vivo V5 Plus review: iPhone impersonator, bokeh king

Phonebook

The phonebook app on the vivo V5 Plus is called Contacts and follows the general styling of the rest of the interface (iOS in other words). 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 your 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 with 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 • In-call interface

Loudspeaker

The vivo V5 Plus posted a Very Good score in our loudspeaker loudness test putting it ahead of pretty much all of its competitors. There is some distortion at maximum level depending on what you're playing, though, but if you are only interested in loudness, this phone will deliver.

Text input

For text input, the vivo V5 Plus comes with a custom keyboard solution, courtesy of TouchPal. 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 keyboard