vivo V5s Review – Is It An Upgrade From The V5?

Introduction

Previously, we did a review on the vivo V5, which was not really encouraging. Now, we are looking at the vivo V5s. What is the difference between the two? Did vivo make any new changes? Let’s see what they have to offer this time. fingers crossed

Unboxing

For the unboxing, we prepared a little video for our viewers to enjoy. So enjoy!

As you can see from the video, the vflicivo V5s includes your standard charger head, USB charging cable and they were kind enough to give a silicone cover for extra protection. Surprisingly vivo included a set of earphones, which is nice but nothing to shout about (No, they are not AirPods, which is definitely nothing to shout about either).

Appearance

In terms of looks, the vivo V5s has a very common look (hint hint like an iPhone). There’s a home button underneath the display for your fingerprint security purposes. Two navigation buttons sit beside (left and right) of the home button.

At the back, the design is slightly different from the V5. The antenna lines that were in the V5 are now lined up on the edges of the phone with the top one just above the camera. It’s metallic finish doesn’t look too shabby either. The single rear camera is located at the top left and only accompanied by a single LED flash.

Here we have the right side look of the phone. There’s your standard power button, accompanied by the volume control buttons. At the left side, there is a SIM tray cum microSD tray at your disposal.

At the bottom view, it is very packed. Starting from the left, we have the 3.5mm jack, a microphone hole, microUSB connector, and finally the mono loudspeaker. Turn to the top of the phone, it is completely blank with nothing situated there.

All in all, appearance wise it looks rather simple. The design seems similar to some of the other smartphones on the market. Wished that they could add something and spice things up a little bit.

Specifications

Performance

So here is the part where it counts the most. Although we already know that the phone with a MediaTek MT6750 won’t rip through the benchmarks, the question still stands. Does the vivo V5s perform better than the V5? We’ll see. Note that for every bench test, the phone was only carrying pre-installed apps with just a game or two.

Antutu rates the phone rather low here. Despite that, the result is slightly higher than the vivo V5 which shares most of its innards with this updated variant. It has a sizable lead over the smartphones powered by the quad-core MTK6735, but it still trails behind the beefier Snapdragon 430-equipped devices.

Here are the 3DMark scores for the vivo V5s. Still relatively similar results with the vivo V5. Not surprising given the similar hardware inside. Here it is ranked above the Snapdragon 430 devices simply because of their higher scores in the ES 3.1 API benchmark. If we take a look at the scores in the older APIs, the Adreno 505 still has a sizable lead over the Mali-T860MP2 in the vivo V5s.

Geekbench tests the CPU performance, and the vivo V5s’ scores are very close to the vivo V5’s scores. It does manage to eke out a small lead, but run-to-run variance is probably the reason behind the difference rather than optimizations. The MTK6750 actually has higher multi-core scores than the Snapdragon 430 which will be great if you run modern apps optimized for multiple cores.

With a score of 3186, it beats the vivo V5 hands down on the Work 2.0 performance. It still fails to best the Snapdragon 430 devices here, but given that it features eight cores, it does walk all over the MTK6735 smartphones which only features four cores.

We were unable to run our usual PCMark battery life test, we had to make do with Antutu’s version. The vivo V5s did not blow our mind with the battery life even with a SoC which was more optimized for efficiency than raw performance, with the 3000 mAh battery only keeping it on for around 4 hours before the test ended by itself. This is understandable as the MTK6750 here based on the rather old 28nm planar process node. Coupled with the average battery size, what you get is average battery life.

User Experience

When I first got my hands on the V5s, it felt rather slim in my hands. I kind of felt scared that it would get away from my grasps. Saying that, after I put on the silicone case that came along with the box, it felt perfect. The size was just right and it felt comfortable. So in terms of comfort, I would rate this. The vivo V5s features the usual microSIM and microSD tray which allows you to only slot in a nanoSIM in place of the microSD if you want to have dual SIM functionality, which is not really my type of usage but there are pros and cons to this. If you don’t have either a nano sim or a micro sim, you can use one or another.

Next is about the interface. When I had my first look at it, first thing that came to mind was “This really looks like an iOS”. When they said that the FunTouchOS was inspired from android’s 6.0 Marshmallow, I did not expect for it to be like this. I came from a device that had the back button on the left side, so it took me a little time to get used to it. Since most devices now allow you to customize these keys as they appear on the interface rather than hardware, I think vivo needs to up the ante in this as well. Despite using FunTouchOS, I can say that it runs smoothly. There were rarely moments when I had to deal with lag or slow performance, switching between applications.

The fact that it still runs on 720p display with the price that it’s asking for, I mean come on. This is 2017. With that said, colors look decent but the lack of sharpness is immediately noticeable if you put it beside a higher resolution display.

One thing that I’ve noticed when playing around with it is that the air operation (one of the smart gesture features) is not working. While this was maybe due to the fact that the phone that I’ve received was a test unit. But still, I felt like a fool waving my hands back and forth on top of the phone just to try and turn the display on.

The home button which acts as the fingerprint security was quite surprising. When vivo said that it was fast, they really mean it. It took me almost instantly to unlock the phone by using the feature.

Referring to the video above, my other issue with the phone is that it was not able to even run Asphalt 8. Even if the game had high requirements, to not be able to run the application, seriously?

We then go in to the camera section. With the front camera of the phone boasting the highest resolution among smartphones with 20MP, expectations are high. The rear camera meanwhile sports a more “conventional” 13MP sensor.

The UI for the camera is pretty common with only few modes and filters available.

Since it is branded as a selfie phone, the main focus would be well, on the front camera. As you can see, the three modes available do have a drastic effect on my face. My experience with the Face Beauty effect was a bit of both positive and negative. There were that moments when I went, “what the hell happened to me?” to “woah, that’s nice”. But more to the negative side, the face beauty in my opinion most of the time makes the image looks more ‘plastic’. It doesn’t look natural. Great for those who want to look like they did plastic surgery, but without the pain, eh? For the Bokeh mode, I enjoyed using it actually. When you take selfies, you would probably want to focus on yourself only. Picture looks sharp and looks good with more emphasis on my face thanks to the background blur. Excuse my mediocre looks by the way.The rear camera’s performance in low light environment was a bit lower than expected. In day light, it performed to expectations. All in all, still good enough for your social media posting usage.

Don’t expect much from the mono loudspeakers as it has the common quality, which is loud. If you really want to enjoy every inch and detail of sound, here’s where the headphones come in handy. With them, you can utilize the Hi-Fi option. There’s also BBE mode with quite of few options to toy around with to suit your ears.

Conclusion

At the price that it is retailing at (RM1299), it was kind of a let down for me. Expect similar performance with the vivo V5 on the inside with more storage and also a little tweak to the design on the back of the phone. That being said, personally I am not one who takes a lot of selfies which makes this device fail to appeal to me. Selfie addicts may enjoy this model though.