Vivo V5 Plus Review- The Perfect Selfie!

Towards the end of 2016, Vivo announced their selfie focused smartphone with whopping 20MP selfie camera, the Vivo V5 (review). Now, the company is upping the selfie ante with a dual front camera on the Vivo V5 Plus. The new device comes with a 20MP + 8MP front camera for superior selfies along with the ‘moonlight’ selfie flash.

The Vivo V5 Plus sports a 5.5 inch Full HD display and is powered by Snapdragon 625 Octa core processor with 4GB RAM and 64GB Storage along with Android Marshmallow. So how good is the device in terms of overall experience? Let’s find out in this detailed review of Vivo V5 Plus.

Design and Build:

Vivo has done good work in the design aspect of the phone and it looks seamless with narrow bezels. It is also quite slim to hold and comes in a unibody metallic chassis. The notable change with respect to Vivo V5 is that the antenna lines have been moved to the edges making the device look a bit more pleasing. Indeed, the Vivo V5 Plus is one of the better-looking devices in this price segment and feels great in hands. Yes, it resembles a lot with iPhone 7 especially the rear panel finishing. It is also quite light and gives a good grip in hand.

The power and volume keys sit on the right side, while the SIM tray is on the left side. The 3.5mm audio jack, speaker, and the micro USB charging slots are all located at the bottom. The rear panel finish looks premium and there is a 16MP camera and LED flash along with Vivo branding. The front panel houses the 5.5inch Full HD display, the dual front cameras, moonlight selfie flash and the home button along with two capacitive buttons. The home button also acts as the fingerprint scanner and provides a great experience with unlocking the phone.

Summing up, the Vivo V5 Plus is definitely a great looking device and feels premium.

Display:

Vivo V5 Plus features a 5.5 inch Full HD display with 1920X 1080p resolution. The display is one of the best aspects of the phone and it has great color quality with good sharpness. It is crisp and has good viewing angles too. The sunlight legibility is decent and the touch response is good. The display has curved edges and is also protected with Corning Gorilla Glass 5, so you get protection from those minor scratches.

Overall, we are totally impressed with the display offered on the device.

Software:

Vivo V5 runs on Android 6.0 Marshmallow and has a custom UI called Fun Touch OS. Fun Touch OS is a custom UI from Vivo and feels similar to other Chinese OEMs with no app drawer and packs multiple home screens. The notification center is implemented similar to iOS and has Control center which can be accessed with a swipe from the bottom of the screen. The control center houses the options for multitasking and also quick toggles.

Looking at the settings of the device, you can see a plethora of options like gestures, smart multi-screen, one-handed mode, super screenshot and more. There are lots of options to make the device customized for your use.

The phone also comes with theme manager where you can download additional themes, wallpapers, fonts and lock screens. There is also a phone manager app which has options to clean the phone, battery manager, app manager, privacy options and more. The global eye protection mode allows you to get warmer colors on display, specifically for reading.

One of the specialties of the device is that it comes with a dedicated custom audio chipset which provides Hi-Fi music through headphones. You can enable the Hi-Fi music from the sound settings for multimedia apps.

While the software offers lots of options, you can see the similarities with the iOS in the UI. While it might be a bit confusing for first time users of Fun touch OS, once you get used to it, it is pretty good.

Performance:

Vivo V5 Plus is powered by a Snapdragon 625 Octa core chipset clocked at 2.0Ghz. It is a Cortex A53 chipset which is coupled with Adreno 506 GPU and 4GB RAM. While the processor is not a powerful for the price segment and even lower than the Snapdragon 652 in terms of performance, it does the tasks pretty well. In day to day usage, we hardly noticed any lags or issues. It responded well to the tasks it was thrown and with plenty of RAM available it does the job pretty well. The gaming performance of the device is also quite good and we could play high graphic rich games without any issues.

The call quality of the phone is also good and we tested with Jio SIM card and it supports 4G LTE VoLTE. Vivo V5 Plus comes with an AK4376 audio chip, which is custom made by the company and this provides Hi-Fi music. You can enable this from the ‘Hi-Fi’ option in the settings app and this works only via headphones. There is a noticeable performance in music quality when you enable Hi-Fi option. The speaker performance is also quite good. There is 64GB storage on offer in the device and you can also expand the storage using the hybrid SIM card available on the device.

The fingerprint scanner is located on the front panel and is extremely quick and responsive and unlocks the device in a flash. You can also configure the fingerprint scanner to open the app on double press.

Camera:

The main USP of Vivo V5 Plus is the dual front selfie camera. The Vivo V5 had a 20MP shooter on the front and the company has now improved it with an additional 8MP camera. There is also a 16MP rear camera with PDAF and LED flash. The 20MP IMX376 front camera sensor, co-engineered with Sony, takes selfie technology to the next level. The dual front camera creates a depth-of-field effect and the Bokeh mode algorithm creates Bokeh effects in the photos. The camera interface is also feature rich and comes with tons of options including filters, manual mode, beauty mode and more. There is also support for 4K recording using the rear camera.

The rear 16MP camera can take decent captures with good color quality and overall clarity seems good in daylight conditions. The sharpness levels could have been slightly better. The camera is definitely improved over the 13MP on Vivo V5. The low light experience was not as good as the daylight photos and you could see noise creeping in. But with adequate lighting it should be able to produce decent photos. The video recording abilities of the camera is good. Here are some of the samples taken with rear camera.

Talking about the front camera, the 20MP + 8MP combination produces amazing selfies. When we reviewed the Vivo V5, we mentioned that the selfie experience was not the best even with the 20MP shooter, but on the Vivo V5 Plus, the company has rectified it and the front camera produces the best selfie experience or in company’s terms the perfect selfies.

The detailing is very good and the selfie experience is probably the best you can get. The Bokeh mode allows you to change the aperture even after you have captured the image, a mode which we have seen in Honor 8 and Huawei P9, but this time on the front camera. For low-light selfies, you also get the moonlight flash. Overall, if you are looking for great selfies, the Vivo V5 Plus is the best you can get today.

Here are some of the selfies taken with the phone.

Battery Life:

Vivo V5 Plus comes with 3055mAh battery with the dual engine fast charging feature. With the power efficient Snapdragon 625, the battery performance of Vivo V5 Plus is very good. We tested the battery with Jio 4G SIM card and with social apps, playing games, watching movies and calls we could easily get to 1.5 days of battery life which is impressive. Even if you are a heavy user, you can easily get through one day of battery life.

Verdict:

The Vivo V5 Plus gets you the best selfie experience you can get on any smartphone today, but is it just for selfies? No, the Vivo V5 Plus is an all-round device with beautiful design, good display, performance and good battery life. There aren’t too many complaints with the V5 Plus except the fact that the software is heavily inspired by iOS.

Priced at Rs 27980, the V5 Plus gets stiff competition from OnePlus 3T, Zenfone 3 and also Moto Z Play which have better specs or are priced lower. But if you are looking for a good mid-range phone (one which is available offline) and not really worried about specs, the Vivo V5 Plus is a good deal at the pricing.