Vivo today has announced launched V5 Plus smartphone in India at Rs 27,980. The smartphone comes in two colour options- Rose Gold and Golda and the main highlight of the device is the dual front-facing camera setup which is a combination of a 20-megapixel sensor and an 8-megapixel sensor along with Moonlight Glow flash while at the back, there is a 16-megapixel camera making it a camera-centric smartphone on paper right off the back. We will discuss the camera in the later part of the review, first, let’s start with looks and design.
Look and Design
When you first hold Vivo V5 Plus in your hand, the design looks quite familiar! The V5 Plus’s design is inspired by none other than Apple’s last year flagship- iPhone 7, especially when we look at the back panel. The Antenna lines on the top and bottom of the metal sleeve also resemble the iPhone 7.
Moving to the front, the V5 plus has a 2.5D display, a home button, which can be doubled up as a fingerprint scanner, which is quite accurate and fast. Good news for those who have traditional headphones, thankfully the phone has a 3.5mm Audio Jack support, which can be found at the bottom of the phone, alongside a microUSB port and six speaker holes. On the left-hand side, there is a SIM tray, which can hold two nano SIM while on the right are where the volume rockers and a power button is placed. The device measures 153.8 x 75.5 x 7.55 mm and weighs 156 grams.
Display, Performance and Storage
The V5 Plus features a 5.5-inch Full HD (1920×1080 pixels) 2.5d curved glass display with Corning Gorilla Glass 4 protection. The display quality is quite good and generates accurate coloursenhancing your viewing experience.
Like all other smartphones, one can adjust the display brightness in V5 Plus as it comes with Auto brightness mode. Moreover, the device offers Eye protection mode, which will adjust the screen colour to relieve the visual fatigue.
The smartphone comes equipped with a 2.0GHz octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 Processor with Adreno 506 GPU along with 4GB of RAM. As far as performance is concerned, we didn’t find any flaws in it. The performance is smooth and can handle heavy tasks with ease. Further, we didn’t find have any problemplaying heavy games like Asphalt 8 and Dead Trigger 2 on the V5 Plus.
The V5 Plus also handled multi-tasking with ease, thanks to the 4GB of RAM on board. The smartphone can hold two SIM cards but doesn’t have a microSD card slot, which can be a deal breaker for those who carry loads of data such as music, movies etc. all on the microSD card. Nevertheless, it does come with 64GB of internal storage.
Camera
Now coming to the device’s USP, the camera. The front-facing dual camera set up offers anenhanced depth of field (DOF). DOF, also called focus range or effective focus range is the distance between the nearest and farthest objects in a scene that appears acceptably sharp in an image. Another feature which takes advantage of the dual-front facing camera is the BOKEH effect.
It is the aesthetic quality of out-of-focus blur in a photograph. In otherwords, it helps in focusing on objects in the foreground, while blurring the background. Other features includeMirrored selfie, Photo watermark, HDR etc. If we consider the overall performance of thedual front camera, one can click pretty good selfies if clicked carefully.
Moving to the back, there is a 16-megapixel camera with LED flash. The rear camera unit does perform very well in outdoors in good lighting conditions. However, when it comes to low light photography, it tends to struggle and a fair amount of noise and grain gets in resulting in images with a lot less detail and sharpness. The camera features include Face Beauty, Panorama, HDR, Night, Ultra HD, PPT, Anti-shake, Professional, Slow, Time laps, Fast, Voice Shutter, Touch Capture, Palm, and Timer.
Operating system
The Vivo V5 Plus runs on the Android 6.0 Marshmallow with company’s own customised skin UI Funtouch 3.0 OS layered on top. Similar to the design, Vivo has gone with an Apple-inspired software as well. From icon design to a dedicated control centre, everything shouts iOS on Vivo’s Funtouch. Similar to what we are seeing with a lot of UI skins, there is no App drawer and apps are stacked up across different pages. Further, you do get customizations like smart-split, one-handed mode, super screenshot and smart-click.
There is also a feature named Wi-Fi Display, which lets you share your phone’s display to Wi-Fi enabled TVs, Projector etc. On the other hand, you do get some pre-installed apps which takes up quite a bit of space of the given 64GB of internal storage.
Battery, Connectivity and Audio
The smartphone is powered by a 3160 mAh Li-Polymer non-removable battery with Fast charging support. The device’s battery can last an entire day with moderate to heavy usage.The device also comes with ‘low power consumption’ mode which would at least give a couple of hours more on the same charge cycle. To sum up, the battery life on the V5 Plus is decent if not one of the best at this price range.
On the connectivity front, the device offers Dual SIM, 4G with VoLTE, Bluetooth 4.1, A-GPS, GLONASS, with Google Maps, Wifi-802.11 b/g/n, Wi-Fi hotspot, a MicroUSB port.
Lastly, coming on to the audio performance which is another aspect where this device is claimed to excel. The audio output through the device’s speaker though gets very loud at times, but the quality is just not up there. The device struggles to pop out mids and lows most of the times. The scenario does get better when we put on the earphones given with the device. As a fun fact, the earphones in the box also resembles the one sold with Apple’s iPhones. The device also comes with a Hi-Fi mode which further enhances the audio quality via earphones.