vivo Xplay5 Elite review: Edging in

Phonebook

The phonebook app on the Vivo Xplay5 Elite 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.

The main interface is a well-organized list, with favorite contacts at the top, followed by an alphabetical rundown of the rest. Naturally, there is a search field, which accepts both names and numbers, as well as a vertical slider, along the letters to the right, for quick navigation. There are no contact pics on this screen though, with Vivo opting to fit more but thinner rows.

The contacts app • Viewing a contact • Smart dial • Call log • In-call interface

Adding a new contact is a pretty straightforward process. It begins by selecting where you would like to store the entry, or you can just set a default the first time you use it. The rest is fairly self-explanatory. 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

Our loudspeaker test put the Vivo Xplay5 Elite in the Average category in terms of loudness. We've seen Vivos perform better in this department, but even so the Elite does pack more bang than an iPhone 6s Plus. The OnePlus 3 is louder overall, though.

Text input

In terms of text input, the Vivo Xplay5 Elite comes with a custom keyboard solution. It has a ton of panes with symbols grouped by category and language, and there's also a 'recent' tab. There are emojis as well. We're not thrilled that the keyboard shows all capital letters all the time, so you need to pay close attention to the shift key to be sure that you're typing lowercase.

Custom Vivo keyboard

Other apps

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 Xplay5 and can influence general performance and power-management through different modes. It also offers black-lists for both calls and messages and has granular permissions controls since before it was cool.

iManager

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 possible too.

File manager

All the little tools are available too, including a calendar, notes app with doodle support, a sleek-looking compass and full scientific calculator.

Calendar • Notes • Compass • Calculator