battery of rigorous tests to assess everything from processing power to camera performance. The scores above represent an average of devices in the same price range as the Vivo X Fold 3 Pro, so you can get a sense of how it stacks up against its competition.

Here's a quick overview of what the Vivo X Fold 3 Pro has on offer:

The Vivo X Fold 3 Pro attempts to be as useful as possible, whether its folded or opened. The external screen is quite spacious, and you can comfortably use it as a regular smartphone if you so desire. It's kind of on the thick side compared to a candybar phone, but for a foldable — it's still pretty thin. The build is metal and glass, with the back panel being a pleasant matte — it's a fine grain, so it feels soft rather than sandy. Bad news — it does collect quite a lot of finger grease, at least the black unit we have here.

The cover screen is quite large, with its 6.5-inch diagonal and almost feels like a "regular phone screen" with a 21:9 aspect ratio. It has thin-ish bezels and the glass even curves out at the side edges. The camera module on the back is quite a beast and does get in the way when handling the phone or when trying to just set it flat on a table.

One unique feature you will notice — the Vivo X Fold 3 has a mute slider. That's very rare to see — as far as we know, OnePlus is the only Android phone maker to employ this. The Vivo implementation here is simple and effective — there are two steps. Muted phone with vibration or sound on — pretty self-explanatory, extremely convenient.

When opened up, the Vivo X Fold 3 becomes a thin, 5.2 mm slab with an almost square aspect ratio. The 6-inch internal screen is quite enough for multiple apps to float about, and the software helps you multitask with various slide-in options. The motion of the hinge is very smooth, stable, and pleasing. And yes, there is a crease across the middle of the screen — very shallow and pretty unnoticeable when using the phone.

The unboxing experience is quite generous — you get a 120 W charging brick to supply the power for the X Fold 3 Pro's fast charging speeds, a cable, and a shell case. Need to note — it's only a back shell, nothing for the front of the phone, like other foldables out there have. But we imagine it'd be quite hard to attach a front shell on this phone, with its thin bezel and curved glass.

OLED screens are bright and punchy — no exception here, with both the external and main displays of the Vivo X Fold 3. The good news is you have a couple of color profiles to pick from, to adjust saturation and white balance. They are also very sharp, with the cover screen having 457 pixels per inch, and the main display — 412 PPI.

Display Measurements:

Impressively, the Vivo X Fold 3 Pro comes with two fingerprint scanners — each tucked away under both the cover screen and the main screen. You don't need to register your fingers with both — you can use whichever one you like, and the other one will "recognize" your prints just the same. And they are ultrasonic scanners, too — the expensive stuff. We found that the external scanner is very snappy, accurate, and responsive. The one under the main display is a bit of a slowpoke — probably because it's harder to get a good read with that flexible screen getting bent under our fingers.

The above is reaffirmed by the benchmark scores — the Vivo X Fold 3 Pro scores 6,600 Geekbench Multi-Core score, which is slightly shy of the Galaxy Z Fold 6's achievement because the latter has the slightly overclocked Snapdragon. Same goes for Single-Core. And, looking at the 3DMark scores, again, the Vivo hits 4,550 best score, which is about 200 less than the Samsung.

To put it in simple terms — this is close to the best performance you can get out of an Android smartphone right now. Of course, we ran some demanding games — namely, Breakout Arena, which is the current hot extraction shooter on mobile — and it ran perfectly fine with max settings.

Vivo's software is called "Funtouch OS", currently running on top of Android 14. The build for the X Fold 3 Pro sports all sorts of tricks to help you with multitasking. The sidebar drawer with apps, for example — whenever you tap on an app icon there, it automatically opens in a floating window, as the phone assumes you are multitasing. If you quickly flutter the flaps of the X Fold 3, in a close-open motion, it will automatically activate split-screen. And the app dock on the bottom has a "recent apps" section on the right — much like on Samsung's Fold phones.

In general, it's an amalgamation of ideas we've seen before. Funtouch looks like a marriage of iOS and One UI — any feature you've liked from other top phones will likely be here. Minus the cool AI image manipulation — for example, tapping and holding on a subject in a photo to instantly crop it out doesn't happen here. Which was a bit of a disappointment, we love doing that on iPhones and Galaxies.

As for software updates — Vivo hasn't made any promises, so let's just assume 2 years of updates, possibly 3 years of security patches.

With dual batteries inside, the Vivo X Fold 3 Pro achieves a total of 5,700 mAh battery capacity — that's a lot, even by "normal phone" standards, and definitely much more than most foldables out there.

As a result, we get a lot of juice out of a single charge on the Vivo X Fold 3 Pro:

Almost 14 hours of browsing, 10 hours of video streaming – those are some numbers, indeed. The Vivo X Fold 3 Pro will comfortably last you a day, maybe two if you are more of a casual user (do casual users buy super-thin, super powerful foldable phones?).

And even if you get yourself in a pickle, the dual cell design allows for super-fast charging — with Vivo's tech, you can charge the X Fold 3 Pro with a 100 W power brick, which will get you 50% in just 15 minutes.

The official Vivo wireless charger can also get you 50 W of wireless power — that's a bit overkill, but it's there for fast top ups whenever you set it down.

Not everything is sunshine and roses — the Vivo X Fold 3 Pro's stereo speakers are a bit of a letdown. They have a bit of bass, but sound tinny and fatiguing in the high mids, and they lack a nice airy presence. The candybar Galaxy S24 Ultra, for example, sounds much better, and the Z Fold 6 is definitely ahead.

For haptics — the Vivo X Fold 3 Pro feels nice. It's a nice, subtle click, that comes on time and feels right enough to give you feedback when you click across the interface.

That’s a tough call. Depending on where you live, getting your hands on a Vivo X Fold 3 Pro can feel like a side quest in a game you didn’t sign up for. Between carrier compatibility questions and a distinct lack of reputable sellers, it’s a bit of a leap — and not the fun kind.

Now, don’t get us wrong—the X Fold 3 Pro is an impressive bit of kit. Gorgeous displays? Check. Solid build? Absolutely. Dual ultrasonic fingerprint readers? Very nice touch. Performance and battery life? Easily flagship-grade. And when you factor in the pricing — especially with Samsung bumping the Z Fold’s price tag by $100 last year — Vivo’s foldable actually comes out looking like a pretty savvy buy… on paper.

The problem? Getting one without resorting to sketchy storefronts or ending up with an incompatible paperweight. So, unless you're a seasoned importer with a plan, we’d say maybe stick with options that are easier to buy—and actually work out of the box.