Blackview BV7000 Pro Review

Blackview BV7000 Pro does sound like a great device to consider if you're looking for a rugged water- and dust-proof smartphone that won't rip you off and actually manages to look good despite its rugged design. The manufacturer does have a significant background and experience in making both rugged and regular smartphones, and this latest model in its portfolio seems to gather all of the company's expertise in design and marketing in one place. So here is our in-depth review of the Blackview BV7000 Pro, which as usual contains detailed specifications information, thorough UI overview, sample photos, and video, lots of tests and benchmarks.

Specifications

Blackview BV7000 Pro packs a 5-inch display with an IPS panel, 1080 x 1920 resolution and a peak brightness of 420 cd/m². The screen is protected by a Corning Gorilla Glass 3 and is coupled with a rugged body that combines a CNC metal frame with polycarbonate and rubber casing that protects it against drops. Performance-wise, the model relies on a MediaTek MT6750T chipset that includes an octa-core CPU comprising of four 1.5GHz Cortex-A53 cores and four 1GHz Cortex-A53 cores. They are coupled with a 650MHz dual-core ARM Mali-T860 MP2 GPU and 4GB of LPDDR3 RAM, which is single-channel, with an 833MHz clock rate. The internal memory measures 64GB and can be expanded with up to 32GB. The usual sensors are on board, including a proximity, light, accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, etc. There's a fingerprint sensor accompanying the primary camera on the back of the device. The shooter features a 13-megapixel Sony IMX258 Exmor RS sensor with a 5-element lens, f/2.0 aperture, and a dual-LED flash. The front-facing shooter packs an 8-megapixel OmniVision OV8856 sensor and an f/2.2 lens. The smartphone supports 2G GSM, 3G WCDMA, and 4G LTE Cat. 6 networks. Its wireless connectivity options include Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Wi-Fi Hotspot, Wi-Fi Direct, and Cast display along with Bluetooth 4.0. The device is equipped with a USB Type-C 2.0 port with OTG support and works with GPS and GLONASS. Finally, it runs Android 6.0 Marshmallow and is powered by a 3500 mAh battery with a 5V/2A fast charger. Here are the complete Blackview BV7000 Pro specifications.

What's in the box

Blackview BV7000 Pro is placed in a square white box with the model's name on top and information about basic specifications and certifications on the bottom. The device resides in the left side of the top level compartment and arrives carefully packaged with the usual protective stickers for the display. Under the device, in separate compartments, you will find a screen protector, in-ear headphones, power adapter, USB cable, OTG cable, user manual, pin for the SIM tray.

Design, build and controls

Blackview BV7000 Pro combines a classic rugged appearance with an elegance that is a rare quality among devices created to withstand harsh environments. Its body is a combination of a CNC crafted metal frame, hard polycarbonate, and a protective rubber coating. The rubbery material is harmoniously combined with metal elements, available in three colors - stardust grey, mocha gold, space silver. The overall result is appealing to the eye. The body is IP68 certified. IP stands for ingress protection. The first digit shows the level of protection against solid particles. It goes from 0 to 6, the latter being the highest level of protection and meaning the device is dust-tight - it is completely protected against contact. The second digit shows the level of protection against liquids. Its range is from 0 (the lowest) to 9K (the highest). In the case of this smartphone, 8 means that the device can be immersed in up to 1.5 meters of water for up to 30 minutes. Normally, rugged smartphones are larger than their counterparts with analogical display and battery size. This is due to their specific construction, including thick rubberized coating that protects the smartphone against drops and other types of impact. Knowing this, it is not a surprise that the BV7000 Pro is the thickest (12.6 mm) and heaviest (223 g) smartphone among those with a 5-inch display and a 3500 mAh battery. It is also much wider (78.9 mm) and taller (153 mm) than other devices in its size class. These dimensions of the model correspond more to a 5.5-inch smartphone. However, this does not mean that it is uncomfortable to handle. On the contrary, the rubber elements on the sides and back definitely help it stick to your hand and the display is the exact size for comfortable one-handed usage. Without doubt Blackview BV7000 Pro is one well-designed and well-crafted smartphone. The overall look and feel is that of a device with a stylish design that combines industrial and rugged elements. The display is covered with a Corning Gorilla Glass 3 that tightly meets the inner casing of the screen module. It is surrounded by the CNC crafted metal frame and rubberized casing. All dust and water sensitive parts are completely protected. The 3.5 mm jack, USB port, SIM tray are covered with tightly fitting rubberized caps, so no dust and water penetrate inside. The camera and the fingerprint module, each has a separate metal plate covering it for protection. The camera also has a blue film coating. The metal frame sides are combined with textured rubber in the areas where a firm grip is required - around the buttons, the SIM tray, and the areas, where you usually hold the phone on the sides. All buttons are made of rubber, too. They do not protrude at all and are quite easy to locate and work with. The controls layout is classic. On the front above the display are the front camera, LED notification light, and speaker. Below it, a capacitive navigation bar is placed with backlit buttons. On the back the primary camera with a dual-LED flash to its left is located and the fingerprint sensor module is below it. Towards the lower end there's a metal plate with the Blackview logo. The metal plates of the camera and fingerprint sensor modules as well as the back plate are attached to the chassis with visible screws. So are the vertical sides of the frame. On the left side the SIM tray is positioned, while on the right side are the volume and power button. Below them the Smart Key is placed. It can be customized by associating various functions or apps to it, depending on whether you single, double click or long press the button. On the top frame you will see the 3.5 mm jack. Bear in mind that it goes deeper than usual 3.5 mm jacks go, so for listening to music you have to use the in-ear headphones included in the package or another set with the same long connector. On the bottom frame the USB Type-C 2.0 port is located. In order to get an idea of the ruggedness of the device, below we share an official Blackview video, which puts the BV7000 Pro to a test with smashing walnuts, hammering nails, drilling, etc.

Display

Blackview 7000 Pro is equipped with a 5-inch IPS display with a resolution of 1080 x 1920 pixels. Its peak brightness is said to be around 420 cd/m². The screen is protected by a Corning Gorilla Glass 3. There are no software features that would enhance your visual experience. Our review unit of Blackview BV7000 Pro has a peak brightness of 393 cd/m², which is close to the specified level but still below it. This means that under direct sunlight the content on the display won't be clearly visible. At 75% brightness, the white luminance is still above 300 cd/m² and at 50% it manages to stay above 200 cd/m². Black luminance values might not be perfect but are not bad either. Hence, the smartphone sports a pretty good static contrast ratio of around 1200:1, which is consistent at all brightness levels. The latter is valid for the temperature of the white point as well, but while consistency is a good quality, high temperature (colder colors) is not. The display of the BV7000 Pro has a temperature of the white point that almost hits 12000 K at all brightness levels. In addition, there are no software features like reading mode or blue light defender, that will make the colors warmer. We understand that this is a rugged smartphone, intended for use mainly outdoors, but adding such features wouldn't harm.

Brightness	White luminance	Black luminance	Contrast	Color temperature
100 %	393.042 cd/m2	0.308 cd/m2	1276 : 1	11995 K
75 %	304.424 cd/m2	0.239 cd/m2	1274 : 1	11919 K
50 %	217.913 cd/m2	0.171 cd/m2	1274 : 1	11739 K
25 %	120.402 cd/m2	0.095 cd/m2	1267 : 1	11727 K
0 %	15.391 cd/m2	0.012 cd/m2	1283 : 1	11878 K

The CIE diagram shows that the model covers a color space that is only very slightly larger than the sRGB one. There are deviations in all three main color gamuts - red, green, and blue. The striped sub-pixel geometry of the panel is not a surprise. The viewing angles shot demonstrates significant loss in brightness from both vertical and horizontal lateral view.

OS, UI and software

Blackview combines its own view on the icon and themes design with almost stock Android 6.0 Marshmallow. As usual, the Lock screen provides shortcuts to the Voice search and Camera apps, and by default, the Notifications and Quick Settings appear on it by default. A swipe leads you to the home screen/desktop with two rows of apps. By default, it looks like most Chinese developers prefer to make it - with all apps installed directly on the home screen and successive ones. In this case, the desktop contains two rows of apps and one row of docked apps. Swipes to the left lead you to the following screens with apps. A swipe to the right brings up something that is reminiscent of OnePlus's Shelf - a screen with a search bar and a field with quick access to preferred apps. A long touch on the Home button brings up the Task Manager, while the Notifications and Quick Settings come up as usual - after a swipe and a second one from the top of the display. The Widgets menu may be accessed either by a long press anywhere on the home screen or by tapping the Menu button. It contains a choice of wallpapers and widgets along with screen transition styles. However, there are some preferences that allow you to customize the UI more to your liking. They contain an option for adding a search field to all screens, another one to loop the screen swipe (this disables the left screen that resembles the Shelf), and another style of a launcher that is more Android M one - with only one desktop and an App tray. In addition, you may choose how the apps accessible via the App tray should be listed - on successive screens or on one screen that can be scrolled up and down. Under the default launcher, you may also choose the icon arrangement. The Widgets menu also contains a shortcut to the Settings and a separate option that allows you to hide apps. The Volume and Power off shades are standard. The Settings contain the four familiar groups of options and for each menu, there is a Blackview-designed icon. The Wireless & networks group is first as usual and besides the traditional management of SIM cards, networks, data usage and wireless connections, it allows you to establish and manage Turbo download connections and HotKnot ones. The second group is the Device one and it starts off with the Display settings. They offer nothing interesting. Only the LED notification light menu and the Cast display feature are worth mentioning. The Display menu is followed by the Sound & notification, Apps, Storage & USB, Battery, and Memory menus, which you're already familiar with from working with any other Android M smartphone. However, in this second group Blackview has decided to add its additional software features. The first one is Parallel Space, which acts like an app, but actually, there isn't an icon for it among the list of apps. A second new software feature is the Gesture Unlock, which allows interacting with the smartphone using simple gestures. You can activate toggles for swiping in the four directions, each associated with a certain action (unlocking the screen, starting the camera, going forth or back in a music playlist). There are also toggles for letter gestures - you draw a letter with your finger on the screen when it is off and this action opens an app associated with it. The third new software feature is the Smart Key menu. It allows you to associate an action or an app to three types of interactions with it - a single click, a double click, and a long press. Personal is the third major group of Settings and offers nothing new. Among the Location, Accounts, Language & input, Backup & reset, and Google, the only menu that's worth mentioning is the Security one and mostly because it contains the Smart Lock options and the Fingerprint settings. The fourth and last group is the System one and it does have a new feature besides the Date & time, Scheduled power on & off, Accessibility, Printing, About Phone, and the System UI Tuner. It is called Smart somatosensory. It allows you to set on and off air gestures for moving between photos in the Gallery and songs in the Music app, take photos, move to the next page in the launcher, unlock the device, etc. At the time of this review, the software version of the OS is the latest one. Blackview BV7000 Pro does contain more apps than we have expected. The usual ones are present of course - Dialer, Contacts, Messenger, Browser, Clock, Calendar, Calculator, Downloads, Email, File Manager, FM Radio, Gallery, Search, Sound Recorder, Voice Search. There are also a standard Music and Camera app along with Google's Play Store, Gmail, Maps. The list of pre-installed apps also contains a Torch, Compass, the Facebook and Twitter apps as well as Xender - a cross-platform for file transfer and sharing.

Networks, calls and connectivity

Blackview BV7000 Pro has a hybrid dual-SIM tray. The first slot is for a micro-SIM card and the second is compatible with both a nano-SIM and a microSD/TF card, but you can use only one or the other. The smartphone works with the following network bands - 2G GSM (900, 1900, 2100 MHz), 3G WCDMA (900 and 2100 MHz) and 4G FDD-LTE (800, 900, 1800, 2100, 2600 MHz). LTE networks are Cat. 6 ones (up to 300 Mbps downlink speed and up to 50 Mbps uplink speed). During our test, the review unit showed impressive call quality at all times. At the same time, it also performed excellently at establishing all possible options for wireless connections. The model supports Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Wi-Fi Hotspot, Wi-Fi Direct, Cast display, and Bluetooth 4.0. It also provides a Turbo download feature for faster downloading of files larger than 20MB. There's also HotKnot available, which is analogical to NFC. The smartphone is equipped with a USB Type-C 2.0 port with OTG support, which works fine, and a 3.5 mm jack, both are deeper than standard ones and the connectors of the included headphones and USB cable are longer. The model works both with the GPS and GLONASS satellite positioning systems and manages to detect satellites from each with an accuracy of up to 5 meters.

Performance

The hardware of Blackview BV7000 Pro is based on a MediaTek MT6750T chipset. The T version of the MT6750 is its highest modification. Its CPU has a two-cluster architecture - the first one contains four Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1.5GHz, while the second packs another quadruplet of those, but clocked at 1GHz. The processor is coupled with a dual-core Mali-T860 MP2 GPU clocked at 650MHz. Another smartphone that we have reviewed and that has the same chipset is the Oukitel U15S. It will also power the currently upcoming Ulefone Power 2 and the Oukitel K6000 Plus. Blackview BV7000 Pro got an AnTuTu score of 43434 points, which is only marginally lower than the AnTuTu score of the U15S - 44328. This situation repeats itself with all other performance tests we ran. Oukitel U15S outperforms the BV7000 Pro only with a very little. In terms of real life performance, there shouldn't be a noticeable difference between the two. The system-on-chip itself provides excellent browsing and is perfect for everyday use. It stutters only at handling heavy graphics, so do have this in mind if you want to play graphics demanding games - most probably they should be set at the low graphics level. The work of the chipset is aided by 4GB of LPDDR3 RAM. It is single-channel with 833MHz clock rate. With this amount of RAM, even from the old generation, the device is swift and you won't feel you've got too many apps open at any time. The built-in memory is more than enough but should 64GB is not enough for you, you may add a microSD/TF card of up to 32GB for additional storage. The Androbench results for reading/writing from/to the memory hint at an eMMC 5.1 type of storage, but this is not confirmed. The smartphone features a number of sensors as well, including proximity, light, accelerometer, magnetometer, gravity, gyroscope, etc. There's a rear-mounted fingerprint sensor, which is fast in creating and recognizing fingerprint IDs. It can be used for unlocking only.

Cameras

You get a traditional Android Camera app with a shutter and video recording buttons placed next to each other on the home screen of the application, shortcuts to the LED flash and HDR settings, a separate settings icon. The latter contains the standard options for photo size, video quality, ISO, exposure, white balance, face detection, EIS, etc. It's almost the same with the front-facing snapper, but it also provides beautification settings. Of course, you can edit a photo after you take a shot. You can apply a filter and/or an effect, crop, rotate or in any other away deform the image as well as adjust the saturation, contrast, hue, curves, sharpness, vibrance, etc.

Primary camera

The smartphone features a 13-megapixel Sony IMX258 Exmor RS sensor with a 1/3.06" size. This is a back-illuminated and stacked CMOS image sensor with a 1.12 μm pixel size, 4208 x 3120 active pixels (13.13MP), and 4224 x 3144 effective pixels (13.28MP). The same image sensor is used for the front cameras of the following smartphones we have reviewed: Xiaomi Mi 5s Plus, LeEco Coolpad Cool1 dual, Vernee Mars, and Xiaomi Redmi Pro. In Blackview BV7000 Pro it is complemented by a 5-element lens with an f/2.0 aperture. The camera module has a blue film coating and is covered with a metal plate that protects it against dust, water, and scratches. While the sensor itself is promising, our review unit of the model was not able to focus properly under any circumstances.

Secondary camera

Blackview BV7000 Pro uses an 8-megapixel OmniVision OV8856 sensor with a 1/4" size, built on a 1.12-micron pixel architecture. The camera outputs photos with a resolution of 3264 x 2448 pixels. This sensor is widely used for the front cameras of a number of devices we have reviewed. You can check out the ZTE Axon 7, Asus ZenFone 3 ZE552KL, LeEco Coolpad Cool1 dual, Zopo Speed 8, Oukitel U13. Cubot Dinosaur uses the same sensor, but for its primary camera.

Audio

Blackview BV7000 Pro arrives with the standard Android Music app. It is very simple and offers mainly various options for sorting the audio files. There's a default equalizer with various pre-set stereo effects and audio profiles. The sound enhancement options are under Sound & notification menu from the Settings. Due to objective reasons - the non-standard depth of the 3.5 mm jack, we have not been able to perform the audio test of this device. Regarding the speaker, our subjective opinion is that it is an average one and not as loud as it should be, but the speaker enhancement feature from the Sound settings does make it sound louder.

Battery

For the battery, you get the standard Android settings, which include toggles for the Standby intelligent power saving and the Battery percentage, the capacity monitor, status and usage data with history details on it. The Battery saver feature and the Battery optimization one along with the Schedule power on & off function are provided as well. Blackview BV7000 Pro packs a 3500 mAh Li-Pol non-removable battery with a 5V/2A fast charger. According to the specifications from the manufacturer, it should provide up to 19 hours of talk time and up to 624 hours of standby time. All battery tests below are developed by us and performed with the screen of the device being calibrated to 200 cd/m². All battery saving features are disabled. The battery charging graph of the Blackview BV7000 Pro reveals a non-linear process that starts quickly right from the very beginning and keeps its pace till the accumulator's capacity reaches 80% after 1 hour and 33 minutes. At that point, the charging speed drops a bit till at 90% it drops even more. These 10% needed 22 minutes to charge and the last 10% to 100% needed additional 40 minutes to be completed. At the same time, the battery temperature during the process demonstrated a sharp increase in the first 8 minutes of charging from 24°C to 36°C. Then it continued rising, but more gradually, till at 50% of the charge the temperature reached its peak of 44°C and maintained it for almost half an hour. At that point, around 73% of the capacity, the temperature started dropping and at the end, it measured 38°C. Unlike the previous chart, the browsing one shows quite a linear battery discharging. It took 6 hours and 21 minutes for the battery to deplete completely from 100% to 0% and the speed of the process was one at the same at all times. The battery temperature did rise from 26°C to 34°C for the first 30 minutes. Then it reached 37°C for the next 30 minutes and 38°C for the third half an hour. This temperature was maintained for the next 4 hours, after which it rose a bit to 39°C. That level remained the same until the end of the process. The battery discharging during looping a 1080p video at 30 fps with a ~20Mbps rate took 8 hours and 19 minutes. Discharging started with a fast and steady pace till it reached the last 10% of the capacity. At that moment discharging increased significantly and it took only a minute for these last 10% to be drained. During the whole process, the battery temperature fluctuated very slightly from 35°C to 33°C and back to 35°C again. For this test we use Epic Citadel's tech demo in its Guided Tour mode. The battery drained completely in 4 hours and 55 minutes. The process was steady and experienced only minor fluctuations when the capacity reached 20%. The battery temperature increased quickly from the very start. For the first 10 minutes is rose from 31°C to 39°C and continued to rise slowly till it reached 44°C. That level with only minor changes was preserved for the rest of the test.

Final thoughts

Currently, Blackview BV7000 Pro is definitely a smartphone to consider if you're looking for a rugged and reliable device. It is eye-catchy, yet robust and with IP68 certification. The body is well-made, while the display could use some software features for tweaking and optimization. The UI is simple, yet allows a great deal of customization and the settings include several useful smart features in addition to standard Android M one. In terms of connectivity, the BV7000 Pro is truly reliable. It performs as it is expected to and the battery life is reasonable. The only major problem is the lack of focus of the primary camera. We're not sure whether a software update would be enough, but the lack of focus is an issue that needs to be solved, otherwise it would be a shame that Blackview uses good image sensors for both cameras. At the time of this review, the model retails at USD 180-220.