In the world of sub 20k smartphones, companies are trying several out of the box tricks to segment their smartphones from the crowd. Motorola has its pure android, Nokia has its built quality, Xiaomi has its jaw-dropping price, and Samsung has its brand equity. In this race to earn the so-called badge of approbation, OPPO has taken a significant leap towards the title of a camera-centric smartphone.
So, does it earn the title of the midrange camera focused smartphone or fails miserably?
Let’s take a deep dive!
Design & Display
The design of OPPO A5 2020 is one that emits flamboyance. Its glossy plastic panels with OPPO branding and a mirror finish looks bold yet subtle at the same time. Don’t get us wrong the smartphone feels rugged, grippy and ergonomic to hold and never seemed to slip out of the hand. We especially liked the fact that OPPO managed to seamlessly blend the quad-camera hump inside the back cover and provided a hint of colour to the power button on the side.
Despite its humongous 6.5-inch HD+ Water Drop display the smartphone is easy to wrap your hand around, thanks to its aspect ratio. Watching movies and a bit of YouTube felt good due to the Dolby ATMOS setup. The display does its job well.
Camera
The main feature of the smartphone comes through its quad-camera setup of 12 MP (f/1.8) primary sensor, 8MP (f/2.25) Ultra-wide unit, a 2MP (f/2.4) monochrome sensor and a 2MP (f/2.4) depth unit on the back. The software offers several modes like panorama, professional, portrait and night mode for taking excellent shots.
Coming to the picture quality, the camera produces some excellent shots in every condition you throw at it. The pictures come out to be crisp and lifelike with the perfect level of saturation. However, the shots taken with the 5X room were a bit grainy and on the blurry side.
Night photography is good as the lens easily ascertains the objects in the shot which is quite apparent when you compare the shots.
The 8MP (f/2.0) selfie camera does a fair job too. Its AI beautification does smoothen out the rough skin tones around the subject making it more useable. However, the low light shots seemed to pale in compared to the rear setup.
The video quality is splendid with good colour accuracy, solid dynamic range, and auto exposure working its way across a shot. This setup can easily record stable 4K@30fps, 1080p@30fps, and 720P@30fps with its EIS.
Processor and OS
The A5 2020 is powered by an Octa-Core Qualcomm Snapdragon 665 processor that is clocked at 2.2 GHz. This processor is powerful yet power efficient at the same time and marks a huge improvement over the Snapdragon 660 found earlier. The phone delivers a solid performance as the apps load up quickly and the games ran smooth. We ran games like Mario Kart, Temple Run 2, Asphalt 9 and Candy Crush which ran without any issues. Overall, we were impressed with the performance which was more than adequate to run multiple apps simultaneously across the UI.
OPPO A5 2020 runs on Android 9.0 Pie with OPPO’s own Color OS V6.0.1 on top. This UI is highly customizable and comes with a whole lot of features. There are numerous themes that you can select from the Theme Store that you can choose from. Inbuilt features like Cloning apps, Split screen, assistive ball come in handy for multitasking and elevating your workflow.
Battery
The A5 2020 comes with a 5000 mAh battery unit that blows the competition out of the water. The smartphone easily lasts over 1.5 days with normal use and can last for an extensive amount of time through your multiplayer gaming sessions. The device comes with a 10W charger that supports reverse charging and can juice up the device within 2 hours.
Gizmo Verdict
The OPPO A5 2020 is a solid successor to the A5 and a testament to the fact that mid-range smartphone camera can be as good if not better than the ones on the flagship smartphones. The smartphone offers a great battery life, adequate performance, a smart camera setup, and good build quality. These three factors should be considered while buying OPPO A5 2020.
