We’re here in Singapore for the launch of the Oppo N3 and it turns out that Oppo had something else up their sleeve. Meet the Oppo R5, the thinnest phone on the planet. It may be constructed from similar materials found on the iPhone 5 and 5s but it has one killer feature that the iPhone or really any other smartphone has never had: a total thickness of 4.85mm and yes, you heard that completely correctly.
On the front of this guy sits a 5.2-inch Super AMOLED display with a resolution of 1920x1080 which will bring right out 423ppi and inside you’ll find the Snapdragon 615 octa-core chip clocked in at 2.1GHz and sitting alongside is 2GB of RAM and 16GB of built-in memory.
The display is one of the best AMOLEDs I’ve seen in quite a while. And it’s really surprising to see it on an Oppo device since most of their previous devices have embraced the IPS display for viewing angles. As far as I can see it, the AMOLED display on the R5 is just as good as any other IPS I’ve seen. Color shift is down to a minimum and it’s super bright and it’s super legible even outside in direct sunlight.
Oppo has also added things like the Sony Exmor sensor from Oppo Find 7 to R5 which is rated at 13MP. It’s capable of all the same features found on the Oppo Find 7 and 7a with HD photo mode and all of its video capabilities found. So 1080p slow motion 4K UHD video and more. The camera itself may protrude outside of the R5 but so do a lot of other devices including this year’s iPhones. Do I like it? No. but do I like how thin this device is? Absolutely and I’ll totally take that compromise.
So since the R5 is so thin, the battery is not the biggest in the world. It’s only rated at 2000mAh, which is not a lot. Even phones like the HTC One M8 and the Moto X for 2014 have larger batteries but they are much thicker than this R5. So I’ll withhold all of my comments on the battery life until I get my hands on a review unit of the Oppo R5 to bring battery life in to the review.
One of the biggest updates to the device this year is Android 4.4.4 with ColorOS 2.0. Oppo phones for the last year had been stuck on Android 4.2 and 4.3 with ColorOS 1.0 and it’s finally seeing some revision. A lot of the features have been streamlined on the R5 and put in more convenient places for the end user.
One of the strangest things of ColorOS 2.0, Oppo has decided to put a springboard setup instead of using an actual app drawer. And it’s really weird not having that. It’s just basically all your apps on the home screen and you basically just have to organize them. You still have folders but you still have to have all your applications set on your home screen.
So this has been my first impressions with the brand new Oppo R5, the thinnest device on the planet. It’s a really great feeling device and it’s built like a super-premium device. It will be available sometime in mid-November but not for all international markets. We’ll see if any US availability will come out of this phone but a few bands will be supported on T-Mobile but Oppo has not commented on US availability.
I’d love to hear what you guys think about the Oppo R5. Make sure to leave a comment down below.