Oppo find 5 review

[Eyal]

Oppo Find 5 review!

 

I should have done that a long time ago. But better late than never.

 

Background:

 

This is the first Android phone I owned, before that I used an iPhone 4s, Back at the time I didn't know any better, and didn't care much about it. However as I started to develop interest in the PC industry, I also started to notice that my phone isn't nearly as interesting as most android phones, lacking customazation abilities and a small display that forced me to zoom in while web browsing a lot more often. Any way, this isn't an iPhone review. I wanted to switch to android for a long time, but I was locked in a contract. As soon as the contract ended I orded the Oppo Find 5 from the Oppo style store. To my surprise the shipping was very fast, less than 10 days (usally shipping to Israel from almost anywhere is over 3 weeks or express shiping that costs much more).

When it arrived I was super excited and thrilled, and I wanted to know how does a 5” phone feels in the hand, how sharp that 1920x1080 IPS display really is.

 

 

 

Display:

 

When I pressed the power button to boot it for the first time, the Oppo logo puped up and it was so sharp and beautyfull! I started looking at the preloaded photos that came in the phone and they where super sharp.

After I used it for enough time I came to conclude that the display's color reproduction is better than any other phone I have ever seen, better than the OLED display on the Samsung Galaxy S4, and light years ahead my old iPhone. The display has a slight undersaturation for reds and the green was slightly more saturated than most displays the blue was very natural, I actually prefer that color over a natural color so I was happy to see that. The contrast ratio was not as good as I expected, but way better than some phones like the Xperia ZL (which I have used for about 30 minutes) but oviusly not anywhere near the EPIC contrast rasio of the OLED display on the Samsung Galaxy S4.

The brightness can go really low, at the lowest brightness you can comfortably read at night. And at the highest settings you can look at it outdoors very well and the reflection is relativly small.

The viewing angles are fantastic and it comes useful when showing a video to a bunch of friends or other scenarios like that.

 

Sadly my unit wasn't perfect, I had two dead pixels in there. I can only notice them when the area around the dead pixels is black or very dark. And you see two bright white dots (can be visible only from some angles. I tried to contact Oppo via email, twitter, facebook multiple times. Sometimes I got a replay on facebook that tells me to contact them via email. And I sent an email again with no responds. I decided to forget all about it, and move on.

 

 

 

Speaker:

 

The speaker is one of the (if not) the best quality built in speaker on a mobile phone I've ever listend to. The speaker is relativly large and I never happend to block the speaker unintentionally. I still wish it had a front facing speakers like the Nexus 10, HTC one, and the Galaxy Note 10.1.

 

 

 

Audio quality when pluging headphones:

 

The quality is slighly better than the one on the iPhone, but I haven't tried to listen to music in other smartphones, so I don't have a good perspective on that. And comes no where near the sound of my Xonar DX, but that's to be expected.

Battery life:

 

I'm a massively heavy user when it comes to battery life, I even was able to repetdly drain the Galaxy Note II's massive battery in a day. It probably has something to do with my horrible network carrie, when I was traveling in NYC I used AT&T and I had at least 50% longer standby time and 20% longer 3G web browsing time. This phone has a 2500mAh battery, and the phone usally lasts me until 4PM which is a huge improvmant over my old iPhone that I drained every day in around 1PM, and the Galaxy Note II lasted me untill 6:30PM on a single charge. So I'm impressed with the battery life of this phone.

 

 

Conectivity:

 

The phone does not supprt LTE, which is fine for me because there will be no LTE in my country until 2016.

To show you speed test results will not be fair for Oppo, because my carrier is very very slow, but signal strength was one bar better than other phones that are connected to the same network. Same thing goes for WiFi performance, I can only tell you that the signal strength is much better than in my notebook, and better than most phones I had the chance to try out.

 

 

Performance:

 

The performance are solid, and smooth for the most parts (until you use facebook home, although fixed in an update), and sometimes (once a week) the YouTube app would crush which is very annoing. But not frequent enough to call it a major flaw. The way I browse the web, I bring most phones to they're knees because I open a ton of tabs. The iPhone wasn't able to keep up with my massive browsing habbits and this one was the first phone I didn't complain about the web browsing on the daily bases, only once in a while I could notice chrome not responding. Gaming performance are great, I was expecting the phone to have a really hard time keeping up with that massive 1920x1080 resolution, but it did.

I should mention that the phone gets hot when you play high performace games and heavy browsing and multitasking.

 

 

 

Skin:

 

Most reviewers didn't like the skin that was put over Android 4.1, I used it for a while without rooting (for the review) and after a while I rooted it (out of curiosity) and flashed CM 10.1 nighly version and it was very unstable, so I decided to try the ColorROM, nice features but I found myself going back to the original Oppo skin, and frankly, I don't think it's a bad skin and I have no problem keep using it (with nova launcher), and wait until the 3^rd pary ROMs will be more stable and than I will try them again, I kept my phone rooted for some cool stuff like Titanum backup and Underclocking (I haven't tried underclocked it yet, but I will in the not too distanced future).

 

 

Camera:
 

With the 13 MP camera you get what you would expect, great photos when you have a lot of light, and poor photos in low light.

I haven't yet tried any 3^rd party camera app, and in the stock app the user interface is simple, even too simple. Meaning, there are a lot of missing features like ISO control, shutter speed and the autofocuse is very basic.

As I said before, when you have proper light conditions you can take some nice photos.

Here you go:

 

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8hoE9etTQ5VMzlIQzI4aFhUU2s/edit?usp=sharing

 

 

Calls:

I rarely make phonecalls at all, so take it with a grain of salt. Phone calls where nice and I have no complaints about it, the other person usally can hear my loud and clear.

 

 

Sorry for the novel. Let me know what you think? Any questions?

Also, I want to know if you think this review is good or bad or missing something, I want to make more reviews in the future.

Edited August 20, 2013 by Eyal

[TheSLSAMG]

Calls:

I rarely make phonecalls at all, so take it with a grain assault. Phone calls where nice and I have no complaints about it, the other person usally can hear my loud and clear.

 

Very good review, but it's a "grain of salt."

[Eyal]

Very good review, but it's a "grain of salt."

Corrected! Thanks

[qwertywarrior]

oppo is very VERY developer friendly

if u want to try out AOSP u can easily flash it with no trouble

( i believe oppo has an image available on their site)

 

if u want the heat to go away just limit the clock of the phone not to exceed lets say 1ghz

when i play a game normally full clock usage is over kill an just heats up the phone so i just limit it to 800mhz ( i own a one S)

[Eyal]

oppo is very VERY developer friendly

if u want to try out AOSP u can easily flash it with no trouble

( i believe oppo has an image available on their site)

 

if u want the heat to go away just limit the clock of the phone not to exceed lets say 1ghz

when i play a game normally full clock usage is over kill an just heats up the phone so i just limit it to 800mhz ( i own a one S)

I know that, I beleive they are the only manufacturers that if you root the phone it will not void the warranty. I'm not sure about that, that's why I didn't mention that in the review.

[qwertywarrior]

I know that, I beleive they are the only manufacturers that if you root the phone it will not void the warranty. I'm not sure about that, that's why I didn't mention that in the review.

they are concentrating on the enthusiast market

for example when they released the oppo 5 they gave like 4 free phones to developers at XDA to make a CM10 build for them

 

if the nexus 5 doesnt impress me ill defiantly buy and oppo  but the price is a bit steep

 

currently users will go with sony nexus or oppo since HTC and samsung especially are complete Aholes

they keep lying to the dev community over and over

[ComputerNoob]

Nice review! inb4 someone quotes the whole review..

[Eyal]

Nice review! inb4 someone quotes the whole review..

What's inb4?

[ComputerNoob]

What's inb4?

in before someone quotes the whole review. Which luckily did not happend.

[Eyal]

in before someone quotes the whole review. Which luckily did not happend.

Yes, that would take a whole page 0_o

[Korindo]

 

 

Skin:

 

Most reviewers didn't like the skin that was put over Android 4.1, I used it for a while without rooting (for the review) and after a while I rooted it (out of curiosity) and flashed CM 10.1 nighly version and it was very unstable, so I decided to try the ColorROM, nice features but I found myself going back to the original Oppo skin, and frankly, I don't think it's a bad skin and I have no problem keep using it (with nova launcher), and wait until the 3^rd pary ROMs will be more stable and than I will try them again, I kept my phone rooted for some cool stuff like Titanum backup and Underclocking (I haven't tried underclocked it yet, but I will in the not too distanced future).

 

 

 

 

To be honest, its the only thing I couldn't stand to make myself buy a personal OPPO Find 5. I just can't stand the skin personally. And I must say I had the same experience as yourself in terms of an unstable root.

 

Personally I prefer stock android with no skin over it.

[Eyal]

To be honest, its the only thing I couldn't stand to make myself buy a personal OPPO Find 5. I just can't stand the skin personally. And I must say I had the same experience as yourself in terms of an unstable root.

 

Personally I prefer stock android with no skin over it.

I do prefer stock, but unlike most people I don't hate this skin. I have no problem waiting till CM will come up with a more stable ROM... Although ColorRom was more stable than the CM nighly.. I still find myself keeping the original skin.