vivo V5 review: The Oddball

Telephony and phonebook

The phonebook app on the vivo V5 is called Contacts and follows the general styling of the rest of the interface, meaning it's entirely custom. There are tabs, but unless you are big on groups, or want to jump to the dialer or to your personal info page all the time, chances are you won't be using them too often.

Dialer • Calling someone • phonebook • a single contact

Viewing a contact is done through a clean and well-arranged interface. All in all, Vivo has tried to keep things as simple and intuitive as possible.

Loudspeaker

The vivo V5 posted a Very Good score in our loudspeaker loudness test putting it ahead of pretty much all of its competitors. There is some distortion at maximum level depending on what you're playing, though.

Multimedia

The vivo V5 comes with a simple gallery. It consists of two tabs, one for your camera roll, the other for your various albums. Either way, you get a grid of thumbnails, four in a row. Hitting the search tool doubles the number of thumbs and groups them by month.

The Albums app is decent

Viewing a single image offers the usual basic options like cropping and rotation as well as a quick shortcut for sharing.

The vivo V5 comes with a dedicated video application. It offers a basic interface and few advanced features but gets the job done. The player itself does offer Hi-Fi support as well as DLNA and subtitles.

Very capable video player

As far as format support goes, the V5 didn't have any issues with playing every video we threw at it, be it DivX, XviD, MOV, WMV, MP4, MKV, including files with the typically problematic AC3 sound. It also has good support for subtitles, though no options for customizing them.

An interesting feature is the pop-out mode. It spawns a small draggable video window on top of the UI, but you can't resize it.

Audio player

The music player, bundled with Funtouch OS and curiously named iMusic, doesn't look overly impressive but is quite pleasant to use and has a few tricks hidden away.

The iMusic player is simplistic, but gets the job done

Launching the app brings you to a selection of quite a few browsing options. Songs can be browsed in various categories and playlists are easily accessible, for even more flexibility. The smartphone comes with preinstalled sound profiles for a few headsets.

The main playback interface consists of a backdrop of album art and a simple control pad. You get two toggles altogether, one for Repeat/Shuffle and another for switching on Hi-Fi mode, but it only works with headphones attached.

Finally, the vivo V5's big audio feature is its Hi-Fi prowess. The phone features AKM's 32-bit/192kHz AK4375 DAC. Provided you have the right headphones and the right source material, it could potentially allow you to play Hi Res Audio.

FM radio

The FM radio is a nice touch. Sure, you can stream with Play Music, but FM broadcasting is free and available at places where there might not be data connection. There are some limitations here. The Radio app is not able to record any radio broadcasts and it lacks RDS (the feature that displays the station name and other info).

FM radio app

Decent audio quality

The vivo V5 performs very well when hooked up to an active external amplifier. The smartphone posted excellent scores for clarity, and its volume was decently high.

Loudness dropped to just above average with headphones and stereo quality took a moderate hit. A tiny amount of intermodulation distortion crept in as well, but all in all, it’s still a decent showing.

vivo V5 frequency response

You can learn more about the tested parameters and the whole testing process here.