Vivo Xplay 5 Hands-on, First Impressions

Released last March, the more premium Vivo Xplay 5 has been making the rounds in China. We got a really quick hands-on time with the device yesterday during the launch of the Vivo V3 and V3 Max from one of the Chinese representatives of the company.

Right off the bat, one could quickly mistake the looks of the Vivo Xplay 5 as the Galaxy S7 Edge due to that double curved edges. Turn it on its back and it looks like an iPhone 6S. Despite those similarities, the Xplay 5 manages to impress us with its great build quality and massive hardware configurations.

There are two variants of the Xplay 5 — the standard version runs on a Snapdragon 652 octa-core processor with 4GB of RAM and 128GB internal storage and the Elite Edition which comes with a Snapdragon 820 chip, 128GB of storage and 6GB of RAM. The latter is the single biggest reason why the Vivo Xplay 5 got its reputation — it’s the world’s first smartphone with 6GB of RAM.

What we managed to play with yesterday is the standard version which, by the way, is indistinguishable from the Elite Edition since both have the same external features starting with the 5.42-inch Super AMOLED Quad HD display in a curved Corning Gorilla Glass 4 panel that stretches on the entire surface.

The power button and volume controls are on the right while the dual-SIM card slot is on the left. The 3.5mm audio port is up top while the microUSB charging port is down below along with the speakers.

The Xplay 5 uses a Funtouch OS 2.5 which is a custom skin based on Android 5.1 Lollipop. It has a flat design with no app drawer to speak of and even the shortcut window pulls up from the bottom of the screen just like on iOS. The UI is simple and straightforward though the unit we saw had a lot of native Chinese apps in it.

The device uses the same Sony IMX 298 sensor as the Xiaomi Mi 5 and the Huawei Mate 8 with an f2.0 aperture. Based on the samples we saw and the ones we saw from the other handsets, it’s a pretty good camera.

Vivo Xplay5 specifications:
5.43-inch Super AMOLED QHD display @ 2560 x 1440 resolution
Gorilla Glass 4
Qualcomm MSM8976 Snapdragon 652 octa-core chipset
4 x 1.8 GHz Cortex-A72, 4 x 1.4 GHz Cortex-A53
Adreno 510 GPU
4GB RAM
128GB internal storage
16MP rear camera with Sony IMX298 sensor, f/2.0, PDAF, and dual-tone LED flash
8MP f/2.4 front camera
Dual-SIM
LTE Cat 12
HiFi 3.0
Fingerprint scanner
GPS with aGPS
3,600mAh battery
Funtouch OS 2.5 (Android 5.1 Lollipop)
153.5 x 76.2 x 7.6 mm
167.8 grams

Vivo representatives communicated that they don’t have any plans of bringing the Vivo Xplay 5 in the Philippines at the moment. They felt the $600PHP 35,211INR 50,850EUR 571CNY 4,367 price tag might be too much for our local market considering they still don’t have much brand equity in the Philippines.