Oppo Find X5 Pro initial review: Gorgeous flagship

Having initially been Oppo’s guinea pig series used to demo some unusual and innovative technologies, the Find X series has become its flagship range, pushing high-end specs into a sleek and attractive device.

Gone are the days where a Find X phone has a pop-up camera, or anything else a little bit wacky. Nowadays it's about having a sleek, ultra-premium device with hardware specs up there with the best of them. 

Last year’s Find X3 Pro was a fantastic device, as was the Find X2 Pro before it. So can the Find X5 Pro follow up on the standards delivered by those two? 

Design (and how it compares to Find X3 Pro) 

• 163.7 x 73.9 x 8.5 mm - 218g 
• IP68 water and dust resistant
• Glaze Black or Ceramic White (both ceramic rears)

Looking at it from the front, or looking along the metal frame around the edges, you’d be hard pushed to find any significant differences between the Find X5 Pro and its predecessor. It’s got the same hole-punch camera, the same bezel thickness, and - apart from the antenna bands being slightly different - the same edges. 

Those edges, of course, are polished to within an inch of their lives and have a supremely glossy finish, and have well-positioned buttons on the left and right. The green-accented wake/sleep button is on the right, and the individual up/down volume buttons are on the left. All within easy reach. 

There’s nothing at all on the top, with all the additional ports being placed in the bottom edge. That includes the Type-C port, flanked by a loudspeaker and SIM card tray. This phone, incidentally, supports dual physical SIMs as well as eSIM. 

It’s on the back where the phone shows more clearly that it’s a new device. But even here there’s influence from the Find X3 Pro. The single, seamless rear surface ramps up to the camera unit. It’s a slightly larger unit this time though, and has a less square shape, with one side sloping at an angle. 

One less obvious change is in the materials used. Rather than the usual glass back, Oppo switched to ceramic for the Find X5 Pro, and offers it in both a black finish and in white. Ceramic, of course, being more durable and scratch resistant than glass, at least, having gone through the long process Oppo puts it through to get it looking like this. Both models are IP68 water and dust resistant too. 

In the hand, it feels comfortable enough. Its curves around the edges - on the front and back - ensure that, while large, it doesn’t feel uncomfortably big in the hand. It does feel quite slippery, however, and the glossy finish hasn’t taken much time to collect fingerprints either. 

Display and software

• 6.7-inch AMOLED - 120Hz adaptive (1-120Hz) - 1300 nits peak
• Quad HD+ resolution - 1440 x 3216
• 1 billion colour - 10-bit - HDR10+ 
• Gorilla Glass Victus 
• ColorOS 12 built on Android 12

Like its predecessor, the display spec sheet sings all the right notes. It's an almost perfect check-list of features, which is always encouraging, and should mean a great visual experience. That's to say it's a big 6.7-inch display with a peak 120Hz refresh rate and 1300 nits brightness. 

It's LTPO technology too, so it means the display can adapt its refresh rate to suit the content you're viewing on it, from as low as 1Hz to 120Hz. It's a 10-bit display too, which means it can display over a billion colours. 

There are a couple of things we've noticed since first turning it on. For instance, QuadHD+ resolution isn't enabled by default. Oppo sets the resolution to 1080p, so if you want to make the most of the screen's crispness, you have to enable that in the settings. Second, in its default settings, it's a very colourful and vibrant screen. 

Software is Android 12-based ColorOS 12, which is similar in a lot of ways to ColorOS 11 that came before. It does pick up the device theming based on your wallpaper feature though. You can set it to do so automatically, or choose the colours yourself from the wallpaper, and have those as your accent colours throughout settings and menus. 

Customisation is a forte of Oppo's, and that's only becoming more obvious in the latest software. It has additional always-on-display customisation options, including taking that Canvas feature first debuted by OnePlus in OxygenOS 11. 

Hardware and specs

• Snapdragon 8 Gen 1
• 12GB RAM - 256GB storage
• 5000mAh battery
• 80W SuperVOOC charging/50W wireless AirVOOC charging

Internally, Oppo’s latest flagship certainly seems to have the right components to keep the phone feeling quick and responsive. The latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 runs the show, alongside 12GB RAM and 256GB storage. It also has the feature that allows you to borrow some of the storage to use as RAM. We’re not sure exactly when that will be necessary, but it’s an option. 

As for battery life, the 5000mAh battery in here should certainly be enough to get through even the most demanding of work days. Especially with Oppo’s battery management. It’s previous flagships had 4500mAh batteries, and we’ve always found them to be among the best performing. 

Not that battery anxiety should ever be a concern, thanks to the availability of SuperVOOC flash charging. With a 12 minute charge, it’ll get your phone battery half full. For those more concerned about battery lifespan, Oppo’s latest battery design and charging optimisations also mean the phone can get through 1600 charge cycles. Plus, it can charge wirelessly too, up to 50W speeds when you use it with the Oppo AirVOOC charger. 

Camera

• 50MP primary - 5-axis stabilisation
• 50MP ultrawite - freeform lens 
• 13MP telephoto - 2x zoom
• MariSilicon X NPU/ISP 
• 32MP RGBW selfie camera 

Last but not least: cameras. From a sensor perspective, not much has changed since the Find X3 Pro. The main and ultrawide cameras both use 50-megapixel sensors, and the telephoto 2x optical zoom camera uses 13-megapixel. 

That doesn’t tell the whole story though. For instance, the main camera now features five axis stabilisation. That’s made up of both sensor shift and O.I.S in the lens. Images are also processed by a new dedicated neural processing unit called MariSilicon X. 

The end result should mean right high dynamic range, and the ability to shoot 4K video even in very low light situations, and still getting detailed, colourful video. Of course, we’re going to more time with it to tell what this all means in real every day use.