Oppo Find X5 Pro Review: Strong contender

Oppo cemented itself as one of the finest Android smartphone makers with the Find X5 Pro, so much so that it remains an attractive option a year after launch. It’s a rival to some of the best phones around and manages to take some risks in the process. Not all the pieces are winners, but on the whole, this remains an excellent phone.

Introduction

The Oppo Find X5 Pro is a 2022 flagship phone that matches the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra at a technical level, jamming in as many high-end specs and features into its frame as possible.

Like the Samsung rival, the Find X5 Pro aims to create a no-compromise device for buyers that want the best Android phone possible and are prepared to pay for it.

In the past few years, Oppo has established itself in the high-end space. The Find X2 Pro won our Phone of the Year gong after release and the Find X3 Pro was up there with the best phones I reviewed in 2021.

It’s worth noting that it has been replaced by the newer Find X6 Pro in China, but considering it doesn’t have an international release on the cards, the Find X5 Pro remains at the top of Oppo’s international collection in 2023.

Screen and Design

• Very shiny back and a standout design
• Big 6.7-inch display with good colours
• Grey and White colour options

Oppo has fitted the Find X5 Pro out with a ceramic back which sports a very (very) shiny finish. This is easily one of the glossiest finishes I have ever seen on a phone and it means you’ll be wiping off fingerprints on an hourly basis if you want it to avoid it looking messy.

While there was a glossy finish option with the X3 Pro, I reviewed the matte version and It feels like an odd decision to go high gloss for both the black and white finishes here – especially as a matte fingerprint-resistant finish is far more common now across the best Android phones we’ve tested.

The finish aside, the rest of the Oppo Find X5 Pro looks great and, importantly, unique – there isn’t really another phone that looks like it. It features the usual array of touches I would expect in a flagship phone like an IP68 rating for some form of water resistance and a high-end finish. The camera bump almost melts into the body, while the Gorilla Glass Victus display curves around the edges. It’s got a very soft finish that feels really nice to hold.

During a briefing ahead of the release, Oppo reps said the Find X5 Pro has a slightly rejigged camera module when compared to the Find X3 Pro. The module has been shifted up slightly, supposedly so your fingers don’t encroach on the camera lenses. This might be the internal reason, but really I can’t see much difference after using it for over a month.

Oppo has impressed me with its displays in the past, and that trend continues here. The 6.7-inch, 1440p OLED screen here is colourful and rich, with perfect blacks and plenty of brightness for outdoor use. Put it next to the Galaxy S22 Ultra and it’s not quite as bright when watching HDR video on Netflix, but I can’t imagine many noticing the difference unless you have the two phones next to each other.

The Find X5 Pro uses an LTPO panel, allowing it to move between 1 and 120Hz depending on what you’re doing. Oppo also claims the screen can display two different refresh rates at once, so if you’re using WhatsApp on the top portion and YouTube on the bottom, both can refresh independently. Using the phone day-to-day I didn’t find a need to take advantage of the feature that often, but it’s an interesting development in mobile screen tech, nonetheless, that could help further elevate the impact high refresh rate tasks have on phones.

Camera

• Three cameras on the back, and two are excellent
• Various night modes for both videos and photos
• 32MP front cameras for selfies

In many ways, the Oppo Find X5 Pro’s camera is one of the strongest I have tested. Both the wide and ultra wide arrays take fantastic snaps, full of rich colour and vibrancy in all manner of situations.

The zoom camera, though, is fairly disappointing for such an expensive phone and the gimmicky (yet very clever) microscopic camera from the Find X3 Pro has been ditched completely. These sacrifices are worth it if you value a really quality ultra-wide lens above all else, but there seems little reason why we couldn’t have had quality zoom thrown in too. It’s not like Oppo can’t do zoom cameras either, as the Find X2 Pro had one of the best of the best around a few years ago.

I’ve spent a month shooting with the Find X5 Pro and I am constantly impressed by the wide and ultra wide pictures it churns out. Snaps taken in daylight are rich in vibrant colours and facial tones, while it can manage low-light and even deep night scenarios with just as much skill. The phone has great stabilisation, both three-axis sensor shift and two-axis lens shift, and this allows for longer exposures in poorer conditions. Pull this phone out in a dim bar and you’ll see less blurry results, even compared to the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra.

I shot hundreds of snaps over a weekend in Barcelona and these two cameras brought out the vibrancy in the sunny weather, with the HDR modes doing a great job at levelling out the scenes. If I was being picky, I would say the detail picked up here isn’t quite on par with the iPhone 13 Pro or S22 Ultra. Fur, on dogs and cats especially, isn’t as sharp as I have seen in some of its competitors, and I noticed this too when shooting landscapes of old Spanish buildings. 

Whereas other phones have one, usually far superior, sensor to take the bulk of the shots and a secondary sensor for the ultra wides, the Find X5 Pro treats both as equals. You’ll find the same 50MP sensor behind both lenses and this leads to comfortably the finest ultra-wide shots I have taken on a phone.

There’s no distortion at the edges, the 110-degree field of view is wide enough for striking landscapes and the colours do an excellent job of matching those from the regular wide camera. It does suffer more in low light, though.

In terms of actual specs, the hardware for these two sensors is the same as you’d find on the previous model. Yet, the snaps are noticeably better and that likely comes down to Oppo’s MariSilicon processing chip that deals with the machine learning skills, photo processing and other aspects of the camera usually dealt with by the main chipset.

I was less impressed by the Hasselblad additions. Oppo, like OnePlus, has partnered with the famed imaging brand but it just feels like an excuse to slap some more branding on the back of the phone. Hasselblad hasn’t done anything to the camera module itself, instead it has offered up some nice filters, a decent Pro mode and an orange shutter button. The only interesting addition is a super-wide XPAN shooting mode that I was quite taken with. This shoots in a letterboxed 65:24 aspect ratio and the results, along with the experience of shooting them, is impressively quaint. I won’t use this mode a lot, but it is enjoyable nevertheless.

The final rear-facing camera is a 13-megapixel effort (with an f/2.4 lens) and this is used for zoom. There’s no periscope tech housed inside and it seems to just crop in a bit further on images. The results are fine – but not a match for the Galaxy S22 Ultra and not even as good as Oppo’s 2019 effort. There’s also a 32MP camera on the front that can move between 80 and 90-degree views depending on how many faces you’re trying to cram in.

Video can be shot in up to 4K 60fps and the stabilisation skills make for some steady footage. There’s even a 4K Ultra Night Video mode that, Oppo says, can shoot at 5 lux which is very, very dark. 

Performance

• Top-end internals across the board
• 256GB storage, 12GB RAM

This is a flagship phone, sitting at the top of the Find X5 line. As a result, it’s jammed with top-end specs including the 4nm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipset powering the phone, 12GB RAM, 256GB storage and a hefty vapour chamber to disperse heat. There is a newer Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 available in 2023 that’ll beat the Gen 1 in benchmarks, but both offer a super-fast experience in real-world settings.

Bigger cooling systems were a theme with high-end phones in early 2022, likely as a result of the 8 Gen 1 chip which runs quite hot. Aside from the usual ramp-up while installing all my apps, the Find X5 Pro has stayed relatively cool during testing – more so than the S22 Ultra when gaming. Shooting long spurts of 4K video and extended intensive gaming sessions did make the phone start to feel a little toasty, though.

The Find X5 Pro was one of the first high-end phones to use the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. The 4nm construction is there to improve efficiency and while there are some performance gains when compared to the outgoing Snapdragon 888, they’re fairly minimal. This is represented in our suite of internal benchmark tests and real-world comparisons. Gaming performance is excellent though and this can easily churn through most well-optimised games at the highest available settings.

These high-end internals, paired with that adaptive 120hz display, make the software here a pleasure to swipe around on. Oppo’s ColorOS Android layer has improved so much in recent years and, while I prefer the look of the UI on the Pixel range, the design here is much better than Samsung’s One UI. Oppo is also promising three years of Android updates (four years of security patches) which is always appreciated.

There is a smattering of little touches I really appreciate, like the detailed always-on display clocks and the great sleep sounds app. It’s a shame then that the software feels a little unfinished. Apps, especially video ones, don’t rotate (or take a moment longer than they should to do it) while I’ve had more app crashes here than on any phones in recent memory.

There’s also a seriously large amount of bloatware preinstalled on the phone that I really would like to see ditched. Amazon, Facebook, even PUBG mobile, are all here and while they can be deleted, they shouldn’t be there in the first place on a high-end phone like this.

Battery Life

• Adequate endurance
• Fantastic charging speeds
• Wired and wireless charging

5000mAh has become the battery size of choice for the 2022 (and 2023) flagships and while I previously felt confident about a cell this big lasting a full day without any issue, I am not so convinced anymore. The Galaxy S22 Ultra, for instance, was an inconsistent performer in the endurance stakes and nothing running Android in this high-end territory has come close to beating the iPhone 13 Pro Max for longevity.

After using the Find X5 Pro for a month I feel confident in saying that, unless you’re splurging on intensive games and hammering the screen with high-brightness HDR video, it can easily be a phone that lasts all day and then into day two. I’d class myself as a heavy phone user (it comes with the job) and I managed around six hours of screen-on time here before I was reaching for the charger.

This is with all the features turned on too, like the maximum screen resolution, so if you tweak the settings then you can certainly stretch it out further.

The important thing is that when the phone does start to hit the red, it won’t take long at all to get back to 100%. The iPhone 13 Pro Max might have the endurance, but the Find X5 Pro’s 80w charging can get from 0-100% in a little over 30 minutes and a 15-minute charge will get you past 50%. 

Speeds like this mean you won’t be charging the phone overnight, but in those little bits of downtime, like during a morning run or while the kettle is boiling. Oppo is confident these faster speeds won’t degrade the battery quicker either, as it said the phone should last over 1600 charge cycles. Considering you’ll charge the phone once a day, this should easily last throughout the contract period with good battery health.

There’s fast wireless charging too, though you’ll need a specific 50w capable Qi pad to achieve those speeds.