OPPO Find 5 Review
by Vivek Gowri on May 29, 2013 6:55 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Qualcomm
- Mobile
- APQ8064
- OPPO Find 5
Obviously, battery life is a huge concern for any high-end Android phone. We’ve been at the point where handsets have to be charged daily unless you’re willing to turn off a lot of things - my father has been running his Galaxy S3 on EDGE just to squeeze two days of runtime out of it and while that’s an extreme case, that’s just where phones are right now. The main difference seems to be that sometimes, you end up with phones that don’t actually get a full day out of the battery. The OPPO is one of those phones.
The Find 5 has a 2500 mAh li-poly battery that has a nominal voltage of 3.8V, giving it a 9.5 watt-hour capacity. That’s pretty much what we’re seeing in high-end handsets these days, slotting in right between the 9.88Wh SGS4 and the 8.74Wh HTC One. Runtime slots in between the Nexus 4 and the Droid DNA, nearly exactly where the Galaxy S3 was and not far off the S4, but well behind the comparatively stellar battery life of the One.
That’s not too bad, but it’s important to note that the battery life has improved significantly with newer firmware revisions. My first battery life tests with the Find 5 were in the 3.5-4 hour range, numbers that I honestly didn’t even think were possible. My first reaction was that I had set up the test wrong or that the phone had shut off partway through the test with battery still remaining. Subsequent revisions have improved that, and the ~6 hours of battery life we’re seeing now is much more in line with what I had originally expected. In the process, I had the Find 5 die on me during the day more often than almost any phone that I can remember. It’s more reasonable now, but battery life still isn’t something I would call good. Tolerable, more like.
OPPO ships the Find 5 with a 5V, 1A charger that’s pretty small for a device with a battery this large. It takes 5:31 to charge fully, and I really think that the output of OEM charging bricks needs to increase to match the near-doubling in battery capacity over the last three years. I’ve been charging my phones with more powerful tablet power bricks for as long as I can remember, because that’s the only way to get reasonable charging times with the devices that have 10Wh of battery capacity onboard.
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VivekGowri - Friday, May 31, 2013 - link
Yeah okay, that was supposed to be polycarbonate, my apologies. It got missed among the other eight thousand words, Klug read over it twice before it posted too so we had enough internal editing, this just slipped through.Sertis - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link
The button layout isn't too bad, having the power on the left side makes it less likely you'll turn off the device if you suddenly grip it tightly (if you're right handed, you'll apply much more pressure with your thumb than the other 4 fingers on the opposite side). Still, i'd rather have the button on the top. My (more agile) thumb can more easily pick and choose closely spaced buttons than my fingers so having buttons that won't "punish be by turning off the device if I hit the wrong one" on the right side is okay with me.Death666Angel - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link
Wow, that's a lot of annoying software bugs. The cheap Chinese phone my wife has looks pretty good compared to that. Granted, it has and old dual core A9 SoC and only 720p (basically an SGS3 rip off), but it cost 165€. The Oppo Find 5 is currently listed for 466€ here (1 listing only). Not a good deal. If I don't want to deal with importing a cell phone (which one has to do to get the good deals on the Chinese stuff), I'd rather take an SGS3 for 330€ or spend up on the SGS4 for 550€ (HTC One is listed at 590€).Death666Angel - Friday, May 31, 2013 - link
Quote: "This is obviously less of a factor in Europe and Asia, where the prices are more equivalent"I can get the Nexus 4 for 299/349€ in the play store (+9€ shipping) here in Germany. That's about as pricey as the US variant, is it not (including the VAT thing)? :)
BeauCharles - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link
Wow, strange that Oppo would get into this market. I own an Oppo DVD player and still use it regularly in this Blu-Ray era. Shame the phone doesn't live up the same level of performance (right now anyway) its DVD/Blu-Ray players do. Oppo is very good about firmware support with those and customer service in general - hopefully that'll be the case with the phonesmars2k - Friday, May 31, 2013 - link
Oppo may be unheard of in the phone sector but they have unheard of status in the home theater segment. They have completely re-written the book first with DVD playback and then with a series of giant killer BlueRay players. One player after another they have blown the competition out of the water in price/performance. They now make a universal player, BDP-105 whose performance cannot be beat without going into the stratosphere on cost. So much so that spending more is essentially pointless.If they pursue the phone market the way they went after DVD and BlueRay playback we will all soon be using Oppo phones.
Death666Angel - Friday, May 31, 2013 - link
The Oppo BDP-105 is going for 1340€ here in Germany. Isn't that stratosphere cost already? :P Seems like it integrates A/V receiver stuff as well. I don't like that. More hassle to upgrade. Oh well.tom5 - Saturday, June 8, 2013 - link
They recently started shipping this in Europe, unfortunately it doesnt support UMTS 900 MHz band that is widely used in Europe.But the biggest show stopper for me is the battery life - today this is the biggest problem in phones so the manufacturers must do everything to make battery life longer. This is where you experience matters, Oppo don't have this experience so we see the results: a phone that won't last you a day.
aranyak - Wednesday, December 2, 2015 - link
Oppo Find 5 is definitely one of the greatest creations of the company, however, Oppo recently made a announcement about Oppo Find 9 which i heard in http://www.techvicity.com/ .. well the phone is believed to be the flagship phone of the company in 2016 with 3 GB of RAM and 64 GB internal storage, that is something else man, really can't wait for it