Oppo Find X5 review

Two-minute review

We thoroughly enjoyed our time with the Oppo Find X5, which is usually a good sign when it comes to phone reviews. It's a handset that is a pleasure to use, and impressed in just about every area, including photo quality, battery life, and screen clarity.

You didn't miss the Oppo Find X4 by the way: the X5 is one of the successors to the Oppo Find X3 series that launched in 2021, and it arrives alongside the Oppo Find X5 Pro and the Oppo Find X5 Lite. With a starting price of about £749 in the UK, this phone is going up against some heavy hitters, including the Samsung Galaxy S22 (£819 with the same 256GB of storage) and the iPhone 13 (£829 with 256GB of storage).

The X5 costs a little bit less than those top-tier flagships though, and that's how Oppo is positioning this phone. If you want to save a bit of cash without making too many compromises, then this phone is definitely worth your consideration.

As we've said, the phone impresses in every area. The build quality and design are very good, the AMOLED screen is bright and clear, the performance is free from stuttering and lag – even when the most demanding apps and games are running – and the camera on the back of the Oppo Find X5 takes some fantastic photos too (it's even pretty capable after the daylight has disappeared).

So why isn't this the perfect phone? There are a few limitations, including a lack of waterproofing, an optical zoom limit of 2x on the rear camera, and a ColorOS Android skin that we're not completely in love with. Those are minor annoyances really, but they're annoyances nevertheless and they're worth mentioning.

With so many handsets on the market at the moment, it's hard to say whether the Oppo Find X5 hits the sweet spot between mid-rangers and flagships, or whether it's overshadowed by phones higher up and lower down on the price scale – it all depends on how much you like its aesthetics and what you prioritize in a new smartphone.

Oppo Find X5 price and availability

• Starts at £749
• Available to buy now
• No US/Australia sales

The Oppo Find X5 is out now and available to buy for £749 and up from the usual retailers in the UK, including Amazon and Carphone Warehouse. You can also buy the phone direct from Oppo. The pricing works out to be about $980 / AU$1,285, though as usual with Oppo phones, the handset isn't going to be available in the US or Australia.

Design

• Polished and sleek
• Matte glass back
• No waterproofing

The Oppo Find X5 is clearly, a well put together piece of hardware, and we especially like the matte finish on the back: smooth, textured, easy to grip and barely troubled by fingerprints in the same way that handsets with glossy, reflective backs are. The X5 gets two thumbs up from us and we hope that more manufacturers start taking the same approach in the future.

The rear camera array is unusually shaped, but it doesn't look bad at all, and the handset as a whole is very easy on the eye. The colors available to pick from, depending on your region, are black, white and purple – we reviewed the understated, sleek-looking black model, which we reckon is the best of the bunch.

With a 6.55-inch screen, the overall dimensions of the Oppo Find X5 are 160.3 mm x 72.6 mm x 8.7 mm (that's 6.31 inches x 2.86 inches x 0.34 inches), and the smartphone weighs in at a very respectable 196 grams (6.9 ounces). It sits between the Oppo Find X5 Pro and Oppo Find X5 Lite in terms of weight and screen size, though thanks to some very narrow bezels, it's actually slightly narrower and shorter than the Lite variant.

You've got the power button on the right as you look at the phone, and the volume controls on the left. Down at the bottom there's room for the SIM tray, the USB-C port, and a single speaker – there's another narrow speaker up at the top, embedded in the bezel. It's a sleek and polished design, helped by the silver aluminum frame around the edges.

Unlike the Oppo Find X5 Pro, there's no IP68 waterproofing and dustproofing on this handset, so you're going to have to be a bit more careful when you're carrying it around. It's one of the compromises you make for the cheaper price, but all things considered, we'd say that the Oppo Find X5 is a fine-looking smartphone that you won't be embarrassed to pull out of your pocket or bag.

Display

• 6.55-inch AMOLED panel
• Slightly curved Gorilla Glass Victus
• 120Hz maximum refresh rate

The 6.55-inch AMOLED screen on the Oppo Find X5 is ever-so-slightly curved at the edges, and comes with a maximum brightness of 1,000 nits, support for HDR10+, and a top refresh rate of 120Hz. It's one of the stars of the show as far as this particular smartphone goes, and it's only interrupted by a small selfie camera cut out in the top left corner.

You get a resolution of 1080 x 2400 pixels with this panel, and an aspect ratio of 20:9, and that leaves you with a sharp screen that displays text and other details clearly and legibly. Colors really stand out and blacks are impressively deep too, thanks to that high maximum brightness level and the OLED technology that's being deployed here.

It's a display that impresses with just about every type of usage, whether it's showcasing games with fast motion on screen, or photo slideshows that appear on social media. The rather gorgeous-looking animated wallpapers that Oppo has provided add an extra touch of class as well.

Camera

• Triple-lens rear camera
• Maxes out at 2x optical zoom
• Excellent low light shots

You're going to get some great snaps from the Oppo Find X5 cameras, even though the phone may not be the best one on the market in terms of camera performance and photo quality. On the back of the X5, there's a triple lens 50 MP wide + 13 MP telephoto + 50 MP ultrawide module, and these won't let you down no matter the lighting conditions you're shooting in.

While the 2x optical zoom isn't all that impressive, the phone takes photos that are sharp, vibrant, and very detailed. Switching to the ultrawide mode is smooth, and photos taken in that mode don't suffer from distortion or any kind of color shift. You just point the camera, press the shutter button, and end up with a high-quality image.

Low-light photos are mostly superb too, although they can take a few more seconds to capture and process. While some of the detail is lost, and the colors, at times, are oversaturated, you can still get yourself some very usable images. The single-lens 32 MP wide camera on the front is perfectly fine too.

The rear camera is one of the areas on the Oppo Find X5 where that extra money you're shelling out – compared to lower mid-range handsets – really makes a difference. It's a fast, versatile, accurate camera system. It's not quite up to the standard set by more expensive phones at the top of the flagship ladder – the automatic HDR doesn't always get brilliant results in darker areas of pictures – but the X5's rear camera definitely holds its own.

Phone cameras have advanced by leaps and bounds in recent years and the Oppo Find X5 is proof you no longer have to spend top dollar to get fantastic results. With a few reservations, including the fact that the optical zoom tops out at 2x, we think most users will be very happy with the photos this phone is able to capture.

Camera samples

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Specs and performance

• Runs a Snapdragon 888
• Up to 12GB of RAM on board
• Good stereo speakers

The Oppo Find X5 runs on a very capable Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 processor – that's last year's flagship mobile CPU from Qualcomm, whereas the Oppo Find X5 Pro uses the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, Qualcomm's top mobile CPU for 2022. In actual use, you won't really notice much difference when it comes to performance, but the Pro model might just last you a little longer before you need to upgrade.

Our review unit came with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. Other configurations are available – 128GB of storage is an option, as is 12GB of RAM – but you can't expand the storage with a memory card. For just about every task that a modern smartphone needs to do, those specs won't get you down.

Those specs translate to Geekbench scores in our testing of 782 (single-core), 3362 (multi-core) and 4546 (OpenCL). Benchmarks don't tell the full performance story of course, but that's more or less on par with the Pro model. This is perhaps an area where you can save yourself some money without too much of a sacrifice in return.

We certainly had no problems in terms of performance when using the Oppo Find X5. Menus snap to attention, games are fluid and speedy, and switching between apps was no problem at all for the handset. We didn't notice even a hint of lag during our time with this phone. While we can't guarantee anything for the future, on paper this is a device that should last you a good number of years as well.

5G is present and correct, as indeed you would expect at this point, and you can run both a physical nano SIM and an eSIM on the phone at the same time if you need to. As for those stereo speakers, which we mentioned earlier, they do a fine job of playing music, podcasts and audio alongside video: from quiet dialogue to louder tunes, we were impressed.

Software

• Android 12 with ColorOS
• Plenty of customizations
• Lots of preinstalled apps

The software on board this phone is Android 12 with ColorOS on top. ColorOS is fine, really, although there are a few more preinstalled apps than we'd ideally like – AliExpress, Amazon Shopping, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok and others. You also get duplicate apps: Oppo's own Photos app as well as Google Photos, for example.

As with other versions of Android developed by Chinese manufacturers, ColorOS is a busy operating system, with a pile of settings and customizations to play around with. Some of them are more useful than others – we're not sure how handy the Smart Sidebar is, for instance, which lets you quickly get at your favorite apps from a pop-up overlay.

While we prefer the simpler, plainer stock Android that comes on Google's Pixel phones, your mileage with ColorOS may vary. It certainly can't be faulted in terms of how much there is to explore. Of course, with Android being Android, you can easily revamp the OS and remove most of the extras that Oppo has added.

Battery life

• 4,800mAh battery capacity
• Lasts into a second day
• 80W fast wired charging

The Oppo Find X5 comes with a 4,800mAh capacity battery, which holds up rather well during the day. While we didn't put the phone through anything that was too demanding, we found ourselves with at least 40% battery life at the end of each day – this is a handset that can go comfortably into a second day, and perhaps further if you're careful.

During video streaming (with the display set to maximum brightness), the battery level dropped by 7% every hour, which equates to around 14-15 hours of video playback in total. For more intensive tasks, like step-by-step navigation using the screen and GPS readings, the battery drain was more like 12% an hour. That's still quite impressive.

There's fast 80W charging, fast 30W wireless charging, and even reverse 10W charging here (so smaller devices like earbuds can be charged up on the back of the phone). Those specs are very decent, but you don't get the fast 50W wireless charging of the Pro model, which is something to think about when weighing up the X5 range.

Should you buy the Oppo Find X5?

Buy it if...

Don't buy it if...

First reviewed: April 2022