Launching today, vivo’s new foldable smartphone has arrived in Malaysia with the vivo X Fold5. theSun spent several days with it and the foldable has proven itself to be very impressive, with almost no drawbacks.
At around 217g in weight, the vivo X Fold5 is quite light for a foldable in the current ecosystem, while its thickness is about 9.2mm while folded and 4.3mm once opened.
The cover and inner foldable screens are essentially the same LTPO Amoled displays with HDR10+ at 1,172 × 2,748 and 2,200 × 2,480 pixels, respectively. In other words, the screens are bright and colourful.
Better yet is the hinge itself. Unlike other foldables, the vivo X Fold5’s hinge feels great and looks, well, it can not even be seen. The crease for the hinge once opened is practically non-existent unless looked at from certain angles and lighting.
Multitasking muscle
Built largely for multitasking, the vivo X Fold5 runs on the slightly older Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset and 16GB RAM, but it is more than enough. Coupled with the Funtouch OS, everything that runs on the smartphone is quick and responsive.
The main draw for the foldable will be its multitasking capability once its screens are opened. For those that always run two apps at the same time can do with the split-screen option accessed from the non-obstructive small multitasking menu at the top.
But, the main reason that makes the vivo X Fold5 shine is the Origin Workbench. It enables users to run five concurrent apps or tasks on the same screen. The main takes the biggest chunk of the space, while the other four are grouped to the left. All apps run concurrently, remaining active and visible at all times, with users being able to swap freely between each with no lag.
Like most of the industry, vivo’s latest comes with AI capabilities.
Accessed by swiping the sidebar, its AI Captions helps transcribe spoken audio, whether in real life through the microphone or system playback of whatever video or audio is being played in the smartphone. Anything that is recognised and transcribed can also be summarised by AI.
Triple lens power
The vivo X Fold5 has a whopping number of five cameras. Two are standard 20MP “selfie cameras” and really not that great, but the real beauties are the smartphone’s three cameras co-engineered with Zeiss.
All three cameras are 50MP. The first is the main camera with a focal length of 23mm, the second is the ultra-wide angle camera at around 16mm and finally, the telephoto camera at 70mm focal length with 3× optical zoom up to 100× digital zoom.
Photos taken during the day with all three cameras look good at their preset focal lengths, but the further it goes, the digital zoom starts kicking in harder to do the heavy lifting. Even night time photos look very good.
In terms of videos, these cameras perform better. They support 4k video recording and come with image stabilisation, which is perfect for vlogging on the move. Having three screens further allows vivo X Fold5 to use a Rear HD Selfie mode to take videos (or pictures) with the smartphone opened up, as the cover screen becomes the preview screen.
Overall, the vivo X Fold5 is a great smartphone and will certainly make a big wave in the foldable market. On top of the cameras being good, its capability with the unfolded screen size and multitasking capabilities put it over the top.
