Vivo V5 Plus First Impression: A Charming Dual Selfie Camera Phone

Dual camera phones are much in vogue these days and Vivo sagaciously introduces this trending feature to the front of their India flagship – the Vivo V5 Plus.

Priced at 27, 980 INR, the new Vivo flagship might appear a bit overpriced, and you might argue that a certain disruptive Chinese online company is offering the same chipset for less than half the price, but that would be an unfair assessment of Vivo’s new offering. The overall Smartphone experience and how content you shall remain with it simply can’t be judged based on raw, often beguiling, hardware specifications.

Vivo V5 Plus Specifications and India Price

Design and Display

The V5 Plus doesn’t stray far from what can be termed as the conventional Vivo design, but Vivo’s engineering and numerous subtle improvements over the V5 lend it a slick, premium feel.

It flaunts a true unibody metal construction, and by true we mean that there are no plastic caps on top and bottom. Instead, Antenna lines have been housed in ‘U Antenna bands’ running on top and bottom, a motif blatantly lifted off the iPhone 7.  Its slim profile (7.26mm thick) makes it pleasant to hold in hands, but the downside is that the rear camera module juts out a bit – something a regular case should even out.

The bezels around the 5.5-inch Full HD display are quite narrow and that helps with reducing the overall Vivo V5 footprint. The display is layered with 2.5D Gorilla Glass 5 that curves around the edges. The home button bellow the display integrates a fingerprint sensor (that is blazing fast) and above it, you will spot a combination of 20MP +8MP selfie snappers.

Vivo’s charm did work on us and we quite liked how the Vivo V5 Plus looked and felt in hands.

Bokeh Selfies

Now, if you are spending 28K on a phone, you would most definitely not want to compromise with the camera. While we are not writing off the rear camera (Honestly, we will need to spend more time with it before we formulate any sort of opinion), V5 Plus’s expertise lies with capturing selfies.

The dual camera arrangement works same as the SLR mode in Honor 6X of Coolpad Cool 1 Dual. The extra shooter is used to sense the depth of objects in the image frame or to distinguish between primary subjects and backdrop.

Just double click the home button to fire the camera app, and switch to the Bokeh mode. Here you can tap on the selfie subject, which is your face more often than not, and set the false aperture with the help of a slider. You can choose to defocus the background or the foreground before or after shooting the image.

In our initial testing, the selfie camera worked great in low indoor lighting, but we would still like to test how well it holds in a well-lit environment. Especially since the Vivo V5 had a tendency of over exposing the selfie image backdrop.

Considering the mad, incessant selfie frenzy that we can’t seem to miss whichever way we turn our head, I guess the Bokeh selfie phenomenon could be a massive hit among young consumers.

Also Read: Honor 6X Vs Coolpad Cool 1 Dual Camera Shootout – Battle For Budget Snapper Supremacy

Performance Expectations

On the inside, Vivo V5 Plus is powered by the power-efficient 14nm FinFET process based Snapdragon 625 chipset, which is all of a sudden very popular in Tech corridors these days. The chipset is paired with 4GB RAM and 64GB storage (no MicroSD card slot) which should be optimum for the targeted audience.

The software is Android Marshmallow based Funtouch OS.  Other manufacturers are offering more advanced chipsets and More RAM for the same price, but then again the V5 Plus might just be perfectly adequate to satiate performance demands of regular consumers.

UI transitions felt extremely fast on the hands-on unit that we examined, but we will have more to say about the Vivo V5 Plus performance after our full review.

The 3160mAh battery inside supports fast charging. And since the Snapdragon 625 has proved to be quite power efficient thus far, you can expect more than a days worth of battery mileage from V5 Plus. Other notable features include 4G LTE, WiFi 802.11 ac (2.4 GHz + 5 GHz), Bluetooth 4.2, GPS and HiFi audio.

Vivo V5 Plus Photo Gallery

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

First Impression

All offline phones (Gionee, Vivo, Oppo) feel overpriced at launch and still manage to find takers. If you can look beyond specifications, the Vivo V5 Plus seems to make a compelling case for itself. It is well equipped to relay premium smartphone experience to consumers who are passionate about selfies and who prefer buying offline. We will we testing in further and shall share our findings soon in our full review.