OPPO R5 review: A delicately sleek and swift Android

With new Chinese smartphone manufacturers entering the India market, the competition seems to put pressure on the Indian counterpart. Xiaomi, the recent Chinese tech giant, has given the budget smartphone segment a completely different meaning. However, budget smartphones are not what people hunt around all the time. There are millions of smartphone hunters who are looking for performance and looks, but cannot afford the elite devices from Apple and alike. OPPO, a Chinese electronics manufacturer, who entered India early last year, has a couple of handsets under its belt. Recently, they took the market by a storm by releasing one of the slimmest handsets in the market—the R5. We took the device for a spin and here is what we saw.

The Gionee S5.1 was the slimmest smartphone on the planet (5.15mm), until OPPO launches the R5 to win the title at 4.85mm. However, it seems that Vivo X5Max has taken the title away from OPPO by shaving the crust by just one millimeter (4.75mm).

The OPPO R5 was a challenge for the company to produce one of the finest smartphones ever. They achieved it with creating a sleek 5.2-inch handset, encased with reinforced industrial steel with a material adapted to steal the heat away from the internal components. When heat is generated, the material is designed to absorb it and improve the thermal efficiency of the hardware within.

Truly speaking, the OPPO R5 is designed well—encased by metal; the R5 doesn’t feel cheap from any angle. The device is so slim that OPPO had to do away with the headphone jack too, and retrieve the audio from the USB port itself. Made with a unibody design, the R5 does not have a rear panel. The sandblasted rear panel and sides feels and looks like a premium handset. The front panel sports the large 5.2-inch full HD AMOLED display with the three capacitive buttons on the bottom and the earpiece, sensors and front camera on the top. The right side holds the volume rocker and power button, while he left side houses the micro SIM tray. A micro USB slot and a hole for the microphone are seen on the bottom.

The rear panel sports the 13MP camera along with a single LED flash and a secondary microphone just next to it. Sadly, the camera protrudes slightly from the rear, threatening to get scratched or damaged when kept on the table or any rough surface. OPPO has bundled a hard plastic rear guard for the handset, but it still won’t protect the camera surface. You may need to be careful while laying down the phone on uneven surfaces. The OPPO R5 measures a measly 4.85mm thick and weighs 155g.

Moving down under, the OPPO R5 is built using some powerful hardware, though not the very latest as you may expect. Build using a Snapdragon 615 chipset, the OPPO R5 cruises on an octa-core 1.5GHz processor along with 2GB of RAM and an Adreno 4.5 graphics engine. The display is a crisp 5.2-incher AMOLED full HD 1080x1920 pixels. The internal storage supplied is just 16GB, and sadly, there is no expansion for the storage and you would have to rely on USB OTG flash drives, online storage or network drives in order to keep large data.

The USP of the device is the camera—a 13MP camera with a Sony Exmor IMX214 BSI sensor. The camera app sports an f/20 aperture and features shooting modes such as Normal, Ultra-HD, Colorful Night, Slow Shutter, Expert Mode, Beautify, HDR, Panorama, Audio Photo, GIF, Double Exposure, Raw, Super Macro and After Focus. The front camera is a 5MP with an 83-degree wide angle lens and an aperture of f/20. Good selfies, the front camera also features a few modes for faces.

On the connectivity front, the OPPO R5 features 4G/3G/HSPA, Wi-Fi a/b/g/n dual band, GPS, GLONASS, Bluetooth v4.0 and USB host. The slim form factor OPPO R5 houses a 2000mAh battery and runs on ColorOS v2.0, based on Android KitKat v4.4. Bundled along with the device is a flash charger, a pair of in-ear earphones, a micro USB to 3.5mm audio adaptor, micro USB cable and a SIM ejector tool. Available in silver and grey colours, the OPPO R5 is priced at Rs 29,990 in India.

As far as the performance is concerned, we did not find any lags or stutters. The R5 sports a mid-range chipset from Qualcomm Snapdragon—the SD615. Sporting eight cores, four clocked at 1.7GHz and the rest a 1GHz, the user interface is well balanced and you won’t feel any issues. Don’t expect stellar performances as you cannot compare this to the new SD 8 series chipsets available on high-end smartphones in the market today. However, for the record, the OPPO R5 manages to be at par (or even beat it in certain cases) with the SD 801-chipset based smartphones.

The ColorOS user interface gives you a great experience, with loads of tweaks and features. When starting the smartphone, you would need to complete the setup procedures to begin with. However, you may not like the initial theme that comes along with the device. You can opt for thousands of themes that are available for free, online, and apply them instantaneously to the UI. The device performs great with the smooth user interface and lively themes.

The display is an AMOLED full HD, produces rich and vibrant colours, with pitch blacks, giving you a great experience while watching movies or viewing photos. The display has a great viewing angle with absolutely no issues from any corner of the display. The AMOLED display also is highly visible in broad daylight, although in direct sunlight, you may have to turn up the brightness levels accordingly. However, the non-reflective screen also plays a role in giving you the best display experience in direct sunlight.

OPPO has surprisingly managed tweak the speaker on the R5 by using a good quality earpiece. The earpiece doubles as the main system speaker. The audio is loud enough for enjoying casual music and videos while indoors, but when outdoors, you would need to put on the headphones in order to enjoy the music. The audio, though above average, lacks bass, but isn’t as bad as one would expect. Since the speaker is front-facing, you don’t lose out on any audio volume. However, it would have been better if there were stereo speakers on the handset for a better audio experience. OPPO found it almost impossible to accommodate the headphone jack on the device—thanks to the 4.85mm thin body where the 3.5-mm jack is pretty difficult to squeeze in. However, the micro USB slot has been intelligently designed to give out stereo audio output for the headphones. Bundled along with the R5 is a micro USB to 3.5mm adapter for the headphones. Lose it or damage it and you would end up spending for a new one, else you may have to opt for a Bluetooth headset for it.

OPPO has been concentrating on the camera on their smartphones and the R5 is no stranger here. Sporting a 13MP Sony sensor, the camera is also a USP, apart from the slim design. The technology used in the OPPO R5 is the same used on the OPPO Find 7. The camera is capable of capturing Ultra HD pictures, which is almost close to a 25MP image. However, you have to ensure you have a stable hand and a brightly lit subject. The camera’s interface is simple and straightforward with easy to use controls. The focus is rapid and so is the shutter speed.

Above: Non-HDR and HDR Mode

The camera interface is limited to a number of options, but you can go to the settings and add a couple of features and enable them when required. HDR, GIF, Super Macro, RAW, expert and a few others are available for the camera interface.

Photos captured by the OPPO R5’s 13MP camera are surprisingly great. Low noise levels and high details are the main advantages of the camera. Colours production is natural and contrast levels are great too. Above and below are a few images for your disposal. We leave you to judge the quality of the camera.

Above: Image taken indoors to check the Ultra HD photo capture. (Inset: picture in normal mode)

To round up the entire review, we would like to say that the OPPO R5 a unique smartphone, fit for style, fashion and performance. A few disappointing features that we would like to highlight are the missing 3.5mm audio jack, a missing micro SD card slot, a slightly low battery capacity and the below-average speaker volume. If you prefer a smartphone with premium looks, sleek design, good photo photography on the go and a great display, the OPPO R5 is a great smartphone. Though there are others in the market that could be surprisingly close to the features that the R5 can offer, nothing yet compares to the sleek, all-in-one that you can find on this one.