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The selfie craze has been around for long now. Many people prefer to use smartphones to click photos instead of DSLR cameras. Keeping in mind the demand for camera-focussed smartphones, brands such as Vivo, Oppo and Gionee have launched a whole series of selfie-centric phones. Talking specifically about Vivo, their V-Series smartphones are quite popular and are equipped with their 20MP Moonlight camera. The newly introduced Vivo V5s is the company’s third selfie phone. Priced at just at Rs. 17,990*, it also comes with improved hardware, attractive design and a decent hardware set.
Highlights
Display: 5.5-inch HD display
Processor: MediaTek MT6750 (octa-core) clocked at 1.5 GHz
RAM: 4GB
Storage: 64GB internal (Expandable up to 256GB)
Camera: Front 20 MP/ Rear 13MP
Battery: 3,000 mAh
Design and Build
In terms of design, the Vivo V5s is identical to its predecessors, the V5 and the V5 Plus. There is nothing very different. The screen size, curve design, camera placement are all similar. The phone is equipped with a 5.5-inch display. On the top is the camera lens with an earpiece and a LED flash on the side. Vivo calls it the Moonlight Glow flash.
The phone is slim but not slippery. A thin metal strip runs along the sides giving it a premium look. There is a fingerprint sensor at the center. Looking at the back, the phone comes with a metal body. The construction is strong and sturdy. There are two thick antenna lines on the top and bottom edges that look similar to those on the iPhone 7. On the top is the camera lens and a LED flash. Just below at the center, is the brand name ‘VIVO’ engraved on the panel.
There is a SIM tray on the left whereas the right side is equipped with the volume controls and a power button. There is a headphone jack, a USB 2.0 port and a small speaker grill placed at the bottom. The phone weighs 154g which is pretty light and fits in the pocket easily. The Vivo V5s is available in three colour variants - crown gold, matte black and energetic blue.
Features
The Vivo V5s has a 5.5-inch HD display that sports a resolution of 1280 x 720. The screen is large enough for multi-tasking, playing games, reading, etc. It is powered by MediaTek MT6750 quad-core processor and 4GB of RAM. This should ensure good performance. The V5s runs on Funtouch OS 3.0 based on Android 6.0 (Marshmallow). We were hoping for a newer version of Android OS on the V5s. Vivo has not confirmed an OS update for this phone either. The phone comes with a 3,000 mAh non-removable battery. This should last a day if you are going to use this phone for playing games, listening to music and chatting. There is also a low power mode that should help reduce battery drain when you need it.
The highlighted feature of the Vivo V5s is its selfie camera. The smartphone sports a 20MP front camera with an aperture of f/2.0 while the 13MP rear camera has an aperture f/2.2. The higher aperture number means you get detailed pictures with bright colours in low light. Also, the phone supports full HD video recording. In terms of storage, the Vivo V5s comes with 64GB of internal storage, which is expandable up to 256GB using a microSD card. The internal storage itself is sufficient to store a ton of movies, music, photos and more.
Another interesting feature is the fingerprint sensor. Besides using a traditional password or pattern lock, you can also register your fingerprint to unlock the phone. There is a button placed right below the display, which acts as a fingerprint sensor. The V5s is a 4G VoLTE phone, so you can make high-quality voice and video calls on compatible networks. The Vivo V5s comes with a hybrid SIM slot so you can’t use two SIM cards at a time if you want to use a memory card for additional storage. Other connectivity options include Bluetooth 4.0, Wi-Fi, OTG and OTG means you can connect a USB drive, keyboard, mouse or a gamepad to the phone.
There are a few additional features that includes the Smart Split feature which lets you run two apps on the screen at once. There are very few supported apps such as Facebook, Messages, Whatsapp, YouTube, VLC, MX Player, the inbuilt video player and WeChat. For example, you can reply to messages on Whatsapp while watching YouTube videos.
Another feature called One-handed lets you shrink the display size so you can control the smartphone using just a finger. There is a Vivo app store with addition to the Google Play Store. You get access to thousands of apps to choose from. To keep your personal and professional life separate, you can even duplicate apps with the App Clone feature. This feature currently supports Whatsapp, BBM, WeChat and Zalo. This way, you can login with two different accounts on any of these supported apps.
Performance
To test the performance of the Vivo V5s, we ran several tests from basic tasks such as browsing, chatting, gaming, etc. to more complex ones. The 3D Mark gaming benchmark scored 5162, which is a decent score and confirms that the phone is good for gaming. The AnTuTu benchmark listed an overall score of 38,340 after testing several tasks of this phone.
Besides this, we ran two processor intensive benchmark called Quadrant Standard and GeekBench. Quadrant Standard earned a decent score of 3518. Another processor intensive benchmark, GeekBench runs a series of tasks. It earned 603 in the single-core test and 2538 in the multi-core test, which is the average score.
We performed web browsing with 10 tabs opened in Chrome, used social media apps such as Facebook, Whatsapp and Twitter, played games such as Asphalt Street Storm, Super Mario and Online Ludo King. We didn’t notice any problems performing these tasks. Considering the scores earned and the tasks performed, the Vivo V5s was good at running graphic intensive games and heavy browsing. The 5.5-inch screen is large and bright. The phone has HD resolution and would have been full HD at the given price.
The major highlight of the Vivo V5s is its Selfie camera. The Camera app has various modes such as HDR, Bokeh, Face Beauty and Panorama. On the right top is the Settings menu that lets you tweak settings the front-camera settings. Besides this, there are five different filters and other editing options to make photos look better.
The V5s clicked decent photos. Colours were bright and natural, but not very detailed. The rear camera’s interface gives you access to Night, Ultra HD, PPT, Professional, Slow and Timelapse modes. Clicking on the professional mode, you get access to the ISO control panel. This helps in clicking good photos. We clicked several photos with the back camera. Images captured had visible sensor noise and they didn’t look very impressive. The Vivo V5s shoots full HD videos with its 20MP primary camera. There aren’t any additional settings besides choosing the size of a video. Videos recorded were pretty average in quality and nothing extraordinary. Video playback is decent. We didn’t notice any performance lag here.
Talking about the touchscreen of this phone, it is accurate and responsive. Another feature is the fingerprint sensor that is placed right below the display. You can register 5 fingerprints. The gaming experience was good. We played games such as Asphalt Street Storm and Super Mario. After half an hour of continues gaming, the phone started heating up a bit though.
The Funtouch OS 3.0 UI of the Vivo V5s looks a lot like iOS. Many of the icons, app folders and animations look similar. The app drawer is absent here and you’ll find that the apps you install all appear on the home screen. The phone has many pre-installed apps which are all sufficient to get you started the moment you get the phone out of the box.
Verdict
All things said, the Vivo V5s is a good phone. It comes with a large display and a metal body. The fast and accurate fingerprint sensor, the selfie camera and a rather long battery life are all things to like. The responsive OS makes this phone very appealing too. Vivo hasn’t made any major changes in terms of its design and it looks a lot like the Vivo V5. There aren’t many changes made to its hardware either. That’s not a bad thing either, which makes it really easy to recommend the Vivo V5s.
