Oppo R5 Review: Slimmest Smartphone with Great Camera But Average Performance

Since last year, Chinese smartphone manufacturers have been wooing smartphone consumers globally. While most of them are sticking to offer smartphones at an edgy price, Oppo is offering decent mid-budget segment smartphones.

Measuring only 4.85mm, the Oppo R5 still holds the 'Slimmest smartphone on earth' title as of today. Available in the price range of ₹28,000 and ₹30,000, the Oppo R5 offers decent specifications and outstanding looks for its price.

Packed in an attractive box, the phone comes bundled with a VOCC charger, USB Cable, a 3.5mm earphone, a 3.5mm to micro USB converter and the essential hard copy manuals. Once unboxed, we found the Oppo R5 looked pretty decent with few similarities to Apple's iPhone design.

The handset has broad, glossy bezel with two thin stripes on both the sides, and the aluminium back shows the manufacturer has been highly impressed with the iPhone 5S design. The R5 also features a protruding camera lens just like the latest edition of iPhone.

Measuring just 148.9x74.5x4.85mm, the Oppo R5 looks like a top end business device, and we found the device comfortable and ergonomic enough to hold but on the same time the thin and sharp square edges make it tad uncomfortable to slide inside a tight jeans pocket.

The major portion of the front has been occupied by the 5.2-inch display. Retaining the minimalist design, the R5 features 3 capacitive buttons on the bottom and 5MP front camera on the top while the rear camera and the much required LED flash occupies the upper left portion of the rear. The volume rocker and power/sleep button sit at the left while the micro USB sits at the bottom edge. To make it size zero, R5 sacrifices the required 3.5mm audio out port. But Oppo supplies a 3.5MM to Micro USB converter which can connect any earphone to the handset.

On the display front, Oppo R5 houses a 5.2-inch HD AMOLED display with 1080x1920 pixels resolution at 424PPI pixel density count. The display feels nice with impressive detailing and decent colour reproduction. The Super AMOLED display is capable of delivering great experience and consumes less battery than its counterparts.

Inside the super sleek casing, Oppo R5 packs a Qualcomm Snadragon 615 SoC which features an Octa-Core processor; out of which four cores clocked at 1.5GHz while the rest clocked at 1GHz.

The SoC (System-on-Chip) also features an Andreno 405 GPU inside. Runs on Android Kitkat 4.4.4 overlaid with ColorOS 2.0 interface, the R5 is aptly backed by 2GB worth RAM and 16GB inbuilt storage.

In our everyday peroformance testing, the Oppo R5 did well without hinting at any possible lags even in the gaming. Using the supplied back cover while gaming or benchmarking the device makes the R5 a little hot. But once we removed the crystal cover, we didn't experience anything similar.

In our synthetic benchmarking test, the Oppo R5 scored 27810, a little less than we expected. In Quadrant Standard benchmark, the Oppo R5 managed to achieve 16894 and in Vellamo Metal it scored 933, less than Nexus 5 and Samsung Galaxy S5.

Unlike the modern day flagships, the Oppo R5 features a 2,000 mAh battery but, for designing the smartphone so slim, the developer had to sacrifice battery capability. As expected, the battery life is not that great, usually stays little less than a day in a single charge but OPPO tried to balance the weakness by supplying the VOCC quick charger right in the bundle.

Oppo claims the quick charger can provide 2 hours of battery life by charging the R5 only for 5 minutes. Charging it for 30 minutes can charge the phone up to 75%. In our experience, we found the charger is capable of charging the phone up to 60 percent in just half an hour, not bad either. So unless you've a charger point around you and carrying the VOCC charger along with you don't have to worry about the battery life of your R5.

The best part of the Oppo R5 is its camera. The smartphone packs a 13MP Sony sensor accompanied by a sharp LED flash at the rear and a 5MP sensor at the front for selfie snapping.

To make the sensors more capable, Oppo also offers several features in the stock camera interface. Both the sensors focuses on the subjects pretty quickly and accurately. The rear camera especially locks the focus very impressively from as close as possible, hence it can click amazing macro shots.

Oppo also includes some nifty features including slow motion camera, intelligent subject tracking and enhancing selfie capability.

All in all, the OPPO R5 is a good all round package for those who want a great looking phone with decent snapping capability. For its slim foot print, the R5 features a weaker battery but the VOCC charger comes really handy. For its price, there might be other substitutes available in the market offering better hardware specifications. But the overall package of Oppo R5 makes it a decent smartphone.