Vivo X5Max review: Asian shadow

Gallery is called Album

The vivo X5Max comes with a simple gallery, but it doesn't leave you wanting for features. Launching the app brings you to a timeline interface of your photos and if you don't fancy this, you can easily switch to a folder-browsing mode. There are also albums, which the user can organize. More albums can easily be created, but the cover selection is quite limited and there is no apparent way to create or download new ones.

The main gallery interface is simple

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

Viewing images on the vivo

The vivo X5Max allows you to edit photos straight from the gallery. The editor itself is packed with features, ranging from trivial cropping and effects all the way up to fine-tuning colors, shadows, exposure and applying different blurs. It is definitely more than enough for quickly fixing up a photo before uploading it online.

The image editor is surprisingly rich in options

Video player

The vivo X5Max comes with a dedicated video application. It offers a quite basic interface and few advanced features, but definitely gets the job done. The player itself does offer Hi-Fi support as well as DLNA and subtitles.

As far as format support goes, the X5Max 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 not actual option for customizing them.

Simplistic video player

Another 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.

Convenient pop-out mode

Nice audio player

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

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.

Browsing songs in the music app

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.

Standard now-playing interface • music controls in the notification shade and lockscreen

Vivo has thrown another little treat in the music application. It is a simple timer, but one that is tied to your music player. With it, you can easily fall asleep to your favorite jams, without worrying about draining your battery overnight. It can even power-down the device completely, once the deadline is reached.

Sleep mode

Impressive audio output

The Vivo X5Max turned out an amazingly talented musician, acing our audio quality test. The smartphone combined perfect scores with the loudest output around when used with an active external amplifier and really got a flying start.

Plugging in a pair of headphones didn't drop the loudness either - the X5Max still remained as loud as we've seen. A miniscule amount of stereo crosstalk crept in and an undetectable amount of intermodulation distortion, but the quality is still very much spotless.

An impressive showing by the slim Vivo champion indeed and one every handset on the market, let alone its price range, would be proud off.

Vivo X5Max frequency response

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