Oppo Find 5 is a quad core smartphone with a very good price tag of 400 euros. The handset has been selling in Europe for a while now, especially since Oppo started offering free shipping for its products in Europe. This is a Full HD flagship, that was launched in early 2013.
The design of the handset feels like a combo between the Xperia S and the Nokia Lumia 920. It’s a bit bulky at 8.9 mm and it weighs 165 grams. The smartphone uses a solid unibody polycarbonate case, with squared edges and it has a steel frame inside, that makes it a very solid piece of gear. We’ve got a metallic area near the camera for extra elegance.
Oppo Find 5 uses metal buttons, that are a bit too thin to be comfortable to use. We’ve got capacitive buttons below the display, a microSIM tray that detaches with the aid of a metal key and the back cover is not removable. At the right of the earpiece there’s a notification light and overall the Find 5 has a premium design with a great quality.
The hardware of the handset includes an IPS LCD 5 inch Full HD screen with Gorilla Glass 2, Dolby Audio, 16/32 GB of storage, 2 GB of RAM, HSPA+ connectivity and 2 GB of RAM. There’s no microSD card slot and back to connectivity, we’ve got Bluetooth 4.0, NFC, DLNA and WiFi dual band. Specs also include microUSB 2.0, a 13 megapixel camera with dual LED flash, a 1.9 megapixel front shooter and a quad core Snapdragon S4 Pro 1.5 GHz processor. There’s an Adreno 320 GPU here, an accelerometer, gyroscope, compass, proximity sensor, GPS and noise canceling with dedicated mic.
The battery here is a Li-Ion 2500 mAh unit that should provide a normal day of use. If you want to get an idea of its usage, an hour of video and photo capture will drain 30 or 40% of your battery on the Oppo Find 5. This means the battery is slightly disappointing sadly. As far as the audio is concerned, we’ve got good volume, good bass, but the speakers are easy to cover. Headphones are pretty good, but slightly uncomfortable to place in the ear.
We’ve got all the EQ options we can want in the settings of the music player and even the rare Dirac HD technology, that I haven’t seen on other phones. It involves a special chip, that makes the songs sound as the artists intended them to sound, with little amplification. The bass is deep on this handset and clarity is excellent. The quality is dangerously close to the Galaxy S4 and Xperia Z, actually.
On the video side, we’ve got a 5 inch IPS LCD Full HD screen with 347 lux units, so brighter than the 200 lux of the Galaxy S4. On black we get 1 lux, which is decent, but no one was expecting deep blacks from an IPS anyway. The screen is of the RGP stripe kind and it offers good contrast, nice view angles and very good brightness. Oppo Find 5 incorporates a 13 megapixel camera with dual LED flash, autofocus, geotagging, touch focus and panorama.
It does HDR and 1080p 30 FPS video capture and by the way it also does HDR video. Photos can be taken in 4:3 at 13 MP resolutions or 16:9 at 10 megapixels. The UI is slightly limited, without many options to play with, not even effects. You can do slow motion and fast motion video and burst shots, with 100 pics snapped in 20 seconds. The pictures will come out slightly oversaturated and burnt, but we’ve seen that happen before.
Night pics are surprisingly decent and the flash actually handles taking pics at night in close range very well. If I were to make a comparison, the camera is better than the one of the LG Optimus G and very close to the one of the Xperia Z, only with less effects and options. The sensor used here is actually the same as on the Xperia Z, a Sony Exmor RS with F2.2 aperture, stacked CMOS setup and the lens uses a 4 layer coating with blue glass filter for extra clarity.
The video zoom is weak and on the audio capture side we’ve got 2 microphones, for stereo recording at 48 KHz. The front camera does HDR as well and uses a wide angle lens. Overall, the cam is pretty good for a 400 euro phone. In the benchmark domain we’ll yet again mention the LG Optimus G and Xperia Z, as the two models we compared the Oppo Find 5 with. After all they share the same CPU: quad core Snapdragon S4 Pro. Oppo Find 5 scores 7193 points in Quadrant, 20.705 in AnTuTu and 59.8 FPS in NenaMark 2. It gets 1722 points in Vellamo, 8465 points in 3DMark and 1610 points in BrowserMark 2.0.
The Xperia Z beats it in Quadrant by 800 points, but it scores less in AnTuTu, pretty much the same in NenaMark 2 and 700 points more in 3DMark. The LG Optimus G is superior only in 3DMark and Quadrant, but only by a bit in the latter.
Oppo Find 5 comes with a browser that offers so-so speed, but you can always resort to Chrome if need be. The keyboard is comfortable and Go Keyboard is available preinstalled. Android 4.1.1 is the OS of choice here, with a standard UI that feels childish and too colorful. You can uninstall apps here like in iOS, by keeping pressed their icon and then he associated red X mark. GoLauncher for Oppo is the one allowing you to do the customizations here, when it comes to themes, wallpapers, widgets, effects and all that.
The notification area is minimalistic and the settings area offers a large number of security options and even some gestures, like double tapping the top of the phone to reach the top of a list. Other stuff you need to know about the Oppo Find 5 is that you need to set up the APN manually for the device and I should mention that its maximum temperature achieved is 40.7 degrees Celsius after a 3G video playback session. It’s an excellent temperature for a modern quad core phone.
We also achieved 34.2 degrees Celsius after some 3D gaming. The call quality on this device is good, but the straight edges of the smartphone may tend to hurt your ears. And now here are the Pros and Cons for this unit!
Pros are as follows:
- good display
- good build quality
- decent price
- pretty good camera
- excellent audio
- Dirac/Dolby tech
- good performance/no lag
And the Cons:
- battery life is pretty low
- bulky design
- UI feels childish
- not enough camera options
- video recording not impressive
We give this phone an 8 out of 10 for design, an 8.7 out of 10 for screen and audio and an 8.5 out of 10 for UI and OS. The overall grade is 8.40 out of 10 and this quite a fine device for 400 euros. If I were to choose between the Oppo Find 5 and the Xperia Z, well Sony would not like my choice…
