I review phones for a living and I would buy the Oppo Find X5 Pro

The truth is, the smartphone world is overcrowded and it’s not that easy to tell one slab of glass apart from the other, but sometimes a phone will come along that is really impressive. The Oppo Find X5 Pro is one of those, and in my opinion, it’s one of the best phones of the year so far. 

I liked this handset so much that I awarded it a coveted five-star rating in the Oppo Find X5 Pro review and I would actually buy it for myself. I’d even go so far as to say that I’d buy it over the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra and the Apple iPhone 13 Pro Max.

Admittedly a big reason for that is its size, plain and simple. Most flagships these days are far too big, and most importantly, far too wide for me to use comfortably or to slip into my jeans pocket. While the Oppo Find X5 Pro still has the big flagship-level 6.7-inch screen, it’s slimmer than most other devices at 73.9mm wide, that’s in comparison to the S22 Ultra’s 77.9mm and the iPhone 13 Pro Max’s 78mm. That may not seem like a huge difference but every little helps. 

I also love its design. There’s been a trend for sharp edges and flat screens on high-end smartphones, which is all very well and does look cool, but I’m a big fan of curves because they look so much more elegant. You get curves everywhere on the Oppo Find X5 Pro, the screen wraps itself around the edges of the device while the camera notch curves upwards from the body of the phone. It’s a beautiful piece of technology.

Speaking of the screen, it's absolutely gorgeous with QHD+ (3216 × 1440p) resolution, 1.07 billion colours and a peak brightness of 1,300 nits - the display is everything you'd expect from a flagship smartphone. 

It’s not all about looks though, what’s under the surface needs to be up to scratch as well, but as you might have guessed by now the Oppo Find X5 Pro is every bit as powerful as it is beautiful.

Packing the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 processor along with an Adreno 730 GPU, 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage it’ll handle anything you could throw at it. If you need more RAM for heavy-duty tasks then you can use the expansion feature to borrow from the internal memory which means you can increase the RAM by up to 7GB.

Another reason to choose this phone over other flagships is the battery life. Using two series-connected battery cells at 2,500 mAh which equals 5,000mAh, it may not seem that different to other handsets. But when I tested it out, it seemed like the battery would never die, it literally lasted for days at a time.

The Oppo Find X5 Pro was one of the best performing phones I have ever seen for battery life. I ran a local video on full brightness over the space of two hours, and in that time the battery level only dropped 10% so would have lasted a huge 20 hours in total. For comparison, the Google Pixel 6 Pro and the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra both lasted 17 hours in the same test.

So what about recharging it? Well unlike a lot of other phones at the moment, the Oppo Find X5 Pro still comes with a charger in the box, the so-called ‘80W SUPERVOOC Flash Charge’. It only took 38 minutes to recharge it from completely dead to 100% - amazing!

The final reason why I would buy this phone is the camera system which is made up of a 50MP main camera, a 50MP ultra-wide-angle camera, a 13MP telephoto camera, and a 32MP selfie camera on the front. Oppo has worked with Hasselblad to co-develop the camera software, and the end results are stunning. 

Point-and-shoot photos of cityscapes and landscapes pick up an incredible array of colours and loads of detail, the shots I took on it came out looking spectacular. Even in low light, the camera does a great job of capturing the moment, brightening up the scene and giving it energy - you can see some of the photos I took on the Oppo Find X5 Pro here.

If you’re in the UK, the Oppo Find X5 Pro is available for pre-order now starting from £1,049. Sales kick off from the 24th March 2022.