Oppo Find X5 Pro review

Two-minute review

The Oppo Find X5 Pro is a fantastic camera phone - as long as you don't want to zoom into your subject too much. The new top-end Find X5 model has a weird weak link when it comes to photography that might be a deal-breaker (but might not).

Since breaking into the western market, Oppo has been trying to position itself as a premium camera phone brand, and the Oppo Find X5 Pro is the logical next step towards that goal. 

As the successor to the equally-premium Find X3 Pro, the X5 Pro has a lot to offer photographers. There’s a cross-over with legendary camera brand Hasselblad, loads of bespoke modes and features, and some high-powered cameras…

… but there is one gaping weak link that limits the phone’s ability to stand up to similarly-priced rivals like the Samsung Galaxy S22 Plus, iPhone 13 Pro and Xiaomi 12 Pro. That would be the phone’s telephoto camera, which has a rather limited range and low-res sensor. In fact, the telephoto feels like an afterthought in comparison to the powerful main and ultra-wide cameras. While rival phones offer 5x - or even 10x optical zoom - Oppo sticks with a paltry 2x.  

The Find X3 Pro’s excellent microscope camera has also been lost during the remake, and though that capability did feel like a novelty with a limited lifespan in the range, we’re still sad to see this truly unique feature go (though the Realme GT 2 Pro recently adopted something similar).

So the Oppo Find X5 Pro has some flaws, but it’s still, for the most part, a well-rounded premium smartphone. It has a powerful processor, fantastic-looking screen and a fairly good battery life.

One of our favorite features is the incredibly fast charging, with 80W wired powering that fills the phone’s battery up in less than half an hour. There’s also 50W wireless charging, which is one of the fastest cable-less speeds we’ve ever seen in a mobile.

We also have to highlight the fantastic customization options that Oppo’s ColorOS provides, like the ability to tweak your fingerprint scanner animation and edge-screen lighting. A new feature on the X5 Pro allows you to add sketches of portrait pictures to your Always-On Display, letting us showcase our personal touch on the phone, even when it is not in use.

And though we gripe about the Oppo Find X5 Pro’s camera failings, we do have to commend its strengths - pictures on the standard or ultrawide cameras can come out beautifully.

Aside from the camera issues, we have to mention other flaws that prevent this flagship from being rated an all-star phone.

In the software department, the main issue we found was that the user interface can be quite buggy: the screen wouldn’t rotate when it should have; message bubbles wouldn’t disappear when asked; notification pop-ups didn’t pop away.

Most of these software issues were just minor annoyances that finally disappeared with a little extra effort - but some persisted and were quite irksome during use. Thankfully, these are aspects of a phone that can usually be fixed after launch via software updates.

But there is a big reason to avoid this phone, and that is the price. Despite being slightly cheaper than its predecessors, the Find X5 is still an expensive device. These days, the mid-range device market is so competitive that many people won’t need to spend so much to get a great phone.

There are still reasons to opt for this device if you’ve got the money, especially if you’re a fan of fast charging or Hasselblad - indeed for certain buyers it will rank as one of the best Android phones - but we’re not sure the device as whole is worth its high cost.

Oppo Find X5 Pro price and availability

Oppo’s new flagship costs £1,049 in the UK, the only place where we have availability information so far. The company doesn’t launch its devices in the US, so don’t expect them there.

That converts to around $1,390 or AU$1,890. That price positions the phone just a hair below the asking price for the Find X2 Pro and Find X3 Pro, devices that cost £1,099 / AU$1,699 (roughly $1,500).

The Oppo Find X5 Pro went on sale on March 24, 2022, alongside its siblings: the standard, and Lite models.

Design

The Oppo Find X5 Pro isn’t a far cry from its predecessor in terms of design - it’s a long, thin device that exudes quality, in both look and feel.

Oppo has preserved the same rough size for the X5: 163.7 x 73.9 x 8.5mm. Those measurements are only about 0.2mm different from the Find X3 Pro, and the X5’s weight is only 2g heavier, at 195g. 

The USB-C port, right-edge-mounted power button and volume rocker are all in similar spots. The X5 Pro is IP68 rated against dust and brief submersion.

The rear is made from a ceramic material that feels expensive in hand, but it’s important to note that this type of phone material doesn’t always hold up after a drop. Also adorning the back is a boatload of different logos: there’s the ‘powered by MariSilicon’ by the camera bump; a large ‘Oppo | Hasselblad’: various small-text information (including the address of Oppo’s headquarters in China); and disposal information. 

We have seen this type of textual adornment on quite a few phones, but for a mobile with such an elegant-looking design, the text mars the simplistic beauty, cheapening the look a bit.

There is a version of the phone that swaps out the ceramic rear material for faux leather, but it doesn’t sound like this version will launch in many regions. In the UK, both the black and white versions going on sale are ceramic.

The big design difference between the X3 Pro and X5 Pro is the latter’s redesigned camera bump - instead of a square thing it’s more… rectangular? With curvier edges? It’s not exactly a design revolution but it’s the key differentiating factor between the phones. As with the older device, the back of the handset seamlessly rises up to meet the bump, making for a smooth design that’s nice to run a finger along.

Display

There have been exactly zero noteworthy screen changes since the last-gen Oppo, but that’s not necessarily a terrible thing since it’s a very good-looking screen. 

This is a 6.7-inch AMOLED panel that is broken up by a ‘punch-hole’ cut-out at the top-left and curves at the edges. The resolution is 1440 x 3216, the refresh rate is 120Hz, the max brightness is 1300 nits and the aspect ratio is 20:9.

That’s a big list of specs, but what does all that mean from a user’s perspective? Well, it’s a great-looking display with top contrast, bold colors and a very high brightness (when you boost it up manually).

Plus, the in-screen fingerprint scanner feels a touch more responsive than that on last year’s model, and changes to the customization options in the software make the Always-On Display a real treat to use - more on that in this review’s Software section.

Cameras

The camera department is a key marketing focus of Oppo for the Find X5 Pro, despite the fact there are actually fewer cameras here than on the X3 Pro - or on rivals like the Galaxy S22 Ultra. Somewhat making up for what it lacks is X5’s collaboration with camera brand Hasselblad, which brings certain software features.

The main camera here is 50MP f/1.7, and it’s joined by a 50MP f/2.2 ultrawide snapper with a 110-degree field of view and a 13MP f/2.4 telephoto camera with a 2x optical zoom. That’s the same combination as on last year’s model but sans the X3’s microscope camera - a true shame because that’s a capability we definitely miss.

Photos taken on the first two cameras mentioned look great: they’re bright, colorful and packed with detail. That’s the case for close-up shots, wider vistas, pictures taken at night or in low-light conditions and Portrait snaps. 

Helping here is the MariSilicon X neural processing chip, which Oppo debuted at the end of 2021. That chip is meant for machine learning and optimization, and while all of its benefits are probably imperceptible to the average user, many will notice that the camera feels quicker to use.

The telephoto camera is a weak link here, as 2x zoom just doesn't compare to the 5x-10x periscope lenses offered by plenty of alternative phone cameras. Pictures look okay at this range, and we even took a few nice-looking 5x zoom shots, but you can’t go much further than that without rapidly losing quality, up to the 20x zoom limit.

That functionality is compared to that of rival phones like the Galaxy S22 Ultra, Huawei P50 Pro and Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra, where the max zoom can go up to 120x. In those phones, you can get 10x - or even 20x zoom - without losing much quality.

If you’re a fan of zoom shots, this isn’t the phone for you. 

On the front of the phone is a 32MP f/2.4 camera, which is fine, but it’s not the best selfie snapper we’ve ever seen. Images look just a touch washed out compared to some we’ve taken on other phones. With that said, if you’ve not tested plenty of top-end mobiles like we have, you’ll likely be impressed with the results.

One interesting selfie feature is that the app will automatically choose whether it wants to use a wider or closer field of view depending on who’s in the frame. It’ll choose a wider angle if there are many people, or a narrower one if it’s a solo selfie. In our time testing the feature, the app only ever chose the wider one, even when we were taking a selfie by ourselves - perhaps that says something about our diet instead of the phone? Whatever its reasons, that consistency made this feature less useful.

Video recording here goes up to 8K, a resolution we imagine 99% of people will never touch; or up to 4K and 30fps or 60fps. There’s some impressive stabilization when recording here, especially if you’re at 1080p resolution, which is when you can use the advanced stabilization mode. This then, would be a good option for mobile videographers.

The Hasselblad collaboration bears fruit in a few different ways. The first, which is easy to miss if you’re not familiar with the legacy camera brand, is that the shutter button is in its iconic orange, and the shutter sound is also one associated with the company’s hardware.

Hasselblad apparently had some hand in the development of the Pro mode (every camera phone has one of these, which lets you adjust settings like shutter speed, aperture and white balance yourself). We’re not totally sure what Hasselblad brought here, but from our testing we’d hazard ‘not much’.

A real addition is a Hasselblad XPan mode, based on the company’s famous 90s film camera, and this takes shots in a wider aspect ratio with a nice film-looking grainy filter and appearance. This was fun to play around with, especially as it’s easy to switch between color and monochrome, but there’s a shutter speed slider placed in such a way that we kept accidentally swiping it.

Camera samples

Image 1 of 12

Performance and specs

The Oppo Find X5 Pro is a super-powerful phone, touting the same top-end chipset as the Xiaomi 12, Samsung Galaxy S22 (in some regions) and OnePlus 10 Pro. That’s the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, and it’ll likely be the most powerful chipset we see in 2022 Androids.

That’s paired with 8GB RAM, though you can boost it up with a built-in RAM expansion feature that temporarily converts storage into more memory - many new phones come with tech like this. You can gain 3GB, 5GB or 7GB this way, which should be useful for certain use cases.

So this is a powerful phone, which will be useful for gaming and intensive processes like image editing. When we put the Oppo through our Geekbench 5 benchmark test, it returned a multi-core score of 3270, which puts it on par with a host of other top-end phones from the last few years.

We should point out that the X3 Pro got just 3257, so it’s not a huge difference, and older phones like the Motorola Edge Plus, OnePlus 8 and Asus ROG Phone 3 all got higher scores. Premium chipsets often have diminishing returns in terms of processing power but they bring more besides, like battery optimization or smarter AI.

We did notice a common Snapdragon 8-series issue, and that’s regarding chipset overheating. When we put the phone through its tests, or used it for lots of gaming, it would heat up quite quickly. That’s not ideal, but unless you’re going to use a Snapdragon 700-series chip phone or one with internals from MediaTek, Samsung or Apple, it’s unavoidable.

Software

We really want to like the Oppo Find X5 Pro’s software, but it’s hard.

The phone runs Android 12 with Oppo’s ColorOS laid over the top, and that’s an Android fork just like the ones many Android phone makers use.

ColorOS is a colorful user interface, a fact that’s exacerbated by the vibrant display, and it’s pleasant to look at - though people who want a more laid-back design might find it a bit much.

Our favorite thing about the software is the vast range of customization options - you get the standard Android features like widgets, Live (or moving) wallpapers, navigation animations etc, but there’s a lot more. You can change the shape and design of icons and settings, the animation that plays when you use the fingerprint scanner, and the lights that flash on the edge of the display for notifications.

A new personalization here is a new feature for your Always-On Display. If you pick a portrait photo, the phone will recognize the person and draw a sketch outline, which you can use as the background. This looks wonderful, and we had great fun playing around with it - as well as using it as our constant background.

So with all that in mind, why do we ‘want to like’ the software, instead of just ‘liking’ it? Well, that’s because we found it very buggy. Sure, this might just be a problem with our test unit or the early pre-release software, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t bring up our myriad problems.

Often, we’d rotate the phone but the user interface wouldn’t rotate - only to spin after we’d given up and were holding the phone normally. A recurring issue was that notification bubbles would be impossible to remove - when we tried to drag them to the X to remove them, they’d just vanish, re-appearing moments later. Sometimes notifications, either new ones or ones we’d checked via the pull-down menu, would stay on screen and not leave.

We were frequently frustrated by such issues because they spoiled our experience with the phone. Hopefully, these annoyances will soon be patched up by software updates.

Battery life 

We go into most top-end phones expecting mediocre battery life, but we actually weren’t disappointed by the Oppo Find X5 Pro’s own juice capabilities. 

The phone has a 5,000mAh power pack - we usually see batteries that size power lower-end phones for up to two days - but with 5G connectivity, powerful chipset and big, bright screens, flagship phones often require a lot more juice.

Still, the Find X5 Pro regularly saw us through a full day of use, even if we were on prolonged photoshoots or scrolling through copious pages of social media. We imagine you’d be hard pressed to drain the battery in less than a day, though people who game or stream video frequently might manage.

If the battery life is good, the charging speed is great. There’s 80W wired charging - Oppo says this’ll power the phone from empty to 50% in 12 minutes, and we’d concur. We could easily plug the thing in before making breakfast and have a full day of charge before the bagel was gone.

In the realms of premium phones, this is one of the fastest-charging ones we’ve ever seen, and being able to juice up a handset this quickly is genuinely a game-changing feature.

Wireless charging is here, at 50W, which is fast for this premium feature, and it takes about three-quarters of an hour to power to full if you’ve got a charging pad that goes at 50W. What’s more impressive is that some of the Find X5 Pro’s similarly-price rivals don’t even have wired powering at this speed.

There’s also reverse wireless charging at 10W - this lets you power up another device using your phone as a powering pad. 10W is fast for this feature, as most phones that have it top at 4.5W, but the feature still isn’t hugely useful as it’s wildly power inefficient. You’ll end up draining far more power from the phone  than the other device will receive.

Should I buy the Oppo Find X5 Pro? 

Buy it if...

Don't buy it if...

• First reviewed March 2022