Vivo V5 review — race for the best selfie camera

Just a few years back, smartphones manufacturers were rushing towards higher and higher rear camera resolutions. It seems like all they saw was “the more the merrier.” Explaining your camera features based on sensor size and pixel size to sensor size was difficult to consumers, and also everyone wanted thinner devices, which resulted in smartphones with increasing pixel count but stagnating sensor sizes. However in recent years, it seems like everyone is finally understanding that the number of pixels isn’t what the be-all and end-all in image quality, and we are now going back to lower resolution cameras with better performance, gained in a number of ways. But well, we aren’t gonna talk about rear cameras today, as today’s device features a whopping 20MP front camera, with a soft LED flash, no less. We are talking about none other than the vivo V5, so without further ado, let’s take a closer look at this device.

Unboxing

The vivo V5 comes in a pretty standard packaging, with the product image on the front, as well as the 20MP front camera highlighted. For some reason, vivo also thought that the inclusion of 4G LTE support is worthy of mention on the front of the box over on the top right corner of the box.

The first thing you see is the phone when you open up the packaging, with the rest of the contents under it. Everything is kept in its own separate compartment. vivo also included a pair of earphones with the vivo V5, a rather rare inclusion of late. An included case ensures that your vivo V5 will be protected from day one, while the 10W charger is not impressive, but still a lot better than the 5W chargers some entry-level devices come bundled with.

Appearance

The vivo V5 is a pretty generic looking device, with a front home button which doubles as the fingerprint sensor. The top and lower bezels are rather large, and the positioning of the front camera and loudspeaker offset towards the top of the bezel doesn’t help to hide it. Two hidden navigation buttons flank the home button, and are backlit this time around, unlike in the vivo V3Max.

The back of the vivo V5 is aluminium, with plastic for both the top and bottom ends. The engraved vivo logo and antenna lines break the monotony of the rose gold here. The camera is located at the top left edge of the device, with no fancy laser autofocus module or RGB sensor accompanying it, and is only flanked by a lonely single LED flash.

Moving over to the right edge of the vivo V5, there are the power button and volume rocker. Both these buttons feature a similar smooth finishing. The SIM tray cum microSD tray is over on the left edge of the vivo V5.

The top edge of the vivo V5 is entirely devoid of any ports, or even the secondary microphone hole. Thus we have a very densely populated lower edge, home to the mono loudspeaker, microUSB connector, microphone hole and also the 3.5mm jack, which thankfully has not been sent out to pasture, yet.

It looks pretty good, but bears an uncanny resemblance to the OPPO F1s, yet another device with a strong focus on the front camera. Considering that both company shares their roots, it is not a surprise at all but one could wish for a little more variety in terms of design.

Specifications

Performance

The vivo V5 is not going to blaze through the benchmarks, with a MediaTek MT6750 which is a decidedly mid-range SoC. Battery life should be decent since the cores are clocked rather low despite the old 28nm HPM process MediaTek harnessed to build this SoC. With 4GB of RAM, multitasking should not be a problem, as long as the CPU can handle it. That’s enough talk, now let’s look at the numbers.

Antutu rates the overall performance of the device, and the vivo V5 scores pretty poorly here. In fact, it is slower than the ASUS Zenfone 3 Laser which didn’t even score that well in this benchmark. Comparing it against another device with the MT6750, the OPPO F1s, the vivo V5 inches it out slightly.

Here it scores slightly lower than the OPPO F1s, but not by much. For some reason, the multi-core performance of the vivo V5 is higher than the ASUS Zenfone 3 Laser’s, despite the latter featuring 8 cores running at 1.4 GHz, while the vivo V5’s cores are configured in a big.LITTLE configuration.

Here we see a rather weak showing, but still better than the OPPO F1s’ performance in the graphics benchmark. As expected, the ASUS Zenfone 3 Laser with the Adreno 505 did better than the vivo V5, but the latter still holds the upper hand in the Slingshot Extreme (ES 3.1) benchmark.

The vivo V5 loses to the OPPO F1s here, scoring a mere 2958 in the Work 2.0 benchmark. PCMark tests the overall performance of the device in work-oriented tasks like photo editing and working with spreadsheets. Perhaps this device isn’t meant for work at all?

Battery life of the vivo V5 is quite abysmal actually, as I managed to only squeeze 3 hours out of the battery before it dropped to 15%. This was over around 14 hours of time away from the plug, which I consider quite poor. I only used it for Whatsapp, a few runs in Fun Run 2, a lot of Facebook and Messenger, light browsing with Chrome and some Instagram, all of which I do not consider to be really high power consumption apps.

User Experience

The vivo V5 features the usual microSIM and microSD tray which allows you to slot in a nanoSIM in place of the microSD if you want to have dual SIM functionality. Not my favorite configuration, but for some reason it is preferred by most brands over the true dual SIM support that the Honor 5X and OPPO F1s sport.

Holding the device, it feels quite heavy, which makes it feel pretty solid. The metal is finished a little too smoothly though, making it quite slippery to hold. If you are worried about it slipping out of your hands, there is always the included soft case for you.

The vivo V5 front mounted fingerprint sensor is solid state, meaning that it is not an actual button like on most other devices. It is also quite a fast one, unlocking the device nearly instantly after I placed my finger on it. The navigation keys are also backlit, quite a nice find after reviewing several devices that literally left me in the dark. The back button on the right is just wrong to me as most Android devices have it on the left. as per stock Android’s arrangement. Also, the vivo V5 comes with a menu key instead of the multitasking key. Menu keys are depreciated in most updated Android apps, which makes this inclusion quite puzzling.

vivo’s proprietary FuntouchOS is very different from stock Android, as I have mentioned in my review of the vivo V3Max previously. It looks more like iOS than Android. Quick settings are accessed with a swipe up from the bottom of the page, and the app switcher is found above the quick settings. This explains the missing multitasking key, but can get confusing if you are a first time vivo user. For the vivo V5, they have updated to Android 6.0 Marshmallow, but judging based on the responses given to vivo users asking about Android 6.0 availability for the vivo V3Max, the future of software updates for the vivo V5 seems rather bleak too. Still, vivo has been known to push out incremental updates despite not giving the big Android updates. Overall, the experience is quite smooth thanks to the loads of animations that take their own sweet time transitioning between apps but there are still quite a few moments of hesitation here and there when opening and switching between apps. The loads of animations also seem to really put a toll on the GPU which resulted in the weak battery life I got.

Moving on, the highlight of the vivo V5, the front camera, is decidedly more impressive than any smartphone I have ever used, going for a 20MP sensor behind f/2.0 lens. Heck, it even sports a higher resolution than most of the rear cameras on smartphones! Moving on to the rear camera, the vivo V5 shares what seems like the same camera as the vivo V3Max, a 13MP sensor with PDAF and a f/2.2 lens.

The UI of the camera is pretty basic, with a few modes and filters available. As a selfie-centric device, there are quite few adjustments to the beautification mode available. As expected, the beautification mode can get pretty aggressive if you want it to. To the point that my pockmarked face can be as smooth as a K-pop artiste’s. No joke.

The rear camera’s low light performance is definitely wanting, with some serious noise exhibited in the dark sky area in the shot I took out of my balcony. In bright day light as well as indoors, the camera performs well, as expected, but some noise control can be seen in the finer details when zooming into the photos taken indoors. Still, the images are more than adequate for social media use, which should be the main use of the vivo V5’s camera. The front camera definitely enhances my face beyond recognition, which may be a boon for selfies-fanatics. I really admire vivo’s work here though, as the smoothing is limited to the face area only, with the hair regions still kept very sharp with so much information from the 20MP sensor. Tapping the shutter in rapid succession, there is not much wait between each shots to speak of, which may please those who need a lot of selfies to finally scrutinize all of them and pick a single one to upload.

Well to scrutinize your selfies, you will need to use the screen, and while the colors of the 5.5″ IPS panel vivo put into the V5 are pretty vivid, great for checking out photos and watching videos, but the 720p resolution makes text-heavy applications look quite bad. I admit we have been spoilt by sharper 1080p displays, and I am not even talking about 1440p panels yet, but 720p in 2016 is just a disgrace.

The mono loudspeaker on the bottom is loud, but that is pretty much all it is good for. It sounds tinny, and bass definition is definitely lacking. Still, that is quite a common issue for most loudspeakers. It doesn’t distort even at maximum volume, which is definitely worthy of mention. Plugging in a pair of headphones allow you to make use of the dedicated AK4376 DAC for HiFi audio. The curiously named BBE mode with the equally curious naming of the multiple options available is also found in the music player, allowing you to tune the sound signature as you see fit.

Conclusion

The vivo V5 is an okay mid-range device but the RM1299 price tag makes me double check my non-existent selfie habit. If you compulsively take selfies everywhere you go, even in the dark, and demand the best front camera you can get, then yes, the vivo V5 is perfect for you. But if you don’t, there may be other devices in this price point that will satisfy you. The first that comes to mind is the vivo V3Max which packs a much more potent Snapdragon 652 under its hood, with a pretty similar design. In fact it is cheaper than the vivo V5 now with an updated SRP of RM1199. If you are not going to scrutinize your selfies, a device with a better processor is going to be a much better pick, as all recent devices actually have front cameras that are more than enough for the random selfie.