Miami based smartphone maker BLU has been making great strides over the course of the last year. Known for its affordable set of smartphones, they’re continuing the trend with the BLU Vivo 5, which interestingly enough, is actually with its most premium design to date. Great hardware combined with an amazing price? This may be the budget Android phone you’ve been waiting for.

You can pick up the BLU Vivo 5 now.

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Video Transcript:

Miami based smartphone maker BLU has been making great strides over the course of the last year. Known for its affordable set of smartphones, they’re continuing the trend with the BLU Vivo 5, which interestingly enough, is actually with its most premium design to date. Great hardware combined with an amazing price? This may be the budget Android phone you’ve been waiting for. I’ll leave a link to the BLU Vivo 5 in the description box below.

Design
First, let’s start with the design. What you are looking at is the svelte unibody construction of the Vivo 5. It’s similar to what you’ve seen in the past with the Vivo Air, but instead of glass surfaces, it’s an all-metal body that lets you know that it’s premium from the moment you pick it up. The chamfered bevels and squared off shape are shades of the iPhone 5 & 5S line, and the nice thing here is that despite the great finish and metal design, the Vivo 5 is amazingly lightweight.

Display
The BLU Vivo 5 features a 5.5-inch 720x1280 Super AMOLED display. When all is considered with everything packed into this device for the price, it’s hard to complain about a 720p high definition display. Being Super AMOLED, you get the inky blacks, oversaturated colors, and wide viewing angles. The display looks great, and complements the rest of the phones design nicely.

Interface
The BLU Vivo 5 runs a skinned version of Android 5.1 Lollipop, and similar to other recent value-priced Android smartphones that we’ve been seeing lately, it does away with the app drawer, instead relying on homescreen paging for organization of app icons. All of the basic Android Lollipop functions are included here.

Processor and Memory
The device is powered by an 8-core 1.3GHz MediaTek 6753 processor, alongside the Mali-T720 GPU, and a whopping  3GB of RAM. For a $199 device, that amount of RAM definitely stands out, and that helps the Vivo 5 perform better than you’d expect it to when you consider its price tag. Most entry-level smartphones come in well below this benchmark.

As for as storage, you get 32GB right out of the box, which is generous since 16GB phones need to die. If that isn’t enough space for you, you can expand your storage space with a microSD card.

Camera
Entry-level smartphones typically struggle in the camera department, but BLU didn’t skimp in this area either, providing a 13 megapixel shooter that performs admirably. Don’t expect extras like optical image stabilization, but what you do get is a camera that can take really good shots, especially in well-lit environments.

On front, you get a 5 megapixel selfie camera with LED flash, which isn’t something you see every day.

Connectivity
As far as connectivity goes, the BLU Vivo 5 supports 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth 4.0, Mobile Hotspot, FM radio, and voice over LTE support. The charging port is USB-C, which is a cutting edge inclusion and something I highly appreciate. The batter is 3,150mAh, and is non-removable due to the unibody construction of the device.

You can pick up the BLU Vivo 5 right now on Amazon for $199 in either solid gold or white silver, and again, the link is in the description below.

That’s it for this first-look at the BLU Vivo 5 - go ahead and hit that Like button if you liked what you saw today, and don’t forget to hit the subscribe button to stay up on our newest videos reviews, unboxings, and gadget giveaways.

Let me know what you think of the BLU Vivo 5 - would you consider an inexpensive Android device that you can get for a couple hundred dollars without having to sign up for a contract from a major carrier? Leave a comment and I’ll meet you there for further discussion.

Thanks for watching guys - I’m Andru Edwards, and I’ll catch you in the next video.

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