vivo V5 Plus review: iPhone impersonator, bokeh king

Albums is one basic gallery app

The vivo V5 Plus comes with a rather minimalist gallery app, dubbed Albums. It consists of two tabs, one for your camera roll, the other for your various albums (yes). Either way, you get a grid of thumbnails, four in a row.

The main gallery interface is simple

A quite powerful editor is on board too allowing you to tweak photos straight from the gallery. Features range 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 full-featured, though

Video player

The V5 Plus' dedicated video app has a basic interface but offers independent brightness control, DLNA connectivity, and a pop-up windowed view.

Simplistic video player • pop-out mode

iMusic, hmm

Continuing the iOS references, the music player is called iMusic (that's been its name for while on vivo phones). It's nothing special, but will do a fine job of playing your local music - no streaming, though. 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.

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. There's a handy timer that will stop playback after a pre-determined amount of time, and it can even power off the device.

Standard now-playing interface • music controls in the notification shade and lockscreen

Audio output is nicely loud, decently clear

The vivo V5 Plus did great when hooked up to an active external amplifier. The smartphone posted excellent scores for clarity and its volume was nicely high.

Loudness remained very good even with headphones, although stereo quality took a moderate hit. Some intermodulation distortion crept in as well, but it isn’t something you’ll detect in everyday usage. All in all a pretty solid showing by the V5 Plus here.

Test	Frequency response	Noise level	Dynamic range	THD	IMD + Noise	Stereo crosstalk
vvo V5 Plus	+0.03, -0.20	-92.0	92.8	0.0020	0.0072	-88.5
vivo V5 Plus (headphones attached)	+0.24, -0.14	-91.0	91.6	0.0080	0.219	-56.0
Motorola Moto Z Play	+0.04, -0.02	-93.0	93.1	0.0018	0.0085	-93.8
Motorola Moto Z Play (headphones attached)	+0.05, -0.02	-92.7	92.8	0.0023	0.054	-52.4
Oppo R9s	+0.01, -0.02	-93.3	93.2	0.0010	0.0070	-93.5
Oppo R9s (headphones attached)	+0.19, -0.35	-92.3	92.2	0.0098	0.295	-58.3
Meizu MX6	+0.10, -0.03	-94.2	94.0	0.0019	0.0064	-89.3
Meizu MX6 (headphones attached)	+0.30, -0.07	-92.5	93.0	0.810	0.271	-31.3
Asus Zenfone 3	+0.03, -0.30	-86.6	83.6	0.0017	0.049	-91.1
Asus Zenfone 3 (headphones attached)	+0.06, -0.03	-92.4	92.4	0.0018	0.021	-88.2
Xiaomi Mi 5s	+0.01, -0.03	-89.6	90.2	0.0029	0.040	-85.5
Xiaomi Mi 5s (headphones)	+0.71, -0.31	-82.9	84.8	0.229	0.559	-48.0
ZTE Axon 7	+0.06, -0.10	-92.4	92.3	0.0015	0.0093	-80.9
ZTE Axon 7 (headphones attached)	+0.03, -0.11	-92.3	92.3	0.0011	0.012	-77.0

vivo V5 Plus frequency response

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