Today we will look at some of the biggest reasons why you should and shouldn’t buy the Vivo V5. First of all, what is the Vivo V5? The V5 is an aggressively priced mid-range Android device from new smartphone maker Vivo. The phone is manufactured in India, near the country’s capital, New Delhi. The phone is a beautiful piece of hardware with really great specs that make for a lot of good reasons to buy the phone. Let’s review them. The first and most compelling reason to get the Vivo V5 is that it’s sold as a selfie phone. That’s because it has a 13-megapixel camera on the back, but the front-facing camera is a whopping 20-megapixel and has a flash too. The front camera is a Sony unit, so you can be sure it’s a great camera and Vivo has also designed a lot of software for the V5, to help you take better selfies. In addition to the great front camera, the Vivo V5 has a beautifully designed and crafted metal body that is slim and feels great in the hand. It’s also a beautiful phone. To add to this, the V5 can accept up to two SIM cards, which is an important feature in Far Eastern markets, and it also has expandable memory via a microSD card slot that can accommodate up to a 128GB card.
Vivo also gives you a host of bundled accessories with the V5, which is unlike many of the competition that offer phones at very aggressive prices but skimp on accessories in the box. The V5 comes with a headset with a microphone and remote, a charger and data cable and even a Vivo V5 case for protection and a screen protector for the screen that has been applied to the phone at the factory. All of this means your Vivo phone is ready to go right out of the box, even if you haven’t yet purchased one of the many designer phone cases available. Some case manufacturers in countries like India even offer you the option to create a custom case for the Vivo V5, using your own photos or illustrations.
The drawbacks of the V5
The biggest reason why you probably shouldn’t buy the Vivo V5 is that it doesn’t come with stock Android. If you’re a fan of a stock or near-stock Android experience or expect your phone to receive frequent or timely OS updates, the V5 isn’t the phone for you. Vivo ships the V5 with a very skinny OS called FunTouch that you probably won’t like.
What’s even worse is that many months after Google has released the next version of Android; Nougat 7.0, the Vivo V5 still runs Marshmallow 6.0 under the hood. The fact that the OS looks so intense means that the chances of the Vivo V5 getting an update to the current version of Android are slim at best. The software version you get on the V5 is what you’re going to be stuck with as long as you have the phone.