Vivo may be a brand that most, if not all, people in Western countries have never heard of, but this Chinese smartphone manufacturer is one of the most popular brands in its home country. Vivo also sells its Android smartphones in other countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia and has notable success in India, particularly due to a huge push offline. This offline push means more in a country like India than in Western countries because even with the world’s fastest growth rate in smartphone adoption, most Indians still buy their phones offline, in stores. physical retailers. Vivo is making a huge effort to sell phones like the Vivo V5 in stores. It’s doing this in large part by offering retailers a much larger reduction in the phone’s asking price. This gives retailers more room to discount the phone and increase sales. Or they can sell the phone at retail prices and make a much higher profit.

Sellers who normally make the most profit selling higher-margin items like smartphone cases and back covers for other phones can make a lot of money selling the V5 itself, and then make even more profit selling accessories like Vivo V5 covers. Though if you want a custom Vivo V5 case, you still have to buy it online from one of the many designer smartphone case sellers in the country.

But what about the V5 itself?

The Vivo V5 is by no means a bad smartphone, hardware-wise. It has pretty standard and competitive specs for an Android phone in its price range in 2017 and it has a good fit and finish to boot. The problem with Vivo, like almost every other unnamed Chinese smartphone, is that it has a terrible skin over the Android OS it runs. This is because the Chinese market apparently prefers skinned versions of Android.

However, anywhere else in the world, the most demanding users of Android smartphones would prefer that manufacturers put a clean and standard implementation of Android on their devices. However, this doesn’t happen and what you usually get is the kind of ugly, terrible, buggy interfaces, like the awfully named FunTouch™ OS with which Vivo handicaps the V5. This single decision makes the Vivo V5 a phone to avoid like the plague, no matter how popular it is.