Wiko View Prime – Affordable phone with extended screen

High-end features of top smartphones are slowly trickling down to cheaper devices. Usually that takes a while and sometimes it goes quite fast. In the case of the Wiko View series that the manufacturer presented at the IFA electronics fair, things are going pretty fast. Six months after the introduction of the LG G6, these Wiko devices also have an 18:9 screen ratio.

Wiko is not necessarily known for its innovative smartphones and that is why these devices caught our eye at IFA. It is interesting that a manufacturer such as Wiko, which usually makes not too ambitious devices, copies a feature of high-end smartphones. It happens more often, of course, but then the implementation is often a lot less good. Not much can go wrong in this case though, as a relatively larger screen is what it is and it doesn’t require overly complex programming to make it work properly.

Wiko View Prime

During the hands-on session, we focused on the Wiko View Prime, because this is the device with the most luxury on board. For example, the View Prime has two front cameras. One of the front cameras has a viewing angle of 120 degrees, which you can use to take group photos. In addition to letting you choose which camera to use in camera mode, the camera can also automatically switch to widescreen selfie mode when it detects two heads. This did not immediately go very well, but the option is therefore somewhat superfluous if you can switch yourself with one tap. What is striking is that the primary front camera has a higher resolution than the camera on the back, namely twenty megapixels. Pixels obviously say nothing about quality and we’ve seen this a few times now; it rarely happens that the photo’

There is then a beauty mode and a portrait mode, which uses the depth information from the two cameras to create background blur. The latter did not work very well during our test session, but it is nice that it is on a device in this price range.

The camera on the back of the View Prime has sixteen megapixels and an aperture of f/2.0. The Prime has another striking feature in video mode and that is that you can draw a circle around someone to keep that person in focus. That in itself works, but it’s kind of strange that you can’t just tap the screen on the person you want to follow. For example, there are more things in the software that are a bit made with the French style, but we are fairly forgiving in this price range. This and other features are very gimmicky.