Oppo A5 Pro 5G Review: Solid But Sluggish

Best Prices Today: Oppo A5 Pro 5G

Oppo has a reputation for dominating the budget phone market, but that battlefield has opened up to new competitors, leaving the Chinese manufacturer has its work cut out.

Rivals such as Nothing and its spin-off CMF, old enemies like Samsung, and the refurbished market give customers looking for a low-price device a lot of options. Every penny counts, and every decision behind how a smartphone is built becomes vital.

While Oppo’s A5 Pro 5G is a decent device, it has few features to help it stand out from the competition. Here’s my full review.

Design & Build

• Sleek, durable design
• Awkward fingerprint placement
• No headphone jack

Aesthetically, the A5 Pro looks sharp and sleek, with a hole-punch notch at the top and a slim bezel. While there is a little chin, it’s barely noticeable when using the phone. 

At 194g, the whole package – available in black or green finish – is impressive. The A5 Pro feels light, comfortable and more stylish than many other budget models I’ve used.

The display features scratch-resistant Corning Gorilla Glass 7i, while its IP69 rating protects it from dust, water jets, steam, and submersion in fresh water for up to 30 minutes. Accidentally dropping the A5 Pro 5G in the pool or taking quick snaps underwater should be safe.

Like other Oppo devices, the fingerprint scanner for unlocking the phone is on the right-hand side under the volume button, which makes it specifically more difficult for left-handers and is less convenient in general. Other than a PIN or passcode, the only alternative is a basic face unlock, though it is responsive and speedy.

Oppo has also killed the headphone jack, which it says frees up space inside the phone for a larger battery and improved water resistance. Personally, I think budget devices should always be able to pair with low-cost headphones, but Oppo at least gives buyers a free pair of wireless buds if they purchase from its website.

Adam Smith / Foundry

Screen & Speakers 

• Smooth 120Hz refresh
• Bright but low-res
• Weak bass output

With regards to the screen, Oppo gives with one hand and takes away with the other. A 120Hz refresh rate makes switching apps and scrolling feel smooth, and is especially helpful with gaming – a nice touch on a budget device.

Adam Smith / Foundry

The phone also has up to 1000 nits of brightness, which makes for good outdoor visibility, even when used in the bright summer sun. Screen glare was not an issue when using it as a GPS while cycling around London. 

However, the display is only 1604 x 720 pixels, noticeably less than the 1080p Full HD that comes even on low-price devices these days. Textures on clothes and hair are less detailed than they should be, and the separation between the foreground and background is not as nuanced. The colour palette is also colder than is realistic – emphasising blues and making white skin tones paler. 

The stereo speaker setup (one downward-firing grille, plus the earpiece) performs adequately, and is loud enough to fill the room, but its talents lie primarily in the mid-range for dialogue and audiobooks. Bass frequencies are difficult for it to convey properly – it’s unable to reach the guttural depths – so pair it with some headphones or a Bluetooth speaker for high-octane action.

Specs & Performance

• Decent gaming performance
• Generous, expandable storage
• Laggy everyday use

The A5 Pro 5G takes intensive games like Genshin Impact in its stride with only the smallest of stutters, making full use of its 8GB of RAM and the MediaTek Dimensity 6300 inside. When there is enough storage space left over, this phone will even use some of it to expand its RAM by up to another 8GB, which is a nice touch.

Users are likely to have storage to spare too. As well as a hefty 256GB of in-built storage, users can get more using the Micro-SD card slot, which is always a welcome addition and one that is increasingly rare on modern smartphones.

Adam Smith / Foundry

In other ways, however, the A5 Pro 5G can be untenably slow. The search bar in the app drawer takes a few seconds to load every time, disrupting quick use, and annoyingly does not clear previous searches when being used again. Once settled in an app, it works fine, but swapping quickly between software takes a little longer than it should. 

Oppo A5 Pro 5G benchmarks

Cameras

• Sharp close-ups
• Unusable max zoom
• Patchy AI editing

For simple snaps, the A5 Pro 5G works fine. Colours satisfyingly pop and texture comes across well, especially if you’re taking close-ups of still objects using the phone’s high-resolution capture mode, which takes full advantage of its 50Mp main rear lens.

It does a decent job handling brightness, but keen photographers will run the risk of any nuance being crushed out in direct sunlight, such as when you’re example when trying to capture stained glass (see below).

The night mode is decent in extreme darkness, but capturing decent detail requires a steady hand. Even minor shakes can leave an image brighter, but blurry. 

However, the camera is even more difficult to use in other circumstances. It has a 10x zoom, but at its maximum capacity, it’s practically unusable, with loads of blur. It isn’t reasonable to expect a dedicated telephoto lens at this price point, but if you want high-quality photos from a concert or other live show, make sure you sit as close to the front as possible.

Inside Oppo’s default photos app, you’ll find a range of AI features, including a reflection remover and a photo enhancer.

The former does a surprisingly impressive job, and while the edges of the removed reflection remain noticeable when you know what you’re looking for, they probably won’t be seen on a smaller screen.

The AI photo enhancer, however, is hit and miss to say the least. Using it on a photo of some flowers completely changes the image, their soft petals into spiky ones, while another part of the flower was transformed completely into a bee.

This is because its machine-learning process is making an educated guess about what should be there, based on the images in its training data. Since many photos of flowers are accompanied by insects, Oppo’s AI believes one could be here too – even though it is not.

The selfie camera is decent, but comes with the same hang-ups of a lot of Chinese manufacturers: lightening skin, tightening the jaw, and widening the eyes. These ‘improvements’ are turned on by default, and can be disabled, but still lack the kind of fidelity that Apple and Google’s devices do.

Battery Life & Charging 

• All-day battery
• Fast charge support
• No charger included

The A5 Pro 5G has a large 5800mAh battery, which easily – and unsurprisingly – lasted an entire day of streaming, messaging, and audio. Battery life is undoubtedly this phone’s biggest asset.

It also comes with 45W fast-charging, but this unfortunately is not supported out of the box. Like most other manufacturers, there is no charger, and the USB-C to USB-A that came with the packaging only took the A5 Pro 5G to 6% after 15 minutes and 16% after 30 minutes when used with a 12W Philips travel plug.

Buying an 80W fast charging power adapter from Oppo’s website, which also has USB-A, will set you back £40 in the UK.

Adam Smith / Foundry

Software & Apps

• Heavy bloatware
• Basic AI tools
• Long update promise

Out of the box, the Oppo A5 Pro 5G runs ColorOS 15, the company’s specific software layered on top of Android 15. The most noticeable change is the amount of bloatware that comes pre-installed, such as Booking.com, Spotify, TikTok and more. 

Oppo boasts new AI capabilities as part of ColorOS 15, such as text and recorder summaries, one-tap translation for documents, and more.

Adam Smith / Foundry

These work pretty well, and it’s convenient to have them on hand. If you prefer an assistant, Google Gemini is also pre-installed on the phone and set as the default.

Oppo has promised a full five years of major operating system updates and six years of security updates, and it should be expected that this technology will only improve over time. However, it’s not clear how long we’ll have to wait for the update to Android 16.

Price & Availability 

At launch in the UK, the Oppo A5 Pro 5G costs £229. That gets you a model with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, plus a free pair of wireless earbuds.

You can buy the phone directly from Oppo, but also via Amazon. Sadly, the phone isn’t being sold in the US.

There are plenty of great budget phone alternatives, including the CMF Phone 2 Pro and Samsung Galaxy A16 5G.

Should you buy the Oppo A5 Pro 5G?

Probably not, though the phone does boast quite a few impressive features. Its battery life, like many other Oppo devices, is hard to beat. It also has an impressive display and is surprisingly smooth with top-shelf mobile games.

However, the phone’s slow loading speeds, bags of bloatware, lacklustre camera, and low-resolution display means other brands can top it with ease. 

Oppo might have a long-standing reputation in the budget market, but it is losing ground to hungrier and more impressive handsets. Unless the company does something drastic to improve its low-cost handsets, it does not look like that is going to change.

Specs

• Android 15
• 6.67-inch, 720 x 1604 pixels, 20:9 ratio display with 120Hz refresh rate
• MediaTek Dimensity 6300
• 8GB RAM
• 256GB internal storage
• 8Mp front camera
• 50Mp main camera
• 2Mp depth camera
• Fingerprint scanner
• Face recognition
• Wi-Fi 5
• Bluetooth 5.3
• 5G
• NFC
• USB-C
• 5800mAh non-removable battery
• 45W fast charging
• IP69 water and dust resistance
• 164.82 x 75.53 x 7.76mm
• 194g
• Launch colours: Black Brown, Olive Green