Vivo X5Pro review: Proficient

A couple of browsers

The vivo X5Pro comes with Google Chrome as well as a custom browser. Its interface definitely looks nice, and like everything else in Funtouch, fits well into the general design outline. The tab selection interface is similar to a desktop browser and eats away screen estate, so it's great that it can be hidden with a toggle in the bottom left corner. The handy text mode will help cut down on data traffic, while night mode will reduce strain on your eyes in dark environments.

Built-in browser

vivo has also included Google Chrome in the mix. It is becoming the most popular mobile browser and should be fairly familiar. Thanks to your Google account, Chrome can sync the tabs you have open on other devices (desktops, tablets) with the phone. This feature also syncs your bookmarks and favorite sites and can remember passwords and login data across different platforms.

Google Chrome

Other pre-installed apps

Vivo has kept things pretty clean in terms of preloaded applications and, besides the nowadays obligatory Google suite, there is quite little preloaded software. Also, the things that are included in the mix are generally well executed, nicely styled and even, quite convenient.

First up, Funtouch OS has an amazing central management hub, called iManager. It is designed to keep your phone in top shape and generally does a pretty good job of it. It can clean your RAM and storage on request and naturally manage applications.

But the software goes beyond this and is quite clever. For one, it has access to some advanced hardware features on the X5Pro and can influence general performance and power-management through different modes. It also offers black-lists for both calls and messages and can even protect you from pesky applications. Once it detects that a certain app is requesting a permission it dubs kind of intrusive, it warns you with a popup.

iManager app is pretty powerful

The vivo X5Pro comes with WPS Office preinstalled. It's a pretty powerful office editor that can handle Word docs, PDFs, Spreadsheets and Presentations. It can link to cloud storage, email files, and create a shared view with other users and more. There's editing enabled, too, so you can get some work done on the go, if need be.

WPS office

Most of the other bundled apps have nothing really spectacular to offer, except, perhaps, slick looks. The calendar is straightforward. It can seamlessly sync with your google account and naturally has events, reminders and all of the standard week, month and daily views, but also a year view.

Pretty calandar app

Moving on, we find that the feature-rich notes app. Entries can contain multimedia, as well as reminders, which get automatically entered into your calendar. The app even lets you doodle on screen for a quick note.

Feature-rich notes application

Other things that deserve a mention are the sound recorder and the calculator, which has a nice scientific view in landscape.

Sound recorder • calculator

The clock app has all the functionality you would expect. You can have multiple alarms each with its own repeat schedule, ringtone and snooze settings. A handy feature can alert a contact of your choice, should you ignore you alarm more than 5 times. There's also a world clock, a stopwatch and a countdown timer.

Clock app has a snooze function with a twist

The phone comes with a very intuitive file manager. It automatically groups things according to type, but also allows traditional folder browsing, as well as searching. Multiple file operations are now possible too.

Straight-forward file manager