OPPO R5

Gionee’s S5.5 started the slimness war with the launch of an Android smartphone featuring a 5.5mm slim body and following with an even slimmer device featuring a 5.1mm thick body. Seeing the demand of slim and sleek looking smartphones OPPO offered the R5, featuring 4.85mm slim body, shattering Gionee’s records. However, the R5 is not just built for the sake of making a slim device, as the build quality that the brand has tried to offer even at this slimness is great and inspires a lot of confidence among users for buying such slim devices, especially after the whole iPhone 6 Plus bending fiasco.

The display on the R5 is based on a 5.2-inch AMOLED unit, which bears a resolution of 1,920 x 1,080 pixels. In terms of colour reproduction, the display, as with all AMOLED displays, is lovely and offers ample amounts of contrast and brightness levels. However, the colour reproduction is a little too saturated resulting in overwhelming colours, which are good for gaming and multimedia but not so much for everyday use and web browsing. The screen size, the resolution and the production process are all similar to the display featured on the Samsung Galaxy S5 and by far the display on the R5 has managed to be the closest competitor till date.

The software on the R5 is based on Google Android KitKat 4.4, on which the company has layered its custom Color OS version 2.0 UI. The first thing to be noticed is the direct approach followed by the user interface to access to all the important things right from the home screen itself. By default, there are three home screens offered by OPPO but more screens are automatically added as and when more apps are installed on the device. Out of the many innovations the brand has done, the widgets offer maximum functionality to the users. For instance, the music widget makes tunes always available at a press of a button while the camera widget shows a live preview and allows users to capture images without bringing up the whole camera UI.

The R5 is powered using the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 chipset clocked at 1.5GHz, which is similar to the processor that has been used on Yu’s Yureka smartphone available at one-third of the cost of this smartphone. Nevertheless, the Snapdragon 615 is a 64-bit computing capable processor, and as and when a compatible operating system will be made available for the device, the full potential of this chip would be unlocked. For now, this chip works with a 32-bit operating system, Android KitKat 4.4 and offers decent overall performance.

As one of its highlight features, the 13-megapixel camera of the device is among one of the most commonly used mobile phone cameras available today. The company has used a Sony Exmor sensor on the device that offers good image capture quality. Coupled with a fast autofocus mechanism, the device takes images super fast while keeping the focus in check for overall quality.