OPPO Find 5 Review
by Vivek Gowri on May 29, 2013 6:55 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Qualcomm
- Mobile
- APQ8064
- OPPO Find 5
We’re pretty familiar with APQ8064 by now, it’s just quad-core Krait (or Krait 200 in the new Qualcomm branding scheme) and Adreno 320. Five months ago, this was world class, though obviously now outclassed by Snapdragon 600-based handsets. Phones are iterating very quickly nowadays, so it’s hard for any one SoC to stay on top of the market for more than 6 months at a time. Snapdragon S4 Pro devices started hitting shelves in November, and by the end of April, handsets with the next generation Krait were already hitting market. Even now, there are a multitude of quad-A15 handsets as well as Snapdragon 800 right around the corner. Ah yes, the never ending iterative cycle of the smartphone world.
Krait 200 doesn’t count as slow, but it clearly isn’t as fast as Krait 300 on a per-clock basis, and the higher frequencies of the newer Snapdragon parts gives those a solid performance edge. I don’t really have much else to say - this isn’t a new SoC, and we’ve seen it a few times - so I’ll just post the benchmarks. I, like Brian and Anand, am none too thrilled about the state of CPU benchmarks on Android, since they’re all browser-based, but until we get something better, this is what we have to work with.
Power management is handled by Qualcomm’s PM8921 PMIC, which we’ve also seen in the Nexus 4, amongst others. The hardware here is actually pretty similar to what we see in the latest Nexus device (other than the display, camera, and baseband, which I’ll get to), which is another potential reason why it’s seen surprisingly quick adoption by third party developers (especially getting official support from Paranoid Android, who usually start with Nexus devices and let others port to more mainstream handsets like the Galaxy S3).
Throttling is becoming a big deal with phones, and it’s important to address it. The throttling thresholds for the OPPO start at 72C, at which point the maximum frequency of the cores drops to 1.18GHz, then 810MHz at 75C, eventually clocking all the way down to 384MHz at 90C. The eventual shutdown is triggered at 120C. I’m not sure what exactly I’d have to do to a phone to get it to 120C other than literally throwing it into a fire, but there you have it. In day to day use, I didn’t see it throttle, even when running benchmarks. I did induce a throttling scenario when using a high-current tablet brick to charge the Find 5 and running GLBenchmark to stress the system, but it’s nowhere near the Galaxy S4 in terms of throttling frequency. I never had a problem with throttling on either of my personal Nexus 4s, though we all know how much trouble Brian had on his evaluation unit, so your mileage may vary here.
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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