The OPPO Find X5 pairs a high price with a killer camera and distinct design

The more your means, the more likely your next Android smartphone will look just like everything else.

There are a few notable exceptions out there, particularly where foldables are concerned. Nevertheless, the homogeneity of modern smartphones is hard to escape. The OPPO Find X5 isn't quite unique enough to stand as an exception to this rule, but there's a defiance here that makes the final product a great fit for those who want something a little different, but don't want to compromise the fundamentals in the process.

Even if the $1,399 price-tag strains the appeals somewhat, the OPPO Find X5 is still the premium economy smartphone to beat for those in the market for an alternative to Apple and Samsung. Rather than peak with the first impression and reveal its wrinkles over time, the OPPO Find X5 is geared to build on that momentum from the get-go. 

It's the rare Android smartphone that only gets better the more time you spend with it.

The OPPO Find X5 sits in the middle of the range when it comes to local pricing, retailing for $1,399 in Australia.

This is $400 less than the more capable OPPO Find X5 Pro and almost double the asking price of the more modest OPPO Find X5 Lite. At $1,399, the OPPO Find X5 is also more expensive than the starting price of both the Samsung Galaxy S22 and the Apple iPhone 13.

However, that's not to say you can't save some cash by choosing the right retailer. Check out the table below for a breakdown of how Australia's various retailers compare when it comes to the OPPO Find X5.

While the feel-factor is a close second, the looks of the OPPO Find X5 are the part of the package that's most likely to shape your first impression of the device.

The front-facing half of the Find X5 (coated in Gorilla Glass Victus) isn't too far from the norm, but the reverse eschews the bulky camera bumps and glass-back design seen in its competitors for a sleeker approach. The Find X5 isn't quite as seamlessly moulded into the chassis as its pro-grade counterpart. That said, it's not far off and nicely complemented by the felt-like treatment that's been applied to the frosted glass back on the device.

The device is available in two colours (black or white), both of which are kitted out with a 4800mAh battery and IP54 water and dust resistance. Whichever tone you throw in with, the unique material design here lends the Find X5 a feel-factor that's subtle but significantly distinct from the other options out there at this price-point, not to mention a significant degree of resistance to fingerprints and smudges.

Flipping back to the front of the device, the standard OPPO Find X5 features a 6.55-inch AMOLED display with 10-bit colour. While the resolution caps out at FHD+, the refresh rate goes all the way up to 120Hz and you can always enable the O1 Ultra Vision Engine feature (introduced in the Find X2 Pro) to make content look that little sharper and colourful at the cost of battery life.

Under the hood, the Find X5 is a little more modest than many of its contemporaries. The middle child in OPPO's premium lineup rocks a Snapdragon 888 processor, 8GB of RAM and 256GB of onboard storage.

If you're directly comparing this thing to the Galaxy S22, you're looking at the same amount of memory and storage. However, this year's Samsung flagships come powered by the more recent and powerful Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 processor. The processor in the OPPO Find X5 is a full generation behind, and has a higher RRP to boot.

When it comes to features, the OPPO Find X5 ticks all the boxes you'd expect and throws in a few OPPO-specific inclusions for good measure. The device boasts dual Dolby Atmos stereo speakers, support for up to 80W wired charging (when paired with OPPO’s SuperVOOC charger) and up to 30W wireless charging (when paired with OPPO’s AirVOOC charger).

The one design choice that didn't really work for me here was the curved edges. Recent years have seen both Samsung and Apple drift back towards flat-edged designs, and the Find X5 is a good reminder of why.

I'd often accidentally swipe on something or close an app I was using by accident. While curved edge designs do look sleeker, the practical issues they invite feel like enough of an encumbrance here that I would be shocked if OPPO doesn't ditch them sooner rather than later.

When it comes to cameras, the OPPO Find X5 is armed with a 32-megapixel front-facing camera and a triple-lens rear camera. The latter is comprised of a 50-megapixel wide-angle lens, a 50-megapixel ultra wide-angle lens and a 13-megapixel telephoto lens. 

Most importantly, the camera on the Find X5 comes enhanced by OPPO’s new house-branded MariSilicon X neural processing unit (NPU) and a partnership with legacy camera brand Hasselblad.

According to OPPO, the former sees the Find X5 benefit from a fourfold improvement in “perceived night video resolution" with reduced grain and better colour reproduction in low-light situations. Meanwhile, the latter sees the Find X5 arrive with a dedicated Hasselblad Camera for Mobile app, new “Natural" colour calibration and support for the panoramic XPAN format.

These inclusions come across as genuine value adds for those who want to push the boundaries of what their smartphone can do when it comes to photography, giving you lots of extra flexibility and little in the way of mere novelty. If nothing else, the Find X5 felt like a substantial upgrade on the camera capabilities of the Find X5 Lite.

After using the OPPO Find X5 as my daily driver for a few weeks, I took the handset to Tasmania to put the camera to work. I came away delighted with the results, but you can check out the gallery below for a round-up of samples that give you a sense of what the hardware here can do.

Looking beyond the lenses strapped to the back of the Find X5, the story when it comes to performance is much more confident and capable than the spec sheet might suggest.

Even if it is held back by the older Snapdragon processor inside it, the Find X5 proved impressively capable. Apps loaded fast, the load that typically comes with multitasking was rarely felt and even graphically-intensive titles like Genshin Impact, Diablo Immortal and Apex Legends Mobile ran really well on the hardware here.

While the fact that you are paying $1,399 for a device with last year's best Android processor does still sting, my time with the Find X5 has left me fairly confident that most will probably come away with few complaints when it comes to the everyday experience of using the device.

The OPPO Find X5 would usually clock in with around four and a half hours of screen time. Depending on the setting I had enabled, I'd usually manage something like a day and a half of regular usage from the device. Additional testing found that the device took 16 hours and 32 minutes to burn down from 100% to 0% using video content streamed via YouTube.

Compared to its competitors, that's a decent enough result. High-end smartphones typically don't fare as well as more modest devices do when it comes to battery life, but the 4500mAh battery here (plus OPPO's penchant for battery enhancement) see the Find X5 deliver battery life that's much closer to the latter, even if it's not quite capable of the long life you'll get from something like the Samsung Galaxy A73.

The OPPO Find X5 is slightly more expensive than its Galaxy-branded competitors, but that surcharge goes down easy when all the different parts align as well as they do here. It's easy to pick away at the areas where OPPO have cut corners, but the Find X5 does an impressive enough job of delivering regardless that details like the outdated processor and the curved edges are hard to hold against it.

Where the $1799 price attached to the Find X5 Pro feels like it might be an overreach on the part of the challenger brand, the Find X5 feels like it's sitting in a more confident and comfortable vantage point.

With the Find X5, the case for OPPO as a best-in-class provider of  premium economy flagship smartphones has never been easier to make.

Check out the table below for a sense of how the OPPO Find X5 compares to some of the other options.