Vivo X5 Pro first impressions: Designed to impress, but priced higher for specs!

Chinese smartphone makers have lately been creating waves in the Indian smartphone market, giving sleepless nights to not just the local vendors but also the top notch OEMs. Vivo is another Chinese brand eyeing to capture significant market share in India. The company entered India later last year, and has since then been trying to make some space for itself in the ecosystem. Working towards this, the company today launched its flagship Vivo X5 Pro in India, with an aim to see itself taking a step ahead and beating the competition in the market.

The Vivo X5 Pro phone combines good specs with a nicely done body and form factor, but is priced at a whopping Rs. 27,980, which can actually hinder the phone's sales, considering that market is flooded with comparatively lower-priced smartphones that boasts similar specifications. Vivo, however, justified the price by saying that the company is offering far better quality and promises a smoother over all experience than its competitors.

PROS

• Glass rear and front panels
• 4G support

CONS

• SD615 chipset
• high price

We had our hands on the Vivo X5 Pro for a short while, and here are our first impressions of the phone:

Design and display

A fleeting glance at the phone, and you would surely want to take a look back! The Vivo X5 Pro looks pretty good, despite it's being made mostly out of plastic. It features a premium-looking plastic chassis that combines a metal band running around the sides, and 2.5D glass on front and rear panels. The company claims that the phone measures in at 5mm. The thin body does add to its looks, and gives it a good grip in hand. As for its weight, it is pretty light to hold. It features a power on/ off key coupled with the volume rocker on the right side, and SIM tray placed on the left.

The top has a 3.5mm audio port, and the bottom comes with microUSB slot sandwiched between the speaker grille. Front comprises of a 5.2-inch Super AMOLED display with a resolution of 1080x1920 pixels and 2.5D glass on top, with a front-facing camera with LED flash, Vivo branding and capacitive keys. The rear panel shows off the camera and company's branding.

Despite the big size of the phone, we were pretty comfortable while operating it single-handedly. The display offers good visuals even at different viewing angles, and reproduces colours well. We took the phone out in sun, and found the display readable, despite glares. Over all, it is a well made smartphone.

Sadly, the Vivo X5 Pro runs on the 1st generation Snapdragon 615 64bit octa-core chipset clocked at 1.5GHz, which overheats and is not quite snappy for its configurations. Phones running on the chipset have been known for glitches and issues in the performance, and lagging. The processor is paired with 2GB of RAM, and 16GB of ROM which is expandable up to 128GB on microSD card.

Camera:

In the photography department, the phone sports a 13-megapixel rear camera with F/2.0, and an 8-megapixel front facing snapper. During our hands-on, the cameras on the Vivo X5 Pro snapped some good while some bad shots. This could be mainly due to the ambient lighting conditions, though we did take a few shots outdoors as well. We will give our final take on the camera of the phone after we review the phone.

The phone comes with Funtouch OS 2.1 skinned on top of the Android 5.0 Lollipop. The company's native UI brings gesture controls, and other features to enhance user experience. It also features Battery Stamina Mode which can be switched on to use the basic features when the battery of the phone is low or when required. The user interface looked nice and worked smoothly, though you may take a while to understand the UI.

The Vivo X5 Pro has been designed well, but does not boasts powerful specs to match its price, especially when its competitors are taken into account. Though we could not test the performance of the phone during the test, we are sure the processor on this one would be giving performance issues quite often. Also, considering that the Indian edition of the phone does not bring eye-scanner on board, we found its price way too high.