Oppo Find X5 Lite 5G Impressions

I should put this up front that I’m not exactly a phone reviewer, and this video won’t contain much in the way of comparisons. It’s more my impressions of the phone rather than a proper review. Good? Great. This is the Oppo Find X5 Lite 5G, a rather stylish, mid-priced phone with some interesting features, as well as decent performance and cameras. Let’s take a look.

First off, the specs. This 5G enabled, WiFi 6 touting device uses a MediaTek Dimensity 900 8 core CPU with a Mali-G68 MC4 GPU. If that means something to you, there you go. If not, here’s the Geekbench scores. Still doesn’t mean anything to you? Yeah me neither – although looking on Geekbench’s leaderboard that places this right around the Snapdragon 845 or 855 in the OnePlus 6T and 7. Not bad!

You also get 8GB of LPDDR4X 2133 RAM which isn’t too shabby, along with 256GB of UFS2.2 x 2 storage, which is plenty as long as you don’t take a million photos a year and literally never move any of them off the phone. But the real star of the spec-sheet-show is the dual 2250mAh batteries in series, and the 65W SUPERVOOC fast charging. The fairly weighty wall plug can charge the dual batteries from dead to 100% in just 31 minutes. That’s fast enough that no matter the situation, as long as you have literally 5 minutes and that charger (and the beefy USB C cable…) you’ll be good for charge. Battery life was pretty decent itself too, easily lasting a full day of moderate use.

Of course, the battery life is affected by the screen, a 6.43” 2400×1080 90Hz AMOLED display with Corning Gorilla Glass 5. Brightness is going to be the big factor, which peaks at 430 nits typically, although can boost to 600 nits in sunlight or even up to 800 nits when viewing HDR content. It even covers 100% of the DCI P3 spectrum which makes it a rather pretty display for content consumption. What also makes it nice is the smooth 90Hz refresh rate – this also helps burn through your battery, and sadly your only option is to manually switch it to 60Hz as there isn’t an adaptive refresh rate option. Still, it looks pretty nice, content looks great as does gaming.

Speaking of gaming, it’s a surprisingly good experience. Playing an FPS game like PUBG mobile is somewhat let down by the single bottom-firing speaker your hand will cover when holding the phone and the lack of stereo sound from the earpiece speaker, but the in-game performance is pretty decent. You have a high performance mode you can stick it in too if you want an extra bit of FPS, alongside the smooth 180Hz touch input too. Happily you get an actual headphone jack here, so if you do want to listen to those footsteps you have that option.

As is becoming the absolute key for smartphones, the camera package is honestly the biggest talking point. It’s comprised of 3 cameras, a 64MP, 80.5° main camera, an 8MP 118.9° wide angle camera and a 2MP 88.8° fixed-focus macro camera. Strangely absent is a telephoto option, which I think has to be my most-used camera on my OnePlus 7T Pro. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever used the wide-angle, so to have it missing here is a bit of a shame.

Check out the video for a look at the photo samples!

There is also a shocking 32 MP front-facing camera with an 85° field of view, making for some top-quality selfies. Of course, being an Oppo phone it comes chock-full of filters and face-tune type features, almost all of which are exclusively designed to work with Asian women’s faces, not a pasty Scottsman like me. If you are into that, it’s there – although actually a mode I did have fun with was the sticker mode, where they’ve copied Apple’s Animojis, save for the ability to record videos with them. The duck was a bit terrifying, yet hilarious to play with.

You do get portrait mode on both front and rear facing cameras, which works about as well as every portrait mode I’ve used. It mostly works, definitely looks fake and I wouldn’t use it much – but I also don’t take selfies so maybe I’m biassed. Surprisingly, you even get portrait mode when recording video too, which is a nice option. In fact, the video is an interesting point in general. All of the additional modes, everything from the “AI enhancements”, to portrait mode, to the “super steady video” options all require you to record at 1080p, not the maximum 4K, and it’ll drop you out of 4K for almost anything and you’ll need to manually set it back even with whatever feature you enabled switched back off.

They’ve even got a dual recording mode which records from both front and rear cameras simultaneously so you can get that shot-reverse-shot look. Video quality, much like the photos, is perfectly usable. It’s hardly the best you’ll see, and a far cry from even a dedicated camera like a Sony RX100, but it’s pretty standard for the class and price tag.

Some other things to note, you get both an under-screen fingerprint sensor which works pretty well, alongside face unlock using the front facing camera which equally works most of the time. The USB port, and the included type C to type A adapter, support reverse charging meaning you can charge another phone from yours which is handy especially with that fast charging. And my god do you see “AI” features everywhere. “Adaptive Sleep”, “Video colour enhancer”, the “AI Highlight video” and camera features. Most of them would generally stay off for me, although their “Smart Sidebar” is a pretty nice little toolbar and app launcher with options for screen or voice recording, screenshots and on-screen translation as well as any apps you want quick access to.

For the £419 price tag, I don’t think this is too bad. It even comes with a nice transparent case in the box, and generally offers a great usage experience. It’s far from high end, but it’s hardly a cheap feeling phone. I’d call it ‘decent’.