Oppo Find X5 Pro review: A bit of a beauty

Arriving ahead of this year’s MWC trade show, Oppo’s latest high-priced flagship is butting heads with our favourite top-end handset of 2022 so far, the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra. And while it doesn’t come bundled with a stylus, the Oppo Find X5 Pro is every bit as special.

READ NEXT: The best smartphones of 2022

Like its predecessor, there’s no doubt that the Find X5 Pro leaves a spectacular first impression. Two questions remain, however: does it stand a chance of becoming a mainstay of flagship design and might it be the first flagship to push Oppo firmly into the limelight?

Buy now from Amazon

Oppo Find X5 Pro review: What you need to know

My headline says it all really. The Find X5 Pro is a stunning handset, and there’s really nothing else quite like it when it comes to aesthetics. I’ll go into more detail as we dig deeper into this review, but the good news is that elsewhere the Find X5 Pro is just as exciting.

You might be paying quite a lot for the privilege, but there’s no doubt you’re getting top-shelf componentry for your money here. Inside, you’ll find Qualcomm’s brand-spanking-new Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipset, which is so young that this is the first phone we’ve reviewed with one of these flagship mobile chipsets inside. This works alongside 12GB of RAM and 256GB of internal storage.

There’s a bigger 5,000mAh battery, too, which now supports lightning-quick 80W charging. A 6.7in QHD+ AMOLED display sits on the front, with a variable refresh rate of 120Hz, and there are a total of three Hasselblad cameras on the phone’s rear: a 50MP (f/1.7) main sensor, 13MP (f/2.4) 2x zoom and a 50MP (f/2.2) 110-degree ultrawide.

Oppo Find X5 Pro review: Price and competition

Like I said earlier, all this stuff doesn’t come cheap, but it’s not quite as expensive as its rivals. Arriving in the UK at the end of March, the Oppo Find X5 Pro is priced at £1,049, which is £100 cheaper than Samsung’s Galaxy S22 Ultra (£1,149).

It just so happens to cost the same amount as the iPhone 13 Pro Max (£1,049), so it might be a good alternative if you’ve been eyeing up Apple’s latest high-end flagship but would rather stay within the Android ecosystem.

On that note, it’s also £50 cheaper than the recently launched Huawei P50 Pro (£1,099). However, due to the restrictive software offering it’s not much of a rival at the moment.

Oppo Find X5 Pro review: Design and key features

Like 2021’s Find X3 Pro, this year’s model is an especially formidable flagship. Overflowing with features, the Find X5 Pro – Oppo skipped the Find X4 – also happens to be the sort of phone that draws admiring glances when you pull it out of your pocket on your daily commute.

READ NEXT: Best phone battery life

The Oppo Find X5 Pro’s design really is one of a kind. The unibody form factor returns, albeit with subtle tweaks to the overall construction. A ceramic sheet seamlessly wraps around the rear camera housing, replacing the glass panel of the previous model. Blending in nicely with the rest of the handset, this makes for a phone that looks just as lavish as its four-figure price suggests.

Another slight change is that the angle of the bottom edge of the camera housing is now ergonomically grooved to fit your index finger when you’re holding the phone. This not only makes the phone more comfortable to hold in one hand, but it also helps to alleviate potential finger smudges on the rear camera lenses. Not to mention that it gives the Find X5 Pro an extra bit of visual panache.

The Find X5 Pro comes in a choice of two colours: Glaze Black and Ceramic White. I was sent the black model for testing, and while its mirrored finish left a good impression, it was a bit of a fingerprint magnet. As you can probably tell, I lost the battle with trying to take smudge-free pictures of the phone for this review.

As you’d expect for a phone that costs as much as this, the Oppo Find X5 Pro is IP68-rated against dust and water ingress and, unlike the equally expensive Huawei P50 Pro, it can also connect to the 5G network in the UK. A fingerprint scanner is embedded under the screen, but it also supports face unlocks. The circumference of the selfie camera lights up whenever it tries to scan your face, too, which is a nice touch.

Oppo Find X5 Pro review: Display

The phone’s screen is a 6.7in AMOLED affair, with a QHD+ resolution and a maximum refresh rate of 120Hz. This display supports 10-bit colours, HDR10+ playback and has a 1,000Hz touch-sampling rate. And, like the S22 Ultra, the minimum refresh rate has also dropped to 1Hz, which should help boost battery life when performing simple actions such as reading an ebook.

As for the actual quality of the screen, everything is above board. With four colour modes to choose from, I found the Natural setting to be the most colour-accurate, with an sRGB gamut coverage of 94%, a total volume of 96% and an average Delta E of 1.31. Aside from the slightly boosted saturation in some red tones, every colour looked as good as can be.

It’s as vibrant as the best AMOLED screens around, too, with a measured peak brightness of 483cd/m2 and perfect contrast. HDR brightness was a bit on the low side, however, peaking at around 725cd/m2 – for reference, the iPhone 13 Pro Max reaches an eyeball-searing 1,176cd/m2.

Buy now from Amazon

Oppo Find X5 Pro review: Performance and battery life

The Find X5 Pro is one of the first smartphones to be powered by Qualcomm’s newest flagship mobile chipset, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. Clocked at 3GHz, this new CPU is built on a 4nm fabrication process, promising superior performance and power efficiency compared to the Snapdragon 888 it replaces. This new CPU works with 12GB of RAM, as well as 256GB of non-expandable internal storage.

And it’s a nippy little thing. This is the first Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 phone we’ve tested, and performance was rather good in our benchmarks, despite the somewhat marginal gains on the previous model. The Oppo Find X5 Pro achieved a score of 976 in the Geekbench 5 single-core test and 3,496 in multi-core processing – if you’re keeping count, this represents a slight speed boost of up to 7%.

It’s also a bit behind the S22 Ultra’s Exynos 2200 chip, while the iPhone 13 Pro Max’s A15 Bionic continues to leave everything else in the dust. This might look a bit weak in comparison, but in practice, the Find X5 Pro felt just as agile as any other recent flagship I’ve tested. It certainly didn’t feel as though the S22 Ultra was any faster with regards to boot-up times, app switching and the like.

Gaming performance, on the other hand, is much improved. Sadly, since you can’t force the 120Hz refresh rate on a per-app basis, our usual GFXBench Manhattan 3 onscreen test topped out at 60fps, so at first glance, it looks like there isn’t much of a boost here.

However, what you need to do is pay attention to the off-screen result, which more accurately reflects the raw power of the 8 Gen 1’s embedded Adreno GPU without the screen’s variable refresh getting in the way. Taking a look at the figures, what you’re actually getting is a frame rate improvement of around 44% – one of the biggest per-generation leaps we’ve seen for quite some time.

Of course, in actuality, you won’t be getting frame rates as high as these, especially if you plan on playing games at the maximum QHD+ resolution. The screen’s refresh rate is capped at 120fps for starters, and besides, you’ll have to find a game on the Google Play store that supports high-frame-rate gaming in the first place.

Moving on, the Find X5 Pro’s battery has increased in size from 4,500mAh to 5,000mAh. The phone’s wired charging speeds are now rated at a maximum of 80W (the fastest we’ve ever seen), with super-speedy 50W wireless charging. It can also reverse wireless charge devices up to 30W if you place them on the back of the phone and enable the setting in the notification drawer.

A new “multi-tier” cooling system is in place this year, which consists of a 75% larger vapour chamber covering the CPU and battery, with a graphene film placed on top of the motherboard and charging coil. Another ultra-thin graphene film is placed under the screen. Theoretically, this should help it to run for longer between charges.

So, how did the Oppo Find X5 Pro fare in our standardised battery rundown test? Pretty darn good, as it turns out. With all data connections switched off, screen brightness set to 170cd/m2 and a looped video displayed on the screen, the Find X5 Pro lasted for 24hrs 3mins before running dry. A two-day battery life certainly isn’t out of the question here.

Oppo Find X5 Pro review: Software

Like its predecessor, Android is at the heart of the Find X5 Pro, with Oppo’s ColorOS skin placed on top. New additions to ColorOS 12.1 include a host of productivity features, such as a new one-handed mode and floating windows – essentially the option to place apps on top of other apps.

One thing I don’t like is the amount of bloatware that comes preinstalled. The usual culprits – Facebook, Amazon Shopping, TikTok and PUBG Mobile, among others – are already installed on the phone when you boot it up for the first time, with AliExpress strangely making an appearance as well. Thankfully, these apps can all be deleted without much fuss.

In lighter news, Oppo guarantees three years of Android updates, which should bring the Find X5 Pro all the way to Android 15. You should also get four years of regular security updates.

Oppo Find X5 Pro review: Cameras

A big chunk of the phone’s launch event was reserved for the Oppo Find X5 Pro’s cameras, and for good reason. There are three cameras on the rear of the handset this year, consisting of a main 50MP (f/1.7) sensor, a 50MP (f/2.2) 110-degree ultrawide and a 13MP (f/2.4) 2x telephoto zoom.

A single 32MP (f/2.4) selfie camera sits on the front of the handset, located in a hole-punch notch in the top-left corner of the display. This uses a new “Intelligent FoV” system, which can switch between 80 and 90-degrees, depending on how many people are in the frame, and it works rather well.

Oppo’s brand-new dedicated imaging NPU, MariSilicion X, sits separately from the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 on the motherboard, and this handles all of the image processing. According to Oppo, in diverting computing power away from the phone’s main Qualcomm chipset, this new NPU allows for a new feature called 4K Ultra Night Video, which can shoot in lighting conditions as low as 5 lux, with better colour distribution, higher dynamic range, increased detail and less visual noise.

READ NEXT: Best phone camera

The main camera also uses a five-axis optical image stabilisation system, which consists of a three-axis sensor shift and a two-axis lens shift. What this means is that video should look rock-steady, and it allows for longer exposures without blurry images. The new RGBW sensor can also gather 60% more light than the previous version, supposedly with increased detail capture.

That Hasselblad partnership is purely on a software level. The Find X5 Pro launches with three “Hasselblad Master Styles”, which are essentially different camera filters created in partnership with three different Hasselblad photographers. The new Hasselblad XPAN mode allows you to shoot in a vintage “letterbox style” aspect ratio of 65:24, and the UI is similar to Hasselblad’s full-frame camera interface.

In testing, the cameras performed rather well, despite the fact that they didn’t quite live up to Oppo’s lofty claims. Image clarity was nice and sharp, with plenty of vibrancy and well-judged exposure levels in most well-lit instances, although the main sensor did struggle a bit with some of the finer details – such as the fur on a local goat – especially when the subject was moving around quite a bit.

I was impressed with the Night mode, too. Just make sure to use the main sensor when capturing low-light images, since some of the nighttime shots looked quite soft when using the zoom and ultrawide cameras. Video capture was also very good, topping out at 4K 60fps, fully stabilised.

Oppo Find X5 Pro review: Verdict

The Oppo Find X5 Pro is a bit of a beauty. Just like its predecessor, it’s a stunning piece of hardware, with top-end componentry and great battery life. But perhaps the best thing is the price: at £1,049, Oppo is undercutting the Galaxy S22 Ultra, so it’s definitely on to a winner.

Buy now from Amazon

However, if you can stomach the extra £100, it still might be worth buying the S22 Ultra in my view. It might not look as eye-catching, but performance is just as swift, the zoomed images are superior and it also comes with a bundled stylus.

Samsung’s high-priced flagship might just about edge it, but the Find X5 Pro follows behind at a (very) close second.