Oppo Find 5 review: Oppo-lent screen

Google Now

Google Now gives you short overview of information it believes is relevant to you right now. Going to work in the morning? Google Now knows this and lets you know there's a big traffic jam on your usual way to the office, so it offers you a re-route.

It can interpret a lot of things from your search history as well. If you've been searching for, let's say, your favorite football team, Google Now will prepare a card showing you the next match the team is playing and will provide you score updates once the game begins.

Google Now

Google has also integrated Voice Actions. They can handle stuff like sending messages (SMS or email), initiating a voice call, asking for directions, taking a note or opening a site. Google Now can also launch apps, check and manage your calendar and look for nearby places of interest and stuff like movie openings in theaters.

One problem Google Now has on the Oppo Find 5 is that there's no shortcut to launch it - you can't long press a button for it, just about the only way is to use the Google search widget.

One big advantage of Google's Jelly Bean is that the voice typing functionality doesn't require an internet connection to work. You can enter text by speaking anywhere you can use the on-screen keyboard - be it the Messaging app or a note taking app - without the need for a data connection as long as you have pre-downloaded the needed language packs (and those only take about 20-25MB of your storage per pack).

Making voice typing available offline also made it faster as it's not dependent on your connection. What's even more impressive is that the transition hasn't cost it anything in terms of accuracy.

Synthetic benchmarks

The Oppo Find 5 uses a Snapdragon APQ8064 S4 Pro chipset, which is the fastest to currently power an Android phone. It packs four Krait CPU cores clocked at 1.5GHz, 2GB of RAM and Adreno 320 GPU. That same chipset ticks inside the Google Nexus 4, the LG Optimus G, HTC DROID DNA / Butterfly and the Sony Xperia Z / ZL.

The Krait cores are fast, no doubt about that - two of them were coming only slightly short of a quad-core Cortex-A9 CPU and four make up a real beast. And the Oppo Find 5 doesn't disappoint. It comes up on top in Benchmark Pi (which is all about single-threaded performance) and it's very near the top in Linpack (which focuses on multithreading, though we do have some reservations about the accuracy of this benchmark).

Benchmark Pi

Lower is better

• Oppo Find 5
  267
• HTC One X+
  280
• LG Optimus G
  285
• Samsung Galaxy Note II
  305
• HTC One X (Tegra 3)
  330
• LG Optimus 4X HD
  350
• Samsung Galaxy S III
  359
• Meizu MX 4-core
  362
• Nexus 4
  431

Linpack

Higher is better

• LG Optimus G
  608
• Oppo Find 5
  593
• Samsung Galaxy Note II
  214.3
• Nexus 4
  213.5
• Meizu MX 4-core
  189.1
• HTC One X+
  177.7
• Samsung Galaxy S III
  175.5
• HTC One X
  160.9
• LG Optimus 4X HD
  141.5

It scores higher than the rest in the compound benchmark AnTuTu and is in the Quadrant Top 3 (also a compound benchmark).

AnTuTu

Higher is better

• Oppo Find 5
  15167
• Nexus 4
  15146
• Samsung Galaxy Note II
  13562
• HTC One X+
  13519
• Samsung Galaxy S III
  12288
• Meizu MX 4-core
  11820
• HTC One X (Tegra 3)
  11633
• LG Optimus G
  11226

Quadrant

Higher is better

• HTC One X+
  7632
• LG Optimus G
  7439
• Oppo Find 5
  7111
• HTC One X
  5952
• Samsung Galaxy Note II
  5916
• Samsung Galaxy S III
  5450
• Meizu MX 4-core
  5170
• LG Optimus 4X HD
  4814
• Nexus 4
  4567

We run GLBenchmark off-screen, which means we're testing at a fixed resolution, regardless of the screen resolution (it's 720p for v2.1 and 1080p for v2.5). This gives us the raw GPU power (games can choose to render at a lower resolution, with higher quality effects and then upscale to the screen resolution).

At the GLBenchmark 2.1 the Oppo Find 5 failed to impress - it posted the same score as the Nexus 4. Things get a lot better at the Oppo Find 5's native resolution of 1080, where it topped out the chart, beating both the LG Optimus G and the iPhone 5.

GLBenchmark 2.1 Egypt (720p offscreen)

Higher is better

• LG Optimus G
  113
• Samsung Galaxy Note II
  105
• Samsung Galaxy S III
  99
• Meizu MX 4-core
  80
• Oppo Find 5
  79
• Nexus 4
  78
• HTC One X (Tegra 3)
  64
• LG Optimus 4X HD
  61

GLBenchmark 2.5 Egypt (1080p offscreen)

Higher is better

• Oppo Find 5
  30
• LG Optimus G
  29
• Apple iPhone 5
  27
• Nexus 4
  26
• Samsung Galaxy Note II
  17
• Samsung Galaxy S III
  15
• HTC One X+
  12
• HTC One X
  9

But most games will probably want to run at native resolution, so we're including Epic Citadel, which uses Unreal Engine 3. Unreal Engine is popular with mobile game makers, so we'll be seeing this very engine in actual games. The benchmarks were run at native resolution and High Quality setting.

Here, the Find 5 didn't do too well, but it's at a massive resolution disadvantage - it has to render more than twice as many pixels as phones with 720p screens. The big surprise here was the Galaxy S III, which is barely ahead despite the lower resolution. Mali-400 is getting old now, debuting on the Galaxy S II and even its overclocked Galaxy S III version is unable to match the newer architecture.

Epic Citadel

Higher is better

• Nexus 4
  53.9
• LG Optimus G
  52.6
• Samsung Galaxy S III
  41.3
• Oppo Find 5
  38.6

Things were going very well for the Oppo Find, but the browser benchmarks clipped its wings. SunSpider was a dog slow 2045ms - more than twice as slow as the best of the bunch. The Nexus 4 doesn't do too well here either - unlike its desktop counterpart, Chrome for Android just isn't very good at this test.

In BrowserMark 2 things started to look up again - the scores are still behind the LG Optimus G, which has the same chipset but less screen resolution (so, each time the phone redraws a web page, there's less than half the number of pixels to deal with). Vellamo shows similar results.

SunSpider

Lower is better

• Samsung Ativ S
  891
• Apple iPhone 5
  915
• Nokia Lumia 920
  910
• Samsung Galaxy Note II
  972
• HTC One X+
  1001
• Motorola RAZR i XT890
  1059
• Samsung Galaxy S III
  1192
• Meizu MX 4-core
  1312
• LG Optimus G
  1353
• Nexus 4
  1971
• Oppo Find 5
  2045

BrowserMark 2

Higher is better

• LG Optimus G
  2555
• Oppo Find 5
  1797
• Nexus 4
  1794
• Nokia Lumia 920
  1774
• Nokia Lumia 820
  1760
• Samsung Omnia W
  1632
• Samsung Galaxy S III
  1247

Vellamo

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy Note II
  2418
• HTC One X (Tegra 3)
  2078
• Oppo Find 5
  1658
• Samsung Galaxy S III
  1641
• LG Optimus 4X HD
  1568
• LG Optimus G
  1522
• Meizu MX 4-core
  1468
• Nexus 4
  1310

To sum things up, the four Krait cores offer top notch performance, there's nothing that can beat them in the Android phone world (Cortex-A15 might, but we are yet to see if big.LITTLE will help it get into a power envelope suitable for phones).

The Adreno 320 GPU does equally well - it manages playable framerates using a real-world 3D engine at FullHD resolution. The PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 can only wish.

It's Chrome that drops the ball - the stock Android Browser is consistently faster, especially with some tweaks from phone makers.