It’s selfie time again. And again and again. With the hordes of mobile phones entering the Android market, there’s an obvious struggle to find uniqueness and differentiation. Therefore — selfie it is. Vivo is sending its V5 smartphone all dressed up as a ‘perfect selfie’ phone. I have no doubt most human beings love seeing themselves in photographs, specially now that there are prescribed poses and pouts expressly for the purpose, but would anyone buy a phone purely on its selfie-ability? Vivo’s marketing folks certainly think so, which is why the front camera is a whole 20MP, quite possibly for the first time on a phone. But first, what does the phone look like? Like every other phone these days.
Two years ago, the design of the V5 would have been stunning. Soft gold, champagne tones, smooth metallic finish, beautiful lines, glinting logo — all quite pretty. Unfortunately, everyone seems to have adopted a similar look, with a few tweaks here and there. So, the V5 is essentially a nice looking and very solid phone, but now rather standard. Very neat, but where have I seen that before?
The specifications on the V5 for other than the camera, are less than impressive. The 720p display and the MediaTek 6750 processor are not what you’d expect to get for the price and are now passe. However, it has the essentials and actually performs fairly smoothly except for some jerkiness occasionally, on scrolling. This Android Marshmallow phone has Vivo’s interface on it and it’s an Apple rip-off with the app drawer banished and an iOS-style control centre that swipes up from the bottom. There’s a split-screen mode for multi-tasking, and a smattering of interface features. Oh, and a home button plus fingerprint sensor that works at rather high speed.
Unusually, the front camera on this phone is a 20MP f2.0 shooter while the rear camera is a 13MP one. The selfie camera boosts the ISO and lightens up the image rather a lot. I found the images tended to get overexposed or whited out quite often and lost out on details. But on the whole, they weren’t bad. You can use the camera app’s beauty mode to do some strange things to change your looks. A ‘smile’ voice command will trigger the shutter so you don’t shake it with pressing the volume button or reach out to touch-capture. There are a lot of filters to further give your selfies an aura. And of course, a ‘moonlight’ glow which is essentially a flash light that can be turned on to light your face up in dark places.
Price: ₹17,980
Love: Great home button, adequately smooth performance
Hate: Not enough value for money
(The article first appeared in BusinessLine.)