Oppo Reno5 5G / Find X3 Lite review

Great OLED panel clocked at 90Hz

The Reno5 5G's display is definitely one of its strongest suits. It may not have a crazy-fast 120Hz refresh rate, but the 90Hz in this price range would do. Some other qualities compensate for that, such as good sunlight legibility, for example. But first, let's go through the specs.

The panel is branded as Super AMOLED, has a small, for today's standards, diagonal of 6.43" and fits a tall 20:9aspect ratio of 1080 x 2400px resolution. The panel itself is protected by Gorilla Glass 5, and there's a small cutout for the front-facing camera in the upper-left corner.

With the brightness slider cranked up to maximum and the auto mode disabled, the display peaked at 444 nits, and in auto mode, it achieved 634 nits in bright light conditions. If it was more than a year ago, this would have been a flagship-grade display. And we mean this in a good way. However, this result failed to reach the advertised 750 nits, though, of course, the measuring methodology used may affect the readings.

Color accuracy, on the other hand, isn't stellar with the main issue being the rather blue-ish whites. The display is subject to tuning, so you may want to opt for a warmer color temperature if color accuracy is what you are after.

Refresh rate management is half-decent as only a few scenarios would lower the refresh rate to 60Hz to save on some power. Netflix and YouTube full-screen playback runs at 60Hz, but almost everything else is fixed at 90Hz. The menu or the app don't matter, except for those rare cases in which the app itself doesn't support anything above 60Hz. Even when using the native gallery app and watching full-screen videos, using the default video player wouldn't cause the refresh rate to go down. Even though we didn't expect granular HRR control like the one presented in the Find X3 Pro, we expected a bit more from the Reno5 5G regarding the automatic handling of the refresh rate.

Battery life

To be honest, we were expecting average battery results at most, but the Reno5 5G's efficiency surprised us. The rather small, by today's standards, 4,300 mAh battery was able to provide juice to reach an overall endurance score of 109h. That's getting really close to phones using 5,000 mAh cells.

The video playback runtime and the standby scores were the main contributors to the overall score. The web browsing runtime was more than satisfactory, too.

Our battery tests were automated thanks to SmartViser, using its viSerDevice app. The endurance rating denotes how long the battery charge will last you if you use the device for an hour of telephony, web browsing, and video playback daily. More details can be found here.

All test results shown are achieved under the highest screen refresh rate mode. You can adjust the endurance rating formula manually so it matches better your own usage in our all-time battery test results chart where you can also find all phones we've tested.

Charging speed

Even if you are not impressed by the phone's endurance, a blazing-fast charging speed can potentially more than make up for it.

The Reno5 5G with its 65W charging support branded as SuperVOOC 2.0 is the undisputed champion in this category.

The 4,300 mAh battery charges from 0 to 100% in just 40 minutes, while a 30-minute charge will get you 87% of the juice back. Of course, you have to consider that the other phones in the chart below offer bigger batteries that are slower to charge, but the difference in charging times is still huge.

30min charging test (from 0%)

• Oppo Reno5 5G
  87%
• Poco F3
  67%
• Xiaomi Mi 10T Pro
  61%
• Samsung Galaxy A72
  54%
• Motorola Moto G100
  37%

Time to full charge (from 0%)

• Oppo Reno5 5G
  0:40h
• Poco F3
  0:56h
• Xiaomi Mi 10T Pro
  0:58h
• Samsung Galaxy A72
  1:15h
• Motorola Moto G100
  1:54h

Speaker

Two or three years ago, we wouldn't have complained about the lack of stereo loudspeakers. But with the intense competition in the mid-range segment, this feature has become a standard. That's why we think the absence of two speakers on the Reno5 5G is a rather big misstep. Not to mention the single, bottom-firing speaker is far from loud.

Quality is mediocre, too, and it's hard to rank this phone hard when you have rivals with solid stereo setups. The highs get distorted at higher volumes while the bass is virtually non-existent, taking away some of the depth of every track you play.

Use the Playback controls to listen to the phone sample recordings (best use headphones). We measure the average loudness of the speakers in LUFS. A lower absolute value means a louder sound. A look at the frequency response chart will tell you how far off the ideal "0db" flat line is the reproduction of the bass, treble, and mid frequencies. You can add more phones to compare how they differ. The scores and ratings are not comparable with our older loudspeaker test. Learn more about how we test here.