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Battery life
- Big 5,000mAh battery
- Goes way beyond a day
- Limited to 10W charging
The combination of a 5,000mAh battery and a relatively low resolution screen means battery life is one of the standout features of the Oppo A5 2020. You can in some cases get through to a second evening with the phone, though not if you're doing a lot of gaming or video watching during the day.
During our testing we found ourselves with plenty of juice left when it was time for bed, having charged the phone up fully in the morning – that's based on a bit of web browsing, music playing and messaging, not on having the phone in constant use all day. Tasks like GPS navigation will of course drain the battery faster.
Even if you're making extensive use of the handset during the course of your day – taking it on a long train journey, for example, and playing games and watching videos all the while – you won't have to worry about needing a recharge before you get back home.
Bear in mind that charging is capped at 10W, so you're not going to be able to have a quick blast of charging and see the battery level jump up significantly: it's a phone that takes its time to charge up, and it can take several hours from empty.
In our standard 90-minute video test at full brightness, the Oppo A5 2020 dropped from a full charge to 88%, which is a very respectable figure – you could be watching video for 8 hours with this. That's the same drop as we saw on the Moto G7 Power, which also comes with a 5,000mAh battery.
Camera
- Quad-lens rear camera
- Decent daytime performance
- Useful scene recognition
The Oppo A5 2020 sports a quad-lens camera on the back, but one of those is a depth-of-field sensor, while another is a small 2MP affair. It's the wide 12MP and the ultra-wide 8MP sensors that really matter, and which are going to get you decent photos in most lighting conditions.
Combined with the on-board AI that tries to recognize what you're taking a photo of and will tweak the settings accordingly, you can get some good shots with this phone – as long as they're just for casual or social media purposes, rather than for photo exhibitions.
There's no telephoto zoom, but the digital zoom does a passable job at getting you closer to the action. It's not something we'd rely on for getting the best photos, as it degrades the quality even further, but if you absolutely must zoom in, then it will do.
Cameras is one of the areas where the flagship phones really do stand out, so don't expect wonders here – and remember how much you're paying for the Oppo A5 2020. Take a close look at the images it produces and some blurring and muddiness is noticeable. On the whole though we were pleased with the vibrancy and punch of our snaps.
Low light causes a problem, as it always does on budget phones: it's not that your photos will be completely unusable, but details suffer. The dedicated night mode makes a rather crude attempt at brightening everything up, but you're probably better off trying to improve shots in a proper image editor on your computer.
You do get that ultra-wide lens included, which is fantastic for getting wider landscape shots and for fitting more people in the frame (though you do have to settle for a drop in quality as a result).
Video tops out at 4K at 30 frames-per-second, though you need to drop down to 1080p to take advantage of the built-in video stabilization. This actually makes a noticeable difference, though only on slight juddering – it's not at the same level as some of the top-end phones of the moment (such as Pixel 4, for example).
In our testing, the HDR engine did a solid job of balancing out dark and light areas of images: it certainly helps bring more detail to pictures, but we've seen it done much better on other phones. As long as you're not expecting iPhone or Galaxy-level snaps from the Oppo A5 2020 though, you won't be too disappointed.
If camera quality is important to you, consider upgrading to the Oppo A9 2020, which ups the main sensor to 48MP and gets you better images as a result. The other specs are largely identical between the two phones.
You get a single-lens 8MP camera on the front of the Oppo A5 2020, which we had no complaints with. As you can see from the samples below, not every shot is a winner, but most of these pictures would look fine posted to your social media channels.
Camera samples
