I played on this newest smartphone from Vivo Philippines a few days before the official release. Now, it is time to reveal my assessment on the new Vivo V5 Lite
The Funtouch OS 3.0 based on Android 6.0 Marshmallow is already familiar to me based on my lil' hands-on of the V5 Plus at their launch early this year mainly of the squar-ish app icons and that double deck control buttons in their control center. The pulldown menu for notifications is set to gray color.
At normal light tasks like social media, calls and texts, the combo of Mediatek MT6750 octa-core processor, 3 GB RAM and 32 GB ROM is a-ok but I knew that this is a "lite" phone (compared to V5) as I encountered some choke situations like force close of Pokemon Go in versions 0.57.2 and 0.57.3 and little random stuck of non-apperance of third party keyboard (I used GBoard for this review for most of the time). I will get more of that in the gaming section
They have the same SoC as the V5. Happy to know that my calls, texts, WiFi connection, Bluetooth, GPS and mobile net worked fine to me.
Out of 32 GB internal memory, you will gonna get 23.24 GB on it's first boot
On gaming, I only had Asphalt 8 which will give you only a few frameskips but it is completely playable.
On benchmarks like what I shown in my latest Facebook live session at facebook.com/rntdblog , it scored at over 40,000 and Vivo did not made tipid on their number of working sensors at seven including the gyro sensor. Internal memory was supplied from Samsung and it has 10-point multi touch
On my video battery rundown test, Vivo V5 Lite survived at 13 hours and 40 minutes in low consumption mode. On my real time usage, the phone can do 5 hours of screen on time at 15% brighntess with 18 hours of mixed usage which is already impressive for me in the number of MT6750-powered handsets that I reviewed. It will heat only a bit on LTE on some gaming but not that much on WiFi and 3G browsing. Charging as expected a bit slow at 2 hours and 45 minutes with it's 5V 1A provided charger
Even without the HiFi chipset inside, Vivo V5 Lite also worked fine in the number of third-party earphones that I got.
Let's go on the camera. The main camera has 13 MP main camera with flash and 16 MP selfie camera with solftlight flash. On the first time, I though that the softlight flash had a bug but good thing, the guys from Vivo PH explained it to me. When the softlight flash is at auto mode, it will only gonna lit once the sensors detect that you are in a low light area. In case that you really need it, you need to set it at "on" mode.
On both cameras, the same number of options and filters of V5 are the same as to the V5 Lite. The main camera looks more than the average side of things on low light. Unlike on V5's selfie cam, you really need the patience to get a perfect shot. After you pushed the shutter button, you need to wait for around 1.75 seconds for the image processing time and have that steady hand to have a great result or you will gonna get a blurry pic. Double the time of it on HDR selfie mode. On HDR main camera set at auto, it was pretty fast for a midrange phone. Pro mode was also a-ok for it's given SoC and price tag
Vivo V5 Lite 13 MP main camera samples
Normal to HDR picture comparison
Vivo V5 Lite sample pro mode sample: ISO 54, shutter speed at 2 seconds
Vivo V5 Lite 16 MP selfie camera sample with 25% set on the fair side.
If you noticed that I had so much low light pics, you can check the indoor shots from my previous media coverage in full resolution here
On the cons, there's a few that I can see for now like the slow charging, the choke issues that we saw that I stated earlier and might be the slow image processing speed of the selfie camera. The pros are a lot for it's given price of Php 9,990 (versus the same priced OPPO A39 and it's direct competitor in all specs - the F1s 3 GB RAM variant) like the bigger and a-ok clarity of it's HD display, fast image processing speed and more than enough output of it's main camera, good audio output on 3.5 mm. jack, OTG and the build.
Vivo V5 Lite is definitely a good buy for me for Php 9,990 even if you will gonna miss the 1 GB more RAM and w/o the fingerprint reader of Vivo V5 but for Php 3,000 more. I will gonna rate 4 out of 5 for the Vivo V5 Lite
