Vivo X5Pro review: Proficient

Albums is a rather basic gallery app

The vivo X5Pro 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 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 X5Pro

The vivo X5Pro 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 X5Pro 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 X5Pro 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 actual options for customizing them. 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.

Simplistic video player • pop-out mode

Audio player has headphone profiles

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. The smartphone comes with preinstalled sound profiles for a few headsets, one of them the bundled XE600i.

Browsing songs in the music app • dedicated sound profiles for a number of headphones

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

FM radio lacks RDS

Unlike other models of the company, the vivo X5Pro has an FM radio receiver. It's a very basic implementation and doesn't support RDS, so you need to enter station names manually.

FM radio is basic, but it's here

Solid audio output

The Vivo X5Pro did very well in our audio quality test. The smartphone combined perfect scores with a loud output around when used with an active external amplifier - not quite as impressive as the X5Max, but still better than most.

Plugging in a pair of headphones didn't drop the loudness - the X5Pro remained more than adequate here. Some stereo crosstalk crept in and an undetectable amount of intermodulation distortion, but the quality is still pretty solid .

Vivo X5Pro frequency response

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