There's a good chance you may have seen Ranveer Singh taking selfies around a city, in a recent television advertisement. That's a promo for Vivo V5 Plus and as advertised, the brand's best bet on this smartphone is the selfie camera. At a price of Rs 28,980, does it fit the picture? Read on.
Pros:
- Bright display
- Premium Build
- Fast performance
- Online and offline availability
- Dual lens selfie camera
Cons:
- Disappointing battery backup
- Average camera
What’s Good?
Right up, Vivo V5 Plus looks heavily inspired by the iPhone 7. The curved metallic back with U-type antenna strips and even the bottom speaker grille are almost identical. The design, which may feel like a rip-off, does add a premium look and feel to the device. The phone has 64 GB of space on board.
The smartphone runs Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 625 octa-core processor on Android 6.0.1, paired with a 4GB RAM. That indeed helps it breeze past heavy-duty graphic games. And yes, they look lovely and crisp on the Full-HD screen, protected by Gorilla Glass 5.
The home button on the front, doubles as a fingerprint scanner. It's quite quick, even in unlocking the phone from standby.
The cameras are a big talking point for Vivo on almost every smartphone. This one has a 16 megapixel snapper on the back, and a 20 megapixel plus 8 megapixel dual camera on the front. The back camera does a decent job of balanced colour reproduction, but loses out on the details. The pictures look a bit smudgy if the light goes low.
- 01/04Sample image on the rear camera of Vivo V5 Plus
- 02/04Sample image on the rear camera of Vivo V5 Plus
- 03/04Sample image on the front selfie camera of Vivo V5 Plus
- 04/04The depth of field can be seen in this selfie
The dual front camera setup felt exciting at first, then started to look gimmicky as we noticed blurred edges and missing details. Here's a tip: For nicely blurred backgrounds, have a good contrast between the subjects in the front and the back, and shoot in decent light.
What’s Bad?
The battery life is quite disappointing. The 3,160 mAh battery supports quick charge, but our review device went low on charge in almost 6-7 hours of active use. With such a battery capacity, this just points to bad power management on the custom Funtouch OS in the phone.
The camera is here, listed once again because we felt the photographs are quite average for a segment dominated by the likes of OnePlus 3T and Xiaomi Mi 5.
Why Buy It?
If you love selfies, this is a phone you may consider. If you prefer shopping offline, this phone should be on your list. But beyond that, the grass is greener on the other side. OnePlus 3T offers a better processor – Snapdragon 821 and more RAM – 6GB, in a similar price band. So, you know which one to buy right?
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