vivo Xplay5 Elite review: Edging in

The basic gallery app is called Albums

The Vivo Xplay5 Elite 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.

The Vivo Xplay5 Elite 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 Xplay5 Elite 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.

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.

Audio output excellently clean

The vivo Xplay5 Elite showed perfectly clean output when hooked to an active external amplifier. The smartphone achieved great marks and had no weak points to its performance, outside of the only average volume.

Adding headphones to the equation doesn’t change too much with the smartphone still producing some of the cleanest output we’ve seen. Loudness failed to impress once more, but it wasn’t too bad either and all things considered it’s an excellent showing by the curved flagship.

And now here go the results so you can do your comparison.

vivo Xplay5 Elite frequency response

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