Oppo Find 5 (Unlocked)

Oppo? The Blu-ray player company? Making a smartphone? Those are the thoughts that went through my mind when I first heard about the Oppo Find 5. In the United States, Oppo is really only known by home theater enthusiasts for its top-of-the-line Blu-ray players. But the company has a much more diverse portfolio overseas, as evidenced by its new flagship smartphone, which is now available unlocked in the U.S. The Find 5 ($499 16GB/$569 32GB) has a sleek, high-quality build, a good size when you consider its big 5-inch display, and a sharp 13-megapixel camera. But it's heavy, there's no LTE support, and the video camera isn't great. Still, the Find 5 is worth a look if you don't like to carry the same phone as everyone else, and it proves that Oppo's expertise isn't limited to home theater gear.

Size, Design, and Call Quality
Like the recent Sony Xperia ZL, perhaps the best thing about the Find 5 is its size. With a screen this big, it's easy to continue building out around it until you have a phone that's impossible to use with just one hand. But Oppo makes it feel manageable by pushing that screen almost all the way to either side of the phone, so that there's just 3.25mm of space, with a reasonable amount of bezel on the top and bottom. At 5.58 by 2.71 by 0.35 inches (HWD), it's actually slightly less wide and deep than the Xperia ZL, though it's a fifth of an inch longer. And while you can't always use this phone with just one hand, it feels more manageable than many other big devices. But at 5.82 ounces it's also quite heavy.

As far as design goes, the Find 5 is yet another generic slab, albeit an exceptionally handsome one. I like the minimalist design language; the phone looks like a long rectangle with subtle curves at the top and bottom. Available in either black or white, the back and sides of the phone are made of remarkably sturdy matte plastic, which also peeks out at the lip of the otherwise all-glass display. There's a power port on the bottom, a 3.5mm headphone jack on the top, and clear plastic buttons on either side that look like glass. If you want a sleek, relatively obscure phone to make your geeky friends jealous, this is it.

I've got no complaints about the 5-inch, 1080p IPS LCD, which looks absolutely gorgeous. With 441 pixels per inch, this is one of the densest screens available, so text, images, and video all look remarkably clear. Typing on the onscreen keyboard feels comfortable, which you might expect given all that screen real estate.

The unibody design makes for less modifiability than, say, the Samsung Galaxy S 4. There's no microSD card slot and the 2,500mAh battery isn't removable. Oppo includes a tool that lets you access the SIM card slot on the left side of the phone.?

The Find 5 is unlocked, so you can use it on either AT&T or T-Mobile's network, or with smaller GSM-based carriers like Simple Mobile (which uses T-Mobile's network). It supports up to HSPA+ 42 on the 850/900/1700/1800/1900/2100MHz bands. You can also hit 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi on the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands.?For this review I tested the phone on AT&T, though it would make an especially good fit for T-Mobile, given the carrier's excellent HSPA+ 42 network and its new contract-free pricing. There's no LTE support here.

Reception and call quality were both good on AT&T's network. Voices sounded clear, but a little thin and thready in the phone's earpiece. Calls made with the phone were loud, natural, and clear, though background noise cancellation capabilities were just average in my tests. The speakerphone sounds good but is not loud enough to hear outdoors. I paired the phone with a Jawbone Era?Bluetooth headset and was able to make hands-free calls using Google Voice Dialer.

I got 11 hours and 13 minutes of talk time over AT&T's network, which is a solid number, though I saw the battery decrease much more quickly while I was running benchmark tests with the screen brightness set to high.

The phone is available in either 16 or 32GB options. I reviewed the 32GB model, which has 25.09GB of free internal storage. I'm bummed by the lack of a microSD card slot, though 25GB should be a decent amount of storage for most people.

Android and Apps
The Find 5 is powered by a 1.5GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro APQ8064 processor, which is one of the fastest chips you can get right now. Combine that with an Adreno 320 GPU and you've got an unstoppable multimedia machine. Benchmark scores were slightly lower than the Xperia ZL, which is likely due to Sony's slightly less aggressive Android overlay. Still, the difference is negligible; the Find 5 should be able to handle anything you can throw at it.

The phone runs Android 4.1.1 (Jelly Bean). That's not the latest version of Android available, but for now, it's close enough. Oppo has tinkered with Google's open source OS to mixed results.

Let's get the bad part out of the way. I'm not sure what Oppo's designers were thinking when creating new widgets, as the freeform shapes you get here are large, obtrusive, and not attractive. I also don't care for the app styling, which places a border around every app icon that doesn't belong to Google. Additionally, the built-in app designs (particularly for the Phone, Messages, Clock, Camera, and Calendar apps) are a little too close to Apple's iOS design for comfort.

(Next page: Camera, Multimedia, and Conclusions)

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