Built to last but hampered by lowly screen quality, the Oppo A5 5G struggles to make the grade even for Android shoppers with simple needs and a very tight budget.
Not everyone can justify spending a wad of cash on the latest flagship smartphone, but thankfully, they don’t need to when mid-range and even budget Android handsets have improved so much in recent years.
Tight competition has seen budget handsets really lift their game, and you can get a lot of Android bang for your buck around the $300 mark if you’re not too fussy about high-end specs and features.
Even so, you need to draw a line in the sand. For some people, the bare necessities might only include durability and battery life – areas where the new Oppo A5 5G stands out. For other people, they’ll draw the line at the quality of the display, which is where the Oppo A5 5G falls well short.
Table of contents
Oppo A5 5G first impressions
There’s no getting around the fact that the Oppo A5 5G’s basic 6.67-inch 720p IPS LCD screen makes a terrible first impression. Even if you don’t have an eye for the finer things, it’s immediately obvious that you’re dealing with a very budget display.
It’s not just the low 1604 × 720 pixel resolution that makes things look a bit fuzzy; it’s also that it’s a basic IPS LCD panel that offers bland colours and poor viewing angles. On the plus side, at least the 1,000 nits brightness makes it easier to read the screen outside.
That might seem a but unfair considering the price tag, but for the same money you’ll find much better displays elsewhere – such as the 2400 × 1080 pixel $299 Motorola Moto G55 5G or the 2340 × 1080 pixel $299 Samsung Galaxy A16 which steps up from IPS LCD to a Super AMOLED screen.
The screen has long been the Achilles heel of Oppo’s cheapest A-series handsets, such as the Oppo A18 and A60 5G. But it’s becoming harder and harder to overlook this weakness as the competition continues to offer more.
It’s worth noting that there’s an Oppo A5 5G Pro for $399, but for the extra $100, you’re still looking at the same disappointing screen. Same with the $369 Oppo A80 5G, but things improve with the $369 Oppo A79 5G.
If you can look past the quality of the screen, which is a big if, then the Oppo A5 5G is a pretty standard Oppo A series offering.
It features the power button with a built-in fingerprint reader in the middle of the handset on the right, below the volume buttons. On the left side, you’ve got a dual SIM port, which can also take a microSD card, and it’s a sub-6 5G handset.
Flip the phone over and there’s a 50 MP main shooter alongside a 2 MP secondary depth camera, accompanied by an 8 MP punch hole selfie camera on the front. As you’d expect, you don’t get advanced features like telephoto, ultra-wide or macro lenses, or even optical zoom.
At the bottom of the handset, you’ll find a USB-C port, alongside an old-school headphone jack. The handset doesn’t feature stereo speakers (some phones use the earpiece speaker). As for Bluetooth audio, it supports the SBC, AAC, aptX and aptX-HD codecs but not LDAC or LHDC.
Oppo A5 5G specifications and price
| Display size | 6.67-inch, 20:9 aspect ratio |
| Display resolution | 1604 x 720 pixel, 264 ppi |
| Display technology | IPS LCD 120 Hz refresh rate 8-bit colour 1000 nits |
| Bands | 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G sub-6 |
| Chipset | MediaTek Dimensity 6300, 8-core CPU |
| GPU | ARM Mali-G57 MC2@1072MHz |
| Rear cameras | Wide angle: 50MP; f/1.8; FOV 80°; 5P lens, AF supported |
| Mono (depth): 2MP; f/2.4; FOV 89°; 3P lens | |
| Front camera | 8MP; f/2.0, FOV 78° |
| RAM | 4GB LPDDR4X |
| Onboard storage | 128 GB UFS 2.2 |
| microSD slot | microSDXC |
| SIM | Dual SIM supported, Nano-SIM card, Nano-USIM card |
| Charging | USB-C 45W SUPERVOOC Flash Charge |
| Battery | 6000mAh |
| Wi-Fi | Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac), 802.11b/g/a/n |
| Bluetooth | Bluetooth 5.4 BLE SBC, AAC, aptX, aptX HD codecs |
| Operating system | ColorOS 15 (based on Android 15) |
| Security | Fingerprint reader, Face ID |
| Ruggedness | IP65 Water & Dust Resistance |
| Dimensions | 165.71 x 76.24 x 7.99 mm |
| Weight | 194g |
| Colours | Mist White Aurora Green |
| Price | $299 RRP |
| Warranty | Two years |
| Official website | Oppo Australia |
Features
The Oppo A5 5G runs Android 15, customised with Oppo’s own ColorOS UI, which adds a range of tweaks along with an iOS look and feel. Interestingly, Oppo seemingly gives you the ability to opt out of installing bloatware, yet more than a dozen unwanted apps still appear anyway.
Oppo says the handset will receive three Android OS updates and six years of security patches, which is better than I expected but still less generous than what you get with some more expensive Oppo handsets like the Oppo Reno 10 5G.
Under the bonnet, the Oppo A5 5G packs the budget MediaTek Dimensity 6300 chipset, accompanied by 4 GB of RAM and 128 GB of storage.
As for durability, the handset has an IP65 ruggedness rating, which makes it more dust and water resistant than most Oppo A-series handsets. It’s also “military-grade” shock resistant, offering 160% better impact resistance than the Oppo A3 5G.
Oppo touts the A5 5G’s ruggedness as one of its big selling features, which might be attractive if your phone regularly tends to slip through your fingers.
The A5 5G’s other big selling point is a very generous 6000 mAh battery, with support for 45W SUPERVOOC fast charging. Of course, there’s no AC charger in the box, so you’ll need to buy a separate SUPERVOOC charger if you want to make the most of this. As expected at this price point, there’s no support for wireless charging.
Thanks to the big battery and the low-res display, the handset should easily get through a day, maybe even two, on a single charge.
Quality
Geekbench 6 benchmarks tell a likely story, producing scores of 778 on the CPU single-core test and 1,925 on the multi-core, plus 1,348 on the GPU test. It’s fine for basic day-to-day tasks, but nothing to get excited about.
They’re similar Geekbench results to the Oppo A79 5G, and a decent step up from the Oppo A18. Even so, they lag behind the Geekbench results of the similarly priced Motorola Moto G55 5G and Samsung Galaxy A16.
| Device | CPU single-core | CPU multi-score | GPU (OpenCL) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Moto G55 5G | 1,016 | 2,304 | N/A |
| Oppo A5 5G | 778 | 1,925 | 1,348 |
| Oppo A79 5G | 718 | 1,836 | 1,163 |
| Oppo A18 | 435 | 1,454 | 565 |
| Moto G24 | 411 | 1,405 | 549 |
| Moto G05 | 406 | 1,352 | 508 |
| Moto G15 | 399 | 1,342 | 950 |
Geekbench 6 scores.
As for the camera, the 50 MP main shooter sounds impressive, but we all know by now that raw megapixels aren’t everything. Images look a bit over-processed and overblown, although not as bad as I’ve seen on some Oppo handsets, and low-light performance is also underwhelming. Of course, it doesn’t help that you’re viewing them on such a mediocre display.
Likewise, results from the selfie camera are average, although the overly aggressive default beautification retouching seems to have been dialled down a notch.
Who is the Oppo A5 5G for?
At $299, it’s much harder to forgive the Oppo A5 5G’s shortcomings than it was with the $219 Oppo A18. Sure, it’s rugged and offers a decent battery but, at these prices, the A5 5G’s screen should at least offer higher resolution, if not a better display quality than IPS LCD.
Budget shoppers might not have a lot to spend, but they expect bang for their buck, and they’ll find more bang elsewhere.
The post Oppo A5 5G review: Built tough, but bring glasses appeared first on GadgetGuy.
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