Oppo F5 long-term review

Performance

MediaTek is quite like Oppo that it doesn't have an offering that will compete head-on with flagships from other companies. It chooses to focus instead on the mid-range of the chipset market, which it caters to with many different SoCs.

One of those is the MT6763T, also known as Helio P23. It's running the show in the Oppo F5, with its 2.5 GHz octa-core Cortex-A53 CPU and Mali-G71MP2 GPU. The graphics bit is a recent ARM design, but the fact that it only uses two cores means performance in this regard isn't anything to write home about.

Let's just say that the F5 wasn't built to be a gaming machine. On the other hand, day to day performance doing anything else is good. Because the processor only has Cortex-A53 cores it can never be as fast as a handset that also packs some A73s or A75s in there, but it's not too sluggish. It doesn't slow to a crawl, and performance is pretty consistent even if it won't win any speed contests.

Dependable is the word we think best describes the F5's performance. Not earth-shattering, not record-breaking, but you will always know what to expect once you've gotten used to the device after a few days. The handset packs at least 4GB of RAM, and depending on the version you buy it may even be 6GB.

That means the memory amount will never be a bottleneck in terms of performance, and with the aggressive killing of background processes that Color OS employs you will literally never wish for more RAM. You might however find yourself wanting the existing amount to be put to better use, but that's covered more in the Software part of this review.

Battery life

Battery life is good. Our normal use case for these long-term reviews involves around 15-16 hours away from the charger, during which time the phone is mostly connected to Wi-Fi, with a couple or so hours of 4G. Bluetooth is always on and we stream an hour or two of music through it.

This is the point at which we normally tell you about our best and worst days from the point of view of screen on time, but we can't because Oppo has decided to cripple Android's battery stats and simply not show that information at all. You do get to see which apps have been using your milliamps most, but that's it.

The best battery life in our usual scenario outlined above means getting over six hours of screen on time in a day, and our gut feeling is that we weren't able to achieve that with the Oppo F5. If we were to speculate, we'd say it's probably going to give you around 4-5 hours of screen on time with such usage, and less if you are always on mobile data. But do take this with a huge grain of salt, as we aren't going by any actual statistics.

Software

Chinese companies' propensity for creating UI skins that copy the looks and functionality of iOS was cute way back when Android itself wasn't pretty to look at, but in this day and age perhaps a re-think of this strategy would be advised. Modifying an OS that isn't iOS so heavily in order to make it look like it came from Apple is an exercise in futility.

Is anyone buying an Oppo F5 going to think they've actually purchased an iPhone? Are the people you show off your device to going to be tricked by this gimmick? If so, how will you explain away the lack of the Apple logo on the back? Are you going to go with "Apple changed its name to Oppo"?

We could call Oppo's efforts in this space artistic, if we go with the 'art for art's sake' mentality. Its Color OS interpretation of Android is shockingly close to iOS not just in looks, but also in some of its functions and even limitations.

The Settings look like iOS - complete with Back shortcuts in the top left area, although this is Android and you have an always-on Back button on the navigation bar. The Share sheet looks like iOS (complete with side-swiping pagination), oh and there are no Quick Settings because Oppo has a Control Center instead. Yes, you swipe up from the bottom to reveal that. You'll find the settings for some built-in apps inside the Settings menu, because iOS also does things this way.

iOS inspired: App settings in Settings • Back shortcut in the top left • Share sheet • Control Center

To dismiss a notification you don't just swipe it away, left or right, like Google intended. No, instead you swipe left and then tap the Delete button that shows up on the right. If that notification is from Gmail, for example, you need to remember that this action won't actually delete that specific email, just the notification. If you want to delete or archive the email itself, you need to swipe down on the notification to reveal the quick actions built into the OS. Confusing much?

Dismissing a notification

There's Android 7.1.1 Nougat lurking somewhere underneath all that, but you'll be hard pressed to notice. We'd normally say we would have liked to see Oreo on the F5, but even if such an update ever happens it's unlikely that you'll be aware of any difference whatsoever. Not that you should expect timely software updates for this device - at the moment, in March 2018, it's on the December 5, 2017 security patch level. This is still the sad reality for most Android mid-rangers.

Current software