I spent six months with the Oppo Find X5 Pro, the flagship of the Chinese giant. After its nomination for smartphone of the year at the Frandroid Awards, it’s time to look back on the joys and dislikes of your company. The latter also stopped abruptly… but we’ll come back to that. Sublime photos, fast charging, comfort in the hand, smooth screen… a review of a real crush.
It’s not always easy to explain why we love a smartphone. When they have flaws, it’s easy to point them out, but when everything is in line, as is the case with the Oppo Find X5 Pro, it can be a bit difficult to put into words. .
Objectively, we can even find fault with this phone: the absence of a telephoto lens beyond the X2, a battery that is sometimes a bit tight, a chip that gets a bit hot… Certainly, but all this is very poor compared to the pleasure it brought me. I came back six months with the best phone that passed through my hands in 2022.
Comfortable for hair, a neat interface.
The first thing that comes to mind when thinking of the Find X5 Pro is an overall impression of comfortable grip. The phone is quite elongated with a 20:9 aspect ratio and its 8.5mm thickness feels relatively thin in the palm of your hand. It all depends on how you hold your phone, personally it tends to sit in the lower right corner of my right palm and this position is one of the most comfortable I’ve experienced on a phone this year.
The ceramic back helps a lot with this impression of overall comfort. This one felt silkier to the touch than the usual glass or leatherette backs. Note that both models we tested have a ceramic back that weighs everything up to 218g, compared to 195g on the vegan leather version.
Honestly, the weight of the phone never surprised me and even reassured me. By the way, if you have the opportunity to take the white model instead of the black ceramic, do it unless you are allergic to white, because the black color is much more fingerprints.
Let’s also clarify that the weight induced by ceramics has never seemed annoying to me when watching videos, both in portrait and landscape format. And let’s talk about the visual experience. In my opinion, Oppo has already made a very good choice by placing the selfie camera bump at the top left instead of in the middle.
This allows a good unobstructed view to the left of the screen. Also, it’s a nice big 6.7-inch panel, with LTPO 2, which means it can go down to 1 Hz and up to 120 Hz refresh. Brightness level, with 1300 cd/m² on the clock, I never suffered from lack of brightness in broad daylight.
The nighttime viewing experience is just as pleasurable as the phone manages to really turn the brightness down, down to 1.89 cd/m² according to our test. I was able to experience it more than once. In fact, it can go very low to the point where the screen appears to be off. The colors have never failed me and I even think my TV was sometimes a bit jealous of my phone since I spent time on it watching series or YouTube.
On the other hand, I could notice a bit strange behavior, at night. I tend to frequently watch the remaining time of a video (don’t judge me). However, every time I opened the interface, the quality of the video in the background immediately dropped, as if it was suddenly more compressed. Once the interface disappeared, the return to normal took a small second. Nothing too serious, you will understand, we are picky.
And while we’re talking about the interface, we’re touching (we’ve never done this before) another strong point of the Oppo Find X5 Pro. ColorOS 13 is one, if not the best interface on Android. Smooth, very responsive, packed with little features with the added bonus of a move to ColorOS 13 (Android 13) that happened very early in the year, from September 2022.
The app drawer is very nice to use with a little hover animation when scrolling. Some features enrich the experience a bit: split screen, floating windows or even Monet, which allows you to draw the colors of the interface over the colors of the wallpaper.
A convincing camera
When it comes to smartphone photography, you can part hairs for hours to find out if the delivered image is the most beautiful or the most realistic. So let’s be clear, the Oppo Find X5 Pro probably isn’t the most versatile, it lacks a real telephoto lens for that. The colors delivered are certainly a bit warm.
But the shots taken with the main sensor are, in 95% of cases, very satisfactory, as they combine great sharpness, very pleasant sharpness, indisputable HDR and colorimetric processing, let’s say flattering, which allows you to immediately publish your photos. findings.
On a more personal note, I was really hooked on the graininess of this camera. This one has an interpretation that can be described as predictable in the good sense of the term. By dint of using it, I already had an idea of the result when I pulled the shutter. A good point.
I also really liked the processing speed and the shutter release, which really captures the scene you want at the moment you want. That’s why I don’t think I’ve had as much fun exploiting my environment as I did with this phone. And at the end of the day, that’s what matters most with a camera phone.
A bit like what my colleague Omar mentioned in his lengthy review of the Galaxy S22 Ultra, unless your friends are equipped with the latest fashion flagship, it’s a safe bet that you’ll become the official photographer of your friends with this phone. , as was my case.
Also, the background blur, also called bokeh, in portrait mode is very satisfying and brings out the subjects well.
The ultra-wide is frankly very close to the main camera, perhaps a bit more striking in the color treatment, but overall it really does feel like we have two devices working their butt off. The use of close-ups, as can be seen in the photo of the doe, is quite impressive in detail.
The X2 zoom is a bit more questionable. Because it doesn’t let you get as close to your subject as an X3 or X5 or even X10. But also and above all because we lose a little the quality of focus. As soon as you move a bit, the blur appears.
That being said, we retain the excellent qualities of the other two sensors, and again, colorimetric consistency is essential. There is only one point where the Oppo Find X5 Pro did not really convince me: night photos. Here are two fairly representative examples below. Generally, the result is too noisy as on the left, or the focus is difficult to achieve as on the right.
However, the result is not catastrophic. It’s just less successful than in other situations.
And there’s the breakdown
Well, I’ve been telling you about mountains and wonders since the beginning of this article, but it’s time to get on the angry topic. My romance with the Oppo Find X5 Pro ended abruptly. As I was calmly ensconced at my desk, I decided to take a photo of my colleague Cassim’s desk to show the huge screens that sit enthroned there to the entire world.
I was never able to post this photo.
The phone just crashed, I understand by this that it was showing me the text below and it was impossible to turn it back on normally.
So Cassim may be a “crack”, I’m pretty sure there’s nothing (I’ll keep an eye on you anyway 👀). After trying some manipulations, we returned the phone to Oppo, who was unable to revive it. I also specify that the phone had not suffered any particular blow and had not been submerged.
Needless to say, a 1,300-euro phone that breaks six months after receiving it is quite embarrassing. Even under warranty, it looks bad. Regarding the reason for the failure, Oppo explains it for two reasons:
- The presence of “unstable Beta testing software (in this case, the phone had ColorOS 13 in Beta, but had switched to a stable version at the time of the crash);
- Pre-series hardware. This means that the phones that are issued to journalists are sometimes – and this was the case here – smartphones shipped upstream that have not passed all the usage tests.
Oppo clearly considers that, both on a software and hardware level, the use of the Oppo Find X5 Pro that we used for 6 months did not reflect normal use. Way of saying that the users who bought it will not have any problem.
A conspicuous fault
It is not objective, but after this brutal separation, I simply missed the Oppo Find X5 Pro. And yet, smartphones are not lacking in the Frandroid editorial staff. I have lost count of the items I was looking for in other terminals. I’m thinking of this very particular grain of photos that I’ve been very attached to, which only the Pixel 7 Pro can come close to, but without its capture speed or its reliability in the result.
I am also thinking of the convenience of fast charging, so rare in the high-end segment. We could also mention the general comfort of use with its superb screen, its ceramic back and its sober and very fluid interface. In short, the Oppo Find X5 Pro is undoubtedly a smartphone that you will remember for a long time.
Source: Frandroid – Chloé Pertuis
Source: Frandroid – Chloé Pertuis
The only real black spot on the board is therefore this sudden collapse. This puts us in the somewhat strange situation of praising a phone for excellent reasons when it only lasted us 6 months. That said, Oppo’s arguments seemed reasonable to us, regarding the fact that our test sample hadn’t passed all the usual certifications. If we can hear you, however, we have made the decision to inform you so that you can make an informed choice based on comprehensive user feedback.
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