OPPO Find X5 review – Balanced Premium Experience at the Right Price

OPPO gained a lot of traction around these parts in the last two years. OPPO have mostly done so with phones that filled a gap left by the other Chinese company that did well-made devices at eye-catching prices. Devices like Reno 4 Pro, Find X3 Pro and Find X3 Neo featured eye-catching designs with flawless build quality some neat USPs. OPPO Find X5 follows the same trend featuring a gorgeous but solid form and some of its big brother’s best features.

Erudite Design

OPPO’s previous flagship range featured an ultra-matte rear glass cover that boldly resisted fingerprints and featured a sweeping curve mating the camera island with the rear body seamlessly.

Read more: OPPO Enco X wireless earphones review – Sound Quality Competes

For OPPO Find X5, that flowing curve remains but it meets at an interesting irregular quadragon. The rounded corners ease the odd shape into its place while a lip around the camera island frames it quite strikingly against the highly frosted glass rear of the device.

This frosted rear is fine, almost silken to the touch, yet glistens as it reflects flecks and specks of light.

The outer aluminium frame is a polished black to match our review model’s overall shade. This contrast is beautiful and another of the details that brings out that centrepiece rear glass.

The OPPO and Hasselblad logos stand out in a frosted light grey on our black review model and break up the sea of starry black.

The macro design is reminiscent of Huawei P40 Pro which featured a light-distorting rear frosted glass with a polished aluminum outer frame that offered a striking contrast.

OPPO Find X5 updates that design language. The asymmetric island shape and the lip surrounding it are bold. Yet Find X5’s imaging arrangement is built into our black review model more harmoniously than the sharper contrast and defined lines of the P40 Pro’s camera bump.

The contrast of the polished metal of the edges has similarly been toned down on OPPO’s design with their colour matching of the two materials.

Solid Investment

The aesthetic quality is matched by its build. The device is around 8.7mm thick and just a touch under 200 grams. It’s dense with a solid feel to it. The aforementioned rear glass offers a wonderful sensory disconnect as the visually rough surface isn’t matched by the soft and smooth feel of the material.

The device wraps smoothly around its vertical axis. The rear glass meets it’s smooth and polished outer frame without a border or kink. Save for a pre-installed screen protector it does the same around the front.

The mildly rounded top and bottom edges lend a pleasing symmetry and, pun somewhat intended, round a device that feels as much as looks like a piece of industrial art.

The case included with the device matched your device’s colour, like with our unrepentantly beautiful blue Find X3 Pro.

This is a marvellous attention to detail with the matte-black case offering protection out of the box whilst not cheapening the device with the customary clear rubbery sock.

One area where a little more reassurance would have gone a long way is an IPx rating. While the device wears some weatherproofing in the form of a gasket on the dual-SIM tray, it lacks any formal certification for splash or dust resistance.

World of Colour

OPPO Find X5 sports a 6.55″ AMOLED display with a maximum refresh rate of 120Hz. It runs 10-bit colour and can beam over billion colours. The typical max. brightness of 800nits is quite dazzling as it the implementation of HDR.

The colours pop a little too much in the default ‘vivid’ mode for my liking but the ‘natural mode’ is stunning. OPPO’s use of natural palettes in image processing features is quite comprehensive.

They include software options to even out skin tones in on-screen image and video as well as during captures thanks to their Hasselblad collab but more on that in the appropriate section below.

Smooth OPPOrater

In spite of, or possibly because of, its 2021 chipset, OPPO Find X5 is a suitably premium slick experience in use. The Snapdragon 888 5G is a tried-and-trusted chipset that has all of its bugs ironed out and most of its corners well explored.

The upper-market Pro model sports the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 which, on paper, is a more efficient and more capable setup, it isn’t readily apparent in benchmarks. The elder 888 platform still beats the new chip at high-end gaming or other demanding GPU work.

This will change, of course, the 2022 chip will eventually beat the 2021 model and the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 will last you longer. But it’s worth noting that for now, Find X5 isn’t a lesser performer than Pro despite its price.

Camera All-Rounder

OPPO once again went with a dual-prime lens on Find X5. Using the same lens for both wide and ultra-wide guarantees better consistency across images when it comes to colour and contrast.

In practice, the large lenses deliver a bright and detailed image in practically all circumstances.

OPPO had recently signed a three-year cooperation deal with high-end digital camera experts Hasselblad and the Find X5 series wears the name and incorporates some Hasselblad software into the device.

The most apparent incorporation is Hasselblad’s Natural Color Correction which improves skin tones in images of human faces. It also aids with gentle chromatic gradients as seen with natural lighting.

This adds to the quality of ‘from the pocket’ photographic excellence. The bright, sharp images with lifelike colour and tone seem to arrive with minimal interaction impressively often.

The weakest suit of the camera suite is its telephoto lens. At 2x, its a little disappointing. Telephoto is probably the most useful of all of the smartphone shifting gimmicks to arise in the last half-decade.

That and effective night shot capabilities but thankfully, OPPO Find X5 fares incredibly well after sunset. The night mode engages automatically, the device flashes its huge eyes at the black void for a few seconds and it’s done.

Even with a relatively unsteady hand, the MariSilicon NPU wrings better-than-usable shots with a reassuring consistency. Like the daytime excellence, it just works a commendable majority of the time.

Video Tasty

Video options are on par with its class while video quality is strong. The same bright, sharp capture you get with the stills cam transfers to moving images. The lack of an optical image stabilisation (OIS) solution may be the one feature Find X5 lacks versus its rivals.

However, the gyro-fed EIS does a decent job of keeping the subject in frame while rocking and rolling. Electronic image stabilisation, even well implemented, will always be a few steps behind in terms of performance.

An ‘action’ setting can improve EIS performance but limits the resolution to 1080p and creates a narrow field of view.

Power Power

A 4,800 mAh battery gives the handset above-average stamina. My regular work and play load saw OPPO Find X5 make it around halfway through day two.

The power user should make it home in the evenings while a more casual user will make it to bed on day two.

Regardless, OPPO are leaders in charging and the company has once again reduced downtime for Find X5 Series.

OPPO Find X5 is equipped with 80W SuperVOOC wired charging which will fill the handset from 0-100% in around 40 minutes. A fifteen minute blast of the in-box 80W charger will bring it from 0-50%.

The device also comes with AirVOOC at 30W which takes around 100 minutes to fill the battery from 0-100%.

OPPO absolutely decked Find X5 out in this respect and charging capabilities are only really bested by its stablemate Find X5 Pro which has the same 80W wired input but boasts a 50W wireless maximum.

Specifications

While the two-pronged approach to flagship models has yielded some huge gaps in performance and features, OPPO Find X5 isn’t much lesser a model than its Pro counterpart.

The spirit of the design remains, as does the incredible craftsmanship and the majority of the series’ flagship features and the price reflects this.

For now, that tried and tested Snapdragon 888 competes with the more experiemental Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 as seen in the Pro model. The display is vibrant, detailed and covered by Victus, the latest screen tech from Corning’s Gorilla Glass series.

Add to these a balanced camera setup that reflects the ‘cover all’ ethos of the handset and OPPO Find X5 is a contender in a competitive market.

OPPO Find X5 (8GB RAM, 256GB Storage) is available in Ireland on the Eir network on a €59.99 p/m plan priced at €349 for existing customers and €149 to join Eir from another network

Review unit provided by OPPO