It’s been months since the Oppo Find X5 Pro was launched in several countries across the world. At the time, there was a slight possibility of it coming to India. Fast forward to June and the Find X5 Pro isn’t coming to India. That’s truly a shame, as the Find X5 Pro is a wonderful smartphone that can compete with the likes of Apple and Samsung. Its Achilles heel: The price and availability.
Yes, the Find X5 Pro from Oppo retails for around ₹1,09,900. At that price, consumers automatically go for either an Apple or a Samsung smartphone. No other company practically has a chance in that price range. Yet, some part of me thinks, that if the Find X5 Pro had ever made its way to the second-most populous country on Planet Earth, it might have sold a fair few units more than it initially expected.
You may ask why I’m saying that. It comes after using the FInd X5 Pro for over two weeks and putting it through its paces. The smartphone ticks off almost all the boxes. It’s got a lovely screen, great battery life, a good primary camera, and an intuitive design. It’s just priced much higher than one would have liked.
Forget the front of the smartphone. Almost instantly, it’s the back panel that will draw you in. It’s got that moulded design with the camera lump fully enveloped. This is all in a single piece of ceramic material that feels as smooth as ever. It’s a glossy back colour that is as reflective as ever. The only downside? It’s smoothness. The back is so smooth that it’ll slide off anything that isn’t flat. This necessitates the use of a case.
Other than that, its build quality is absolutely fantastic. The width is narrow, making the in-hand feel wonderful. It may be slightly heavier than its rivals but not enough to put anyone off.
There are two colour options - Glaze Black and Ceramic White - and Oppo sent me the former option for review. The smartphone is protected by Gorilla Glass Victus, which should help if it does slide off your chair, table or sofa. The Find X5 Pro also comes with an IP68 rating for dust and water resistance.
The downside of a ceramic back is that the panel is an absolute fingerprint magnet. There’s no way to even hide it unless you clean it off every fifteen minutes.
On the front is a 6.7-inch AMOLED display surrounded by slim bezels (the bottom one is slightly more noticeable than the others) and comes with a 120Hz refresh rate. It’s a 20:9 screen with a QHD+ resolution (1440x3216) and a peak brightness of 500 nits.
There are the volume control buttons on the left, while the power button is on the right side. There’s an in-display fingerprint sensor (that works better than most of the competition) and face unlock (that again works pretty well).
The Find X5 Pro comes with the best-in-class chipset from Qualcomm. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chip paired with 12GB of RAM means that the Find X5 Pro will almost never lag.
Day to day performance was breezy. The only downside is that the smartphone gets a little bit warm when gaming for prolonged hours or snapping a lot of photos in a short period of time. The smartphone comes with Oppo’s own ColorOS12 software based on Android 12. It’s a heavily customised look and takes some getting used to.
ColorOS 12 comes with several new features including a much-needed one-handed mode. It’s smoother and more customisable than it used to be, but in my opinion, still far from being the best in class.
Battery life is another area where Oppo has got it right. With a 5,000mAh battery inside the smartphone, you can easily use the smartphone for a day and a half on a single charge with a usage pattern that doesn’t involve prolonged gaming sessions. Screen-on-time was easily over five gours even with the QHD+ resolution selected.
With every setting on full, I still managed to have about 15-20 per cent left at the end of a full day. There’s an 80W SuperVOOC wired charger included in the box. This can charge the phone from zero to 50 per cent in just 12 minutes. Furthermore, there’s also wireless charging that comes in as 50W. With this, going from zero to 100 per cent will take just under 50 minutes.
Just like its sister brand OnePlus, Oppo has also partnered with Hasselblad to fine-tune its cameras. There are three cameras on the back (50MP main sensor + 50MP ultrawide + 13MP telephoto (2x optical zoom)) along with a 32MP selfie camera on the front.
Let’s talk about that main 50MP camera. In a range of lighting conditions, including low light, the cameras produce good images, with excellent details and very little noise. Sometimes, you may notice some oversaturating, but on the whole, it does a fantastic job.
Shooting a video with the Find X5 Pro is quite a good experience. It has great stabilisation in the 1080p mode.
Let’s come to the 50MP ultrawide camera. On the whole, it is good, but more often than not, it produces images that look washed out. The 13MP 2x telephoto camera does a decent job but is far inferior to the other two cameras. In fact, it is miles behind the competition at this price point. Phone from Vivo, Samsung and Apple have optical zooms that get you much closer to your intended subject.
The Hasselblad partnership also needs some fine-tuning. All we get is the “XPan” mode in the software. “Capture cinematic panoramas and vintage-style photos in the legendary XPan format. Experience the golden age of photography embraced by the future.” Essentially, this mode flashes your shot like a negative, takes too long to process, crops the top and bottom, and delivers a 5-megapixel image.
The only other area where the Find X5 Pro stumbles is in the software. Yes, ColorOS has improved by miles in the last few years but there is one thing that still troubles me year after year: bloatware. Yes, the Find X5 Pro comes with over 20 pre-installed apps, most of which you wouldn’t want to use. There’s also a third-party app store that is wholly unnecessary.
Thankfully, most of the apps can be uninstalled, and you can replace them with your favourite apps from the Google Play store.
The Find X5 Pro is a slick, fast and good-looking high-end Android smartphone. It’s got almost everything you’d want from a flagship smartphone. There’s the top-of-the-line chip from Qualcomm, great battery life, a high-quality AMOLED screen, a unique back design, super-fast charging, and a promise of four years of software updates.
To add to that, the main camera on the back is very good.
The Find X5 Pro stumbles in its collaboration with Hasselblad, the Find X3 Pro’s macro camera is no more, and the ultrawide camera is disappointing and has a ton of bloatware that can put off any potential buyer.
Oppo’s Find X5 Pro may be its best smartphone in years but it still has a long way to go to justify its sky-high asking price. Oppo has shown that it can make a great flagship smartphone. Once the niggles are sorted (and there is more availability), then flagships from Oppo will truly shine.
