Vivo V5 Review – Amazing Selfie Smartphone With 20MP Front Camera. Equally Great Otherwise?

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Vivo, the prime sponsor of IPL, is a Chinese multinational technology company that designs, develops, and manufactures smartphones, smartphone accessories, software, and online services. It was founded in 2009 in Dongguan, Guangdong as a sub-brand of BBK Electronics.

To the uninitiated, BBK Electronics owns major smartphone brands like Oppo, OnePlus and Vivo.

Vivo V5 is the latest addition to the V-Series by the company and here we are to see how it stands in the smartphone industry. Vivo V5 slides into the mid-range segment priced at Rs. 18, 490/-.

DESIGN:

The design of the Vivo V5 definitely takes its influence from many smartphones like the iPhone 6, Oppo F1 and OnePlus 3. The front of this looks exactly like the OnePlus 3 having the capacitive button at the bottom which is also a fingerprint sensor. The sensor was incredibly quick at authenticating us and always worked accurately. You can even use it to lock apps, in addition to unlocking the phone. The Vivo V5 comes with backlit capacitive navigation buttons. The antenna bands running across the top and bottom of the back of this phone, with a 13MP shooter placed at the top.

All the buttons on this device are placed on the right hand side of this device with the volume rocker above the power button. The clicks on the button are good in use. The Left side of the panel contains the Dual SIM-Tray, which can accommodate a microSD card (up to 128GB) in the second slot. Build quality is good, with Corning Gorilla Glass protecting the display and the faux-metal chassis blending together very well. I wish the phone was made of real metal, would have given the device a much more premium feel.

The 5.5-inch IPS display is bright with good colour saturation, although the resolution is just 720p, but is crisp and good to look at. The design of the phone is modern, slim and light weight too, weighing at just 154 gms and thickness at just 7.6mm. The bottom of the phone has the audio 3,5mm jack, a microphone, Micro-USB port (No Type-C port, an utter disappointment) and speaker grill. Quite a lot has been stuffed on the bottom side of this device. In The box, we have a 2 Amp charging adapter, a micro USB – USB type A cable, one headset, SIM-ejector tool and manual guide.

SPECIFICATIONS:

The Vivo V5 is Powered by a 4GB RAM (DDR3) , 32GB internal storage, an octa-core MediaTek MT6750 SoC clocked at 1.5GHz (4x Cortex A53 at 1.5GHz + 4x Cortex A53 clocked at 1GHz) paired with a Mali-T860 GPU to give the user a smooth experience.

There is a 20MP camera with a moonlight flash on the front, while the rear camera set up gets a 13MP sensor with phase detection autofocus (PDAF).Coming to the connectivity, the Vivo V5 features a Hybrid Dual SIM (micro + nano/microSD) set up with support for 4G LTE bands. As for the regular connectivity options, it features Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.1, GPS + GLONASS and also includes a regular micro USB port with USB OTG support. All of the above is powered by a 3,000mAh battery.

SOFTWARE:

Vivo ships the V5 with FunTouchOS 2.6, which is now based on Android Marshmallow.The FunTouch is nowhere that it’ll look like an Android device, the redesign from Vivo is so extensive that the only similarity would be the Now on Tap feature. The FunTouch takes a lot of its influence from the iOS, its slide up drawer from the bottom and not having an exclusive app drawer. Vivo V5’s software looks and functions just like it did on the previous V-series phones.

Watch out the Video below to have a look at the software on this device.

A short press on the left capacitive button brings up a home-screen customisation menu, including the widgets, transition animations, and an option to hide a particular app from the home screen. The trouble here is that this menu is quite tiny, and it’s hard to gauge certain widgets. The drop-down shade is used only for notifications.

PERFORMANCE:

Performance on this device was fast and smooth, we didn’t really face any difficulties and lags. Once you get a hang of the FunTouch UI , you should be good to go. Loading times for apps on the Vivo V5 are relatively short and there aren’t any visible signs of a performance bottleneck when multi-tasking. Gaming on this device was fairly good with minor frame drops in games like Asphalt-8. Though the mediatek processor is not suited for high end games the phone performed decently when tested.

On the Cellular front, the device run fast on Airtel 4g and streaming videos on this device was bliss.  The Vivo V5 supports VoLTE as well. Speakers are loud and crisp. Mind you the speakers are mono and do not offer any bass. Vivo’s Hi-Fi additions using the built in DAC delivered an immersive music listening experience but this only works for certain music and video apps (iMusic, YouTube and Google Play Music) and mainly for locally stored music.

The 3000 mAh battery on this device almost gets you about 12 hours of use in a day with medium usage like video streaming, social media, games, calls, whatsapp etc. Charging time is just fair, nothing great. It’s a 2 Amp charger, takes less than 2 hours to charge from 5% to 100%. All in all the performance of this device is good to get your day going but there are better processors offered by other phone manufacturers who offer phones in the same segment as does Vivo.

CAMERA:

The highlight feature of the Vivo V5 is its front-facing 20-megapixel camera, which boasts of a Sony IMX376 sensor with f/2.0 aperture, and a fixed-focus lens. It supports full-HD video recording and Face Beauty shooting mode. The Front facing camera is impressive, shoots one of the best selfies in any light. It has a custom beauty mode, in which you could adjust the buffing, enlarging of the eye and slimming your face. You won’t look you anymore, but hey it’s a great click for social media 😛 .It’s a typical one touch makeup for you by Vivo.

It is the Selfie King of smartphones in this segment right now, you cannot go wrong in any light or angle with this front-facing moonlight selfie camera. Kudos to Vivo for that.

Things get a little wobbly when we move to the rear camera, it’s a 13 MP shooter and we can see that vivo has given much more importance to the front facing camera than the rear. The rear is one of the worst cameras you can use. Images are fairly good in daylight but things turn ugly for the Vivo V5 as the lighting starts to dim, it images are pixelated and grainy, you rather would not click a picture with this camera. They are of actually of no use in low light. Thumbs down Vivo for the rear camera.

VERDICT:

Vivo V5 does come with plenty of compromises, at the cost of a 20MP front-facing camera. But it all seems to have paid off, because at the end of the day if the primary purpose of having a smartphone for you is clicking selfies, it does click some really impressive selfies. The front camera at its best with smooth android experience at a price tag of Rs 18,980 could lure in a lot customers. Vivo V5 is a package with few compromises but it does well for its price tag.

PROS and CONS:

PROS-

1. Front Camera- Selfie King
2. Smooth Android Experience
3. Fast Performance – Despite Old Processor
4. Price
5. FM Radio

CONS:

1. Rear Camera- Low light disaster
2. Battery
3. No 1080p display
4. Old Mediatek processor

Buy from Flipkart.

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