Vivo India has introduced their all new Vivo V5 smartphone in the mid-range segment for a price of INR 17,980. The phone will be up on sale in India from 26 November 2016 at local mobile stores. While we are still a little-over-a-week away from the Vivo V5 reaching the markets, here are our first impressions of the smartphone.
Many phone makers are pumping up the camera game and loading their new smartphones with more capable optics to get the best out of those sensors. This is not just reserved to the Primary or Rear camera modules but the front facing cameras are benefitted with the tech as well. So for the rear camera we have had the Oppo coming up with a 50MP phone that was by far one of the phones with a huge mega pixel count. So while that was for the rear camera, Vivo decided to execute some ‘world first’ task on the front facing camera and so the Vivo V5 was launched. This one here boasts a 20MP front facing camera; let’s see how it performs but first let’s get to the design.
Design
The front is pretty clean with a 5.5inch HD IPS display with 2.5D Corning Gorilla Glass protection. For the price though, we would have loved a FullHD display. On top of it is a 20MP camera with an earpiece, proximity sensor and a secondary flash.
At the bottom of the screen, is a fingerprint sensor integrated in the home button and is indeed very quick at its dual job. Moving on to the sides, on the right are the volume rocker and the power button and to the left is the sim card tray that also holds the memory expansion slot.
The rear is where you realize the premium aluminium unibody construction that feels nice and comfy in the hand. The rounded edges and corners add to the ergonomic feel. We have a 13MP camera and the flash on top. The two metallic stripes running across the width of the phone and the Vivo branding finish the rear looks. The 3.5mm audiojack, microphone, USB charging port and the speaker grille are placed at the bottom of the phone.
Camera
Instead of introducing you guys to the performance hardware lets take a detour and head to the camera first. The front gets a 20MP unit while the rear makes do with a13MP camera. So does the 20MP really work for the Vivo V5? Well, we had the phone with us for a very less time and hence you will have to wait for a couple of days till we get a review unit but still here are some noticeable observations.
The camera app is simple and still give a wide range of the settings. The rear camera gets modes like Face Beauty, Panorama, HDR, Night, Ultra HD, PPT. It makes use of Phase Detection Auto Focus tech and also gets options like Motion Track, Voice Shutter, Touch Capture, Palm, Timer, Gender Detection, and Watermark. Something that really impressed us was the Professional mode that lets you tweak the ISO, Shutter, White-Balance and Focus.
Coming to the performance of the rear camera felt a bit disappointing especially in dim lit conditions. The photos came out grainy and didn’t seem to be spot on with the focusing. Also the panorama images didn’t impress up. On the positive side the colour reproduction is good and temperatures are quite balanced.
The Front camera is a decent performer and with the Moonlight Flash up for assistance the images come out good. Thanks to the inventor of beauty modes, the selfie game never goes wrong and the modes on the Vivo V5 are good game. You can set gestures for capturing photos. The Moonlight Flash is handy and does not throw harsh flashes on the face, instead throws a diffused light on the face. Our selfies came out decent but not as expected. Here are a few examples:
Hardware and Performance
Inside the Vivo V5 is a 1.5GHz octa-core MediaTek MT6750 SoC coupled with Adreno 405 GPU. This MediaTek engine is assisted by 4GB of RAM and 32GB ROM. The phone supports microSD cards upto 128GB. The setup is decent to take you through all the daily apps and games. We had no issues while running through apps and games.
The Funtouch OS 2.6, based on Android 6.0, is pretty identical to the iOS. The icons, menu themes, and the drop down panel, and the quick app drawer are similar to that on the iOS devices.The experience is not that intuitive but people who want a simple uncomplicated experience would not dislike it. The maker has also pumped in a custom built AK4376 Hi-Fi audio chip that is claimed to provide an improved sound quality and experience by giving a signal-to-noise ratio of up to 115dB. Now this is what the company says, we shall let you know once we have it tested!
The Vivo V5 has a smart window system that let you split the screen to run two different apps at the same time without having to swap applications. Big thumbs up to the feature! Other phones with a similar or identical CPU -GPU mix deliver a good performance and we expect the Vivo V5 to do the same. We don’t expect the phone to make exceptional benchmark scores but enough to be a good buy. The battery packed in the V5 is a 3,000 mAh unit and we think that this number should have been more.
Conclusion
The phone packs a decent performance hardware and the camera units have a lot of potential and can perform better if tweak through softwares. It is too early to throw out a verdict on the phone as we are still to test it through a lot of parameters. Till then stay tuned with Gizmoids as we shall soon get the phone in our labs!
