Oppo has consistently made outstanding phones. They have innovated and tweaked their way into many hearts including ours at 8-Bit Island. As reviewers we keep waiting for the misstep to make sure we report, and yet time and time again Oppo has blown us away. So now we have our hands on the Oppo Find X5 Pro, can this be the flop that has to be coming?
The short answer is nope.
In the box
One thing we have consistently noted, and loved, about Oppo’s phones is that out of the box they come with all you need. They usually come with a gel case and a screen protector. The Find X5 Pro came with the gel case and best of all the screen protector was pre-applied. No bubbles from a poorly attached screen protector for me.
The screen protector was so well applied that I have been using the phone for 2 weeks and only spotted it had one on last night.
The gel case is matte black and covers the whole back of the phone exposing the cameras. It looks incredibly tidy and is understated in a way that will fit any style. You can of course go and buy any other case to go with your phone, but honestly I wouldn’t even want to.
Annoyingly when you start the phone up it gives the option to transfer files directly from another phone using a USB-C to USB-C cable. In the box we have… a USB-C to USB-A cable. The benefit of this is there are more USB-A plugs out there including the ones being built into powerboards (and Taco Bell of all places) but it is disappointing to be shown an awesome feature that you will use when you first start up your phone, and not have the hardware for it.
Still, the transfer from my backup didn’t take ages, so I am nit picking something pretty minor here.
The camera
One thing that Oppo has consistently done is provide good cameras for their price points. The lower cost phones tend to have software and a camera well above what you would expect, but when it comes to their $1,999 phone we should expect something pretty amazing right? Well they delivered!
Have you heard of Hasselblad cameras before? I hadn’t, and after a quick Google I understood why. They are expensive ass cameras starting from 11K but boasting some pretty extraordinary photo quality. Well the tech in the Oppo’s cameras are Hasselblad, and oh my god they are detailed. I have been taking advantage of having a loan phone to snap as many pics of my kids as I can and they are some seriously amazing photos.
Moving from taking a detailed picture of my kid, to quickly using portrait mode to blur the background, to then flicking to a HDR video of my 10 month old face planting on a foam couch. It was so seamless and I captured some truly amazing footage with my weeks using this phone. The portrait mode was especially awesome as it automatically grabs the object in high detail and blurs the background, making some snaps that look as good as DSLR ones I had sent to my kids.
One of the coolest things isn’t the ridiculously high detail in the photos and videos, but the shaky cam on videos is so smooth. You flick that feature on and then suddenly I was taking a video of my son on the flying fox running behind him, and it looks so damn smooth.
This is a fricking phone, it shouldn’t be this good.
Battery and charging
Oppo’s phones have regularly boasted some pretty long battery lives. Of course this phone has a lot to offer, and using all of these features will smash the battery. So fortunately we wind up in a happy medium here. If I wasn’t using the X5 Pro too much then I was easily getting well over a day out of it. But that’s not how I use my phone.
A normal day has me taking photos and videos of my kids, listening to podcasts and music, playing some games, and watching a lot of videos and browsing the internet. I would say I use my phone at the higher end of reasonable use. Fortunately the phone was still going at the end of the day.
The thing with the Oppo Find X5 Pro is, running out of battery isn’t that big of a deal. Using the charging cable I was able to fill it to 50% in 10 minutes. So if you aren’t sure how long your phone will last and you have an excursion ahead, plug that beasty in for 10 minutes and you will be good to go. That is insaaaane. The phone also offers fast wireless charging which apparently also does that in 15 mins, but I don’t have the bits to test that out.
Should you buy this phone?
I will be blunt, I have loved my time with this phone. I am genuinely gutted to be sending it back because it has been a treat. Games run like a dream, it has heaps of internal storage, and the camera is insane.
If you have 2K to spend on a phone then it is well worth it and I will be taking snaps of my kids up until I have to put it back in the return bag.