India is selfie territory. Indians seem to be the world’s greatest selfie takers, often putting life before safety all in the cause of a good selfie. But would we pay the asking price of a OnePlus 3, with its top notch specs, for some clicks?

I wouldn’t ordinarily have compared the Vivo V5 Plus with the OnePlus 3 or 3T. The two are aimed at different consumers. But the pricing of the new V5 Plus forces one to pit them against each other.

To look at, the V5 Plus is instantly recognisable as an iPhone rip-off. Try as they might, there’s always something just short of an Apple original on the Chinese phones, although they are pastmasters at copying the iPhone and selling the results as iPhones on their home turf. The metal back (pale gold in my case) is quite good looking and smooth matte finish with the Vivo logo looking classy enough in the middle.

On the front, it looks like all the other phones except for a rounded rectangular home button rimmed with gold. It has a lovely soft feel when pressed. Press twice and it’ll trigger the camera, which is the marquee feature of the device. All other specs are middling.

There’s a dual selfie camera on this phone: 20MP and 8MP. The idea of the two lenses is to get that blurred effect for the background and make it seem like a photo shot with a DSLR, though no phone camera really manages any such thing, to be honest.

The camera set takes reasonable selfies, bright and lit up, but a little soft and not always true to the actual tones. There’s a beauty mode to soften your skin, change tone, and whiten — which ends up whitening everything a little. A ‘moonlight’ flash lights up your face though I don’t like the unnatural effect at all. The rear camera is nice in daylight and bright indoors, but a little soft. You have to love yourself rather a lot to opt for a phone for just that one highlight feature, at a somewhat unreasonable price.

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