Oppo Find X5 Lite review: Astonishing battery life

Where to buy

The Oppo Find X5 Lite truly lives up to what you might expect out of a "lite" suffixed phone. That's a trick many phone makers use to effectively rebadge a less capable handset with the hopes that the more premium brand association will make consumers attracted to it.

That's precisely what Oppo does with the Oppo Find X5 Lite, which is sold as the Oppo Reno 7 5G in other parts of the world. Naming aside, in the mid-range space I'd typically expect Oppo phones to stand out for camera quality and features.

That's not what you get from the Find X5 Lite, which instead swaps camera grunt for sheer battery endurance. If you want a mid-range phone that will last all day – and then some – this is the current best phone to buy by a significant margin.

Design: Find X5 in name only

Image: Alex Kidman/Finder

The Find X5 line is defined by smooth flowing lines, subtle colour decisions and a premium look and feel.

At least, that's what the designers of the Find X5 and Find X5 Pro were keen on.

The Find X5 Lite is rather obviously a rebadged Oppo Reno design, with a rather more plain design language in play.

At the front, you're faced with a 6.43 inch FHD 90Hz AMOLED with a top left hole punch camera.

Here the "lite" nature of the phone is shown through that 90Hz top refresh rate, as it's rather easy to score a phone with 120Hz refresh (or even 144Hz in the case of some of Motorola's phones) for this kind of price point. Still, it's a pleasant display with high contrast typical of AMOLED panels.

The left-hand side houses the phone's dual SIM and microSD card reader and volume controls, while the right-hand side houses the power button. Unlocking is via the less-secure face ID or an in-display fingerprint reader that had few issues during my review period.

Flip the Oppo Find X5 Lite over and you'll be met with either a more plain "Starry Black" finish, or the more ostentatious "Startrails Blue" model Oppo sent me for review.

I'm on the record as being a fan of blue-tinged phones – your taste may vary – but the lined trails effect and shimmer on the back of the Find X5 Lite is a lot to get used to. I can't quite shake the feeling that I'm trapped in a 1980s Kim Wilde video somehow.

A very welcome inclusion on the Oppo Find X5 Lite that isn't on too many mid-range phones anymore is a 3.5mm headphone jack, located at the base next to the USB-C charger. I don't always need wired headphones these days, but it's much easier to have a port ready to roll rather than fumble around working out if I've got a USB-C adaptor handy.

The 3.5mm headphone jack is nice, but what is absent that you can find in phones at this price point is any kind of IP water resistance rating.

It should be able to survive a light water shower or similar, but if you drop it in the sink it's almost certainly going to be an expensive brick.

Oppo Find X5 Lite review: A good camera, but Oppo can do better

Image: Alex Kidman/Finder

The Oppo Find X5 has a triple lens array at the back, headed up by a 64MP primary sensor. That's joined by an 8MP ultra-wide 118.9 sensor and finally a 8MP macro sensor. At the front, you can satiate your selfie-centric ego with a 32MP sensor.

Phone cameras are always more than just the sum of their megapixel totals, and Oppo has really good form in over-delivering on the camera front in an affordable way.

That wasn't quite my experience with the Oppo Find X5 Lite. I certainly wouldn't say that it was a bad camera to speak of, but I did quickly hit some obvious limitations.

The inclusion of a macro lens is something I've seen on too many really cheap phones – and at $799 the Find X5 Lite is far from "cheap" – but like those budget handsets, it's a real struggle to get anything particularly satisfying out of the macro lens.

It is pleasing to note that the front-facing selfie camera doesn't automatically decide to turn your selfies into plastic facsimiles, although you can go quite nuts on the beauty sliders if it's to your taste.

However, be careful as it's all too easy to turn yourself into a caricature. If you ever see me looking like this in real life, I've been replaced by some kind of rubber alien doppelgänger:

Image: Alex Kidman/Finder

The ultra-wide lens is reasonable, but delivered slightly dull images in my tests, even on brighter days.

That leaves all the heavy lifting to the 64MP primary sensor, which predictably uses pixel binning to deliver better shots in dimmer situations. However, it's still not a strong contender in very low light.

What all of that adds up to is a serviceable camera array, but not a particularly good one at this price point, and especially against some of the bigger brands and their slightly sharper, generally AI-led optics. Oppo can do a little better than the Oppo Find X5 Lite, and it's frustrating that it hasn't managed to do so.

Oppo Find X5 Lite sample photos:

Image: Alex Kidman/Finder

Image: Alex Kidman/Finder

Image: Alex Kidman/Finder

Image: Alex Kidman/Finder

Image: Alex Kidman/Finder

Oppo Find X5 Lite review: The performance is good, but not best in class

Image: Alex Kidman/Finder

The Oppo Find X5 uses a MediaTek Dimensity 900 chipset and processor with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of onboard storage.

MediaTek, for the longest time, was the budget choice of really slow phones, but its Dimensity line of 5G-friendly chips has definitely brought a lot of competition in the mid-range space in recent years.

As such, I was keen to see how the Oppo Find X5 Lite would compare against other phones in its price class. While it bears the Find X5 branding, I wasn't expecting the same kind of performance you'd see out of the Oppo Find X5 or Oppo Find X5 Pro.

At the Oppo Find X5 Lite's asking price, you have a lot of mid-range choices. Here's how the Oppo Find X5 Lite compares against phones at or near its price point, based on current retail pricing at the time of writing:

There is, predictably, nothing to compare against the iPhone SE 2022. Not everyone's a fan of Apple's walled garden approach, but the Find X5 Lite is outperformed in a straight line CPU speed test by the Snapdragon 778 found in the older Motorola Edge 20.

It did manage better benchmark performance than the Samsung Galaxy A53 – though that's a cheaper handset by $100 at the time of writing – or the similarly priced Nokia XR20, but then that's a phone that sells on toughness, not speed.

On the graphics side, the Oppo Find X5 Lite utilises a Mali G68 GPU with middling results against that same crop of phones using 3DMark's GPU-centric benchmarks:

Again, the iPhone dominates, but the Find X5 Lite can only outdo the XR20, which I entirely expected based on the latter phone's slow performance.

What all of this adds up to is a phone that does live up to that Lite suffix, because its performance is rather ordinary for a $799 phone. It's not slow, and most apps should run with few issues, but it's not hard to get a faster handset for the same money.

Like every other Oppo handset, the Find X5 Lite uses Oppo's own ColorOS overlay on top of Android, in this case Android 11 with ColorOS 12 on top. It's disappointing to see a 2022 phone ship with Android 11, especially as Oppo's track record with OS upgrades isn't a particularly good one.

ColorOS includes its own replacements for most Android core apps, which makes sense when you remember that these exact handsets are sold in China where Google apps are a no-no.

The issue here is that you have to agree to security provisions for every single one of them the first time you launch them. It's Android, so you can replace most of them, but it's still alarming, and a little baffling as to why Oppo doesn't opt for a system-wide permissions structure just to make it easier on users in markets where Google services are available.

Oppo Find X5 Lite review: Fast charging and a battery that lasts for days

Image: Alex Kidman/Finder

The Oppo Find X5 Lite packs in a 4,500mAh battery, which is on the lower side for an Android phone in its price bracket. I'd generally expect 5,000mAh for phones at this price. That's excluding the iPhone SE 2022, but then Apple always does go its own way in the smartphone space.

Battery life is never quite as linear as looking at battery capacity statistics, but a bigger tank can always give you a little more. Oppo's managed something quite clever here, because despite a smaller battery (or, strictly speaking, 2 x 2,250mAh cells in sequence), it manages some of the best battery life I've seen in any mid-range phone this year.

In Finder's battery test, it easily topped its class, and by a margin that means even heavy users should be able to whip through a day's usage without worry. Multi-day usage is entirely feasible too. Here's how it compares:

Oppo has long had its own proprietary VOOC charging to rapidly top up its handsets. The Oppo Find X5 Lite features 65W SuperVOOC charging to rapidly top it up when the battery goes low. You do get an in-box 65W charger too, though wireless charging is notably absent if it's important to you.

Should you buy it?

Lite phones are always defined by that suffix, and that's totally true for the Oppo Find X5 Lite. It's not really a Find X5 series phone in any serious respect anyway. But beyond the branding, you're giving up water resistance, faster app performance (especially for GPU-intensive tasks) and, surprisingly for an Oppo phone, truly competitive camera performance.

However, with the possible exception of water resistance, none of those features are bad, merely average. Where the Oppo Find X5 Lite raises itself above the pack is in battery life, where both in forced testing and my own day-to-day use, I've found it to be truly exceptional. If you're happy with average elsewhere and want best-in-class battery life, buy the Oppo Find X5 Lite.

Oppo Find X5 Lite review: Pricing and availability

The Oppo Find X5 Lite retails in Australia for $799 outright.

Price

RRP: $973.50

Where to buy

Check price at eBay

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How to buy the Oppo Find X5 Lite on a plan

You can buy the Oppo Find X5 Lite on a 12-, 24- or 36-month repayment period with a mobile plan from Optus or Vodafone.

Specifications

How we tested

The Oppo Find X5 Lite was tested over a 2-week period concurrently with the Oppo Find X5, using a range of benchmark tests, as well as day-to-day use of apps, videos and games to assess its performance. All benchmark tests were run at least 3 times to gather an average score for each category. Cameras were tested in multiple locations and times of day to assess overall camera quality.

I've been working as a tech reviewer for more than 2 decades, picking up multiple Australian IT Journalism awards along the way, including awards in the best reviewer and best technical journalist categories. However, in real life, I do not look anywhere near as plastic as the selfie above.

The model of the Oppo Find X5 Lite used for this review was loaned to me by Oppo for the purposes of writing this review.