Vivo V5s First Impressions: Refreshed Design, Double Storage

Pushing the selfie envelope further, Vivo today added Vivo V5s to its ever expanding selfie arsenal. While the Vivo Y66 is meant to serve as the low-cost ‘Perfect Selfie’ option, the V5 Plus (Review) is meant to cater to premium phone buyers. And the Vivo V5s is an attempt to keep the winning selfie formula relevant for a tad longer.

Yes, the new V5s retouches and embellishes Vivo’s bestselling selfie phone, the Vivo V5 (Review) and will rather act as its replacement for the time to come.

Also Read: Reasons To Buy And To Not Buy The Moto G5 Plus

Vivo V5s Specifications and Price

Refreshed Design and Software

The design makes for the most conspicuous difference between the Vivo V5 and V5s and is largely what shall justify its existence. The V5s shares design semblance with the top-end Vivo V5 Plus. On the rear, there are no plastic trimmings at the top and bottom. It’s metallic (the V5 was plastic) and has U-shaped antenna bands on top and bottom. These bands, though have unabashedly been lifted from current generation iPhone, should give the impression of being a bit more inventive to quotidian buyers. And they also

It’s overall a very slim and neat looking phone with curved rear edges for handy grip and an aesthetically appealing 2.5D glass on the front.

Apart from the outer casing, the software on Vivo V5 gets a facelift too. During our initial examination, we didn’t find it to be radically different than the FunTouch OS 2.6 that we are familiar with but there are a few more features like, say, the Clone App that allows you to keep duplicates of apps like WhatsApp and FB logged in with different accounts.

Sticks to its selfie guns

As its USP, the phone brandishes a 20MP front camera that’s also paired with a moonlight flash and selfie-friendly software. Apart from the usual beautify settings, this one also adds a Groupfie mode that lets you click and scan more area to the left and right of the originally composed frame in order to broaden the canvas. We will have more to say on how well the selfie camera and the Group selfie feature performs after our full review treatment.

Performance Expectations

The overall Vivo V5 experience was well ahead of what the hardware specifications suggested. The not so powerful chipset proved good enough to drive well-optimized software for all moderate and basic users. The fingerprint sensor was extremely fast and the display reproduces punchy (though not accurate) colors even when it wasn’t full HD crisp. And that’s what we are expecting from Vivo V5s in terms of performance as of now.

We would have liked to see an upgraded SoC, but then again this is a chip that Vivo can control well (as was evident with V5 performance). It might very well suffice for moderate users who don’t intend to push their handsets to their limits.

It’s worth mentioning that Vivo has also increased native storage from 32GB to 64GB for the V5s and that should help maintain the performance in the long run, especially for heavy users.

An incremental upgrade?

Well, the design refresh is in no way an insignificant add-on, but yes we can see why Vivo V5s will be viewed as an incremental update. The Vivo V5s is certainly one of the best looking phones under 20,000 INR, and could very well qualify as a decent phone for moderate users who would prefer to buy from offline retail stores.

Also Read: Oppo F3 Plus Or Vivo V5 Plus – The Dual Selfie Dilemma

Vivo V5s Photo Gallery