Whether or not some people want to admit it, selfies are incredibly popular these days and we're seeing more smartphone OEMs leveraging this customer base. Vivo recently launched the Vivo X7 Plus (with Android 5.1 Lollipop for some reason), but it did feature a 16MP cameras on the front and back of the phone. Many people have praised this device for the photo quality of its front-facing camera, so now Vivo wants to capitalize on this segment yet again.

The Vivo V5 has what the company is calling a 20MP Moonlight Camera on the front of the phone. This is actually the Sony IMX376 1/2.78” camera sensor that has a bright bright f/2.0 aperture. They've also equipped the phone with a front-facing LED flash as well. It's quite rare for a smartphone to have a selfie camera with that many megapixels. Instead of putting this same camera on the back though, Vivo opted to include a 13MP sensor with Phase Detection AF.

Aside from the 4GB of RAM, the rest of this phone falls into the mid-range category. We see the Vivo V5 has a 5.5" 720p IPS LCD Gorilla Glass 2.5D display, an unnamed 64-bit octa-core SoC, 32GB of internal storage, microSD card slot, an AK4346 Hi-Fi audio chip, a 3,000mAh capacity battery, and Funtouch OS 2.6 installed on the phone out of the box (which is based on Android 6.0 Marshmallow). It has a metallic unibody design and will be available in Crown Gold as well as Grey.

The V5 from Vivo will have 2G GSM connectivity on bands 2, 3, 5 and 8; 3G WCDMA connectivity on bands 1, 5 and 8; and 4G LTE connectivity on bands 1, 3, 5 and 40. We are told that pricing for customers in India will be INR 17,980 (which equates to about $265/€245), and it will be made available to the public on November 26th.

The reason this phone is interesting is that it signals that OEMs are likely to keep experimenting with better front cameras owing to the reception and success of such phones. More Indian OEMs are likely to follow suit with their own selfie-focused releases, a move which in turn has the potential of influencing the smartphone market through ripple effects.

Source: Vivo