The Blackview BV8000 Pro is an IP68 tough phone with true global LTE

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8.9

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Blackview BV8000 Pro review summary


  • Full Global LTE, including Middle East, Euro, UK, N/C/S Americas, Asia, Australia, Africa
  • IP68 makes it dustproof, waterproof and shockproof
  • Excellent selection of components all working very well
  • Very good display and battery life

Blackview BV8000 Pro review

Beyond its huge RAM and storage, what makes Blackview BV8000 Pro special is that it’s IP68 certified, and beyond the tough phone certification, it has GLOBAL LTE. An incredible number of bands to make it truly Global LTE. I have a post up about that at the GizBeat main page.

We will have the review rcome together piece by piece. For now, we have a few pictures and there will be more coming.

Take a look at a few threads we have going now about the BV8000 Pro at Chinaphonearena. If you have any questions or comments, don’t be shy.

Blackview BV8000 Pro what’s in the box

  • OTG cable
  • headphones
  • additional screen guard (one already on the phone)
  • quick charger
  • USB cable
  • screwdriver and 4 replacement screws




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Blackview BV8000 Pro review pictures image samples

The Blackview BV8000 Pro carries a Samsung S5K3P3 sensor. This is a true 16MP optical sensor and is the same sensor carried by Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 Pro (Snapdragon version).

Strangely, Blackview hasn’t yet implemented HDR, and we hope to see this remedied in a software update soon. Already two OTA have been received and installed, but they didn’t include addition of HDR.

It’s quick to focus, has decent dynamic range, and decent sharpness across the frame. Color pop is good without going overboard. Macro shots come out quite good.

I was pleasantly surprised by the indoor shots; they come out with good brightness and sharpness. Noise is well controlled at smaller sizes (1MP or less). Though, if pixel peeping or zooming in on dim areas/low light shots, will be obvious.

The outer camera glass is oleophobic, which makes it resistant to fingerprints and super easy to clean if it does happen to get dirty. You can literally clean the glass with a swipe of a finger and have it near crystal.

Overall, I’m impressed with the Blackview BV8000 Pro camera. Hopefully, they get a good HDR mode implemented, but even with normal shots, dynamic range is quite good.

All shots in the gallery below are unedited except for resizing and saving at 85% jpg quality. I recommend seeing them in our Flickr gallery if you want to see them a bit larger (2MP 1080P). The Flickr gallery link opens in a new tab.
No photos

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Blackview BV8000 Pro display

The display on the BV8000 Pro is IPS 5.0″@1080P. Colors are very good looking; deep and with good pop without going overboard. Text is very smooth. White balance is correct, and can easily be adjusted from quick tiles for reading/night mode to add a bit of warmth.

I bought a tempered glass screen protector and it fits absolutely perfectly and has a slightly-rounded curve at the edges. The only way to tell it’s not the actual front LCD glass is by the holes for the camera and proximity sensor. It’s nice to see the edges smooth all the way down with no air underneath. Something I’m not used to since the 2.5D “arc” fad took hold.

Blackview BV8000 Pro specs and frequency support
  • Display: 5.0 inch, 1920 x 1080 pixels FHD Corning Gorilla Glass screen
  • CPU: MTK6757 Octa Core 2.3GHz
  • System: Android 7.0
  • Camera: 8.0MP front camera + rear camera 16.0MP
  • Sensor: Ambient Light Sensor, E-Compass, Geomagnetic Sensor, Gravity Sensor, Proximity Sensor, Touch Sensor
  • SIM Card: dual SIM dual standby, Nano SIM + Nano SIM
  • Feature: GPS, A-GPS, GLONASS
  • Bluetooth: 4.0
  • GSM 850/900/1800/1900MHz
  • WCDMA 850/900/1700/1900/2100MHz TD-SCDMA B34/B39
  • FDD-LTE B1/B2/B3/B4/B5//B7/B17/B19/B20
  • TD-LTE B38/B39/B40/B41
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Blackview BV8000 Pro power

The SoC on the Blackview BV8000 Pro is Helio P20 MT6757CH. This SoC has 8 CPU cores– 4 [email protected]+4 [email protected]. This is more than enough juice to run Android quickly and smoothly. The GPU is Mali-T880MP2@900MHz, as with the CPU, this GPU is powerful enough to run mostly whatever you throw at it.

I tested the BV8000 Pro with Asphalt 8 and found it to generally max the FPS out at default settings. As with many Android games, they are governed at 30fps. See the video here to watch BV8000 Pro max out Asphalt 8.





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Blackview BV8000 Pro frequency support

The Blackview BV8000 Pro carries something that only a scant few China models carry– full Global LTE. This includes N/C/S Americas, Euro, Middle East, Oceana, Asia, Africa and Australia.

IP68 and BV8000 Pro 30 meter drop test

Blackview BV8000 Pro IP68 tough standard

The IP stands for International Protection Rating. It’s also sometimes known as Ingress Protection Rating.

The ‘IP’ is then followed by two digits. These digits correspond to international standard IEC 60529. The digits rank the level of protection based on increasing levels of protection definitions. Higher digits are better.

  • First digit: corresponds with Solids, with a ‘0’ being not protected. The highest level of protection is a ‘6’, which means the product is dust tight; dust can not enter.
  • Second digit: corresponds with Liquids, with a ‘0’ being not protected. The highest level of protection is an ‘8’, which means the product can be continuously submerged beyond depths of 1m.

Thanks to the BV8000 Pro’s armor, the phone is also shock proof; internals should easily survive drops of up to several meters to concrete. Blackview has run a few drop tests and it easily survived a huge tumble down concrete stairs. It wasn’t until they got to a 30 meter drop that the phone had an issue. Even then, it was just due to the power button being slightly misaligned from the fall.





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Blackview BV8000 Pro review components

Fitting for the price and being a tough/outdoor phone, the BV8000 Pro has a wide array of sensors and components.

  • Gyroscope: working without issue
  • USB 3.1 Type-C OTG: working without issue (Tested USB SD thumb drive)
  • Accelerometer: working without issue
  • Linear acceleration: working without issue
  • Gravity: working without issue
  • FM radio: working without issue
  • Pressure sensor: working without issue
  • GPS: working without issue. very good SNR, 3D lock times, and accuracy
  • Rotation vector: working without issue
  • Compass: working without issue
  • WiFi: working without issue. excellent, staying stable and moderately quick at 144ft / 44m
  • External speaker: working without issue. excellent loudness and very good sound depth for a mobile phone. top notch.
  • Dedicated camera button: working without issue (hold for 3 seconds to open camera)
  • Dedicated SOS button: working without issue
  • LED notification: working without issue

Also included is an Outdoor Tool Box, which includes apps Sound Meter, Compass, Flashlight, Bubble Level, Heart Rate, Plump Bob, Protractor, Pressure, Height Measure, Pedometer, and Magnifier. Perhaps slightly gimmicky, as all of these apps can be downloaded as 3rd party apps from Play, but some will appreciate them already on the phone and easily accessible in the Toolbox folder.

Blackview BV8000 Pro fingerprint sensor

The fingerprint sensor on the BV8000 Pro is incredible. It’s super accurate, quick, sensitive, and can unlock and open the display from deep sleep. Just the slightest touch of the proper finger from any angle opens the phone.

Blackview BV8000 Pro style

This is a beefy phone. About the same width and height of the 5.5″ Redmi Note 4X and 13mm thick. For myself, this is no problem. It has some excellent grip around back edges and a wide strip of grip in the middle of the back.

Including the sides, there are 12 torx screws, and an additional 4 Phillips head screws holding the SIM/SD plate in place. These obvious screws add to the industrial, tough style of the phone.

I really like the BV8000 Pro style. Despite its beefiness, it’s looking modern and classy. In a sea of slim, iPhonesque mobiles, this is a phone that will turn heads.

Blackview BV8000 Pro Antutu

We put the BV8000 Pro through a single run on the latest Antutu and we received a score of 60,513. This is typical of Helio P20 and means the phone is well beyond powerful enough to run Android smoothly.

Antutu (1 run),

Blackview BV8000 Pro Geekbench 4

BV8000 Pro scored very well on Geekbench 4, with the MultiCore score putting it up there with Galaxy S7 and Snapdragon 820.

Blackview BV8000 Pro OS

The OS is Android 7.0 Nougat. All apps that we tested worked without issue. The OS is lightly skinned by Blackview, which includes icon changes in the quicktile panel and in settings, but is generally controlled the same way you would control vanilla AOSP Android. Generally, the OS is quick and snappy.

While it was possible in other iterations of Android to change DPI, it required doing so through ADB. In Android 7, we can easily adjust DPI through Display settings, or in developer mode. This allows you to squeeze or expand what you would typically see on a display at one time.

A nice bonus is inclusion of 5GHz WiFi and VoLTE.

In addition, BV8000 Pro supports multi-window mode. Something I’ve really come to appreciate. It allows you to set up two application spaces, one at the top and one at the bottom, so you can, for example, watch a movie while surfing the net or while chatting.

As mentioned above, there have been two OTA updates come through since receiving the phone. They downloaded and installed flawlessly.

Blackview BV8000 Pro battery life

The battery on the Blackview BV8000 Pro is a 4180mAh. Running it through our 720P / WiFi / YouTube / 140lux test gave us a very good result of about 11 hours screen on time. We did a second test with standard usage and got eight hours screenon time. This should be enough to get most users through a couple of days before needing to charge. Users who use SIM data a lot and/or high brightness may see less than our eight hour result.

Blackview BV8000 Pro charging

Charging the Blackview BV8000 Pro takes about two hours to 85% and an additional 30-60 minutes to saturate to full.

Charging

Blackview BV8000 Pro RAM and ROM

The Blackview BV8000 Pro has 6GB of RAM. This is an enormous amount, and likely far more than the average user will use.

Likewise, with storage, we have a huge amount; about 50GB for internal.

RAM & ROM

Blackview BV8000 Pro SIMs/SD

Also unique to the BV8000 Pro, is the inclusion of dual-SIM+SD. This means that you can use two SIMs, while using the third slot for SD memory up to 256GB. This allows for a total of about 300GB storage on the Blackview BV8000 Pro.





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Blackview BV8000 Pro summary conclusion

I really like the BV8000 Pro. I appreciate the rugged, unique style, and all components are working great. The camera software currently lacks HDR, but is otherwise impressive. Battery life is very good, it’s IP68 certified, and has dual-SIM+SD slot.

Buy Blackview BV8000 Pro

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On top of all this, this is one of only two or three existing China brand mobiles that carry true Global LTE. It’s incredible, and something we’ve been waiting for for a long while.

No matter where you are, the phone is a great choice, but those countries which previously were cut off from China phones due to lack of LTE in their areas, have extra incentive to snatch the BV8000 Pro phone up.

This is a phone I could easily use as my main mobile and would recommend to a close friend or family member.


Good

  • Strong selection of components
  • Strong WiFi and GPS
  • IP68 tough certified
  • full Global LTE!
  • Good battery life
  • Good display
  • Huge RAM
  • Huge ROM storage
  • Dual SIM+TF SD slot

Bad

  • Camera doesn't have HDR yet
8.9

Great

Display - 8
SoC power - 8
RAM - 10
ROM storage - 9
Frequency support - 10
IP68 tough (score modifier) - 10
WiFi - 9
GPS - 8.5
Sensor and component inclusion - 10
Fingerprint sensor - 10
Camera - 8
Battery life - 8
Charging - 7.5