When Oppo designed the Oppo A5 Pro, some serious choices were made – some brilliant, and some distinctly less so.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Superb battery life | No included charger |
| IP69 water resistance | Low performance for a phone at this price |
| 5 years of Android updates and 6 years of security updates | Camera quality is mediocre |
Score: 3/5
 |
Buy The Oppo A5 Pro! | Buy On Amazon |
In this review
Oppo A5 Pro Specifications
Oppo A5 Pro Design
Oppo A5 Pro Camera
Oppo A5 Pro Performance
Oppo A5 Pro Battery
Oppo A5 Pro Conclusion
Ethical disclaimer: The Oppo A5 Pro used in this review was loaned to me by Oppo Australia.
That gets it reviewed; Oppo has no input into the content of this review and they can read it and watch it the exact same time that you do.
Far too many publications don’t bother with disclosure, or hide it down the bottom of a review, and that’s not a transparent or fair way to treat readers/viewers. So it’s not what I do.
For more on ART’s ethical policy, click here.
Design
When you’re building a budget phone, you’re always making some serious choices about what to include.
Oppo has a long history in providing excellent value budget handsets, typically based around a strong design and decent cameras, but for the Oppo A5 Pro, it’s made some very different choices indeed.
This starts with the design, built around a 6.67 inch 1604×720 pixel 120Hz capable LCD display. While it’s nice to see 120Hz in a phone, it’s hardly alone in the budget space in doing so, but opting for 720p screens in a $399 phone definitely is a choice, and not one that I’d say plays in the Oppo A5 Pro’s favour.
Why opt for a simpler 720p display on a phone at this price point? Well, if this was a role playing game character, I might say that Oppo instead chose to put all of its points into its armour class, because for a phone at this price, it’s undeniably tough.
The Oppo A5 Pro is rated at MIL-STD 810H for shock protection and at IP69 for water and dust ingress.
As a reminder that doesn’t make this a bulletproof or drowning proof device – but it is quite rare to see in a phone at this price.
If you’re the rather clumsy type, or you have to habitually work in environments that are particular dusty or damp, this could make it a particularly attractive purchase proposition.
While I still favour phone cases, you could probably get away without one for the Oppo A5 Pro. Irritatingly (to me), its packaging looks like it might come with a case in the box in some markets, with a cardboard sleeve that would fit such a thing – but not here in Australia.
In Australia, Oppo sells the Oppo A5 Pro in either a Mocha Brown or Olive Green finish, though it appears internationally there may also be pink and blue variants of this phone.
My review model was the Mocha Brown, and it’s an interesting colour choice in itself. There’s very few brown phones out there, although in a lot of lighting situations it presents slightly more grey in tone.
The rear camera bump isn’t quite flat to the phone so it will rock slightly if sitting flat on a desk.
Controls sit on the right hand side with standard volume and a combo fingerprint reader/power/assistant button that sits flush with the side.
On the left hand side you’ll find a dual SIM card tray, with an option for microSD expansion on the secondary SIM card slot. The Oppo A5 Pro also supports eSIM and NFC for contactless payments.
Camera
Oppo has long sold itself as a camera centric phone maker, and at first glance on the rear of the Oppo A5 Pro, you might think that it’s sporting a dual lens system, most likely a standard wide and ultra-wide lens combination.
That’s not what Oppo’s opted to do here.
At a guess, putting all their points into the rugged nature of the phone meant that other compromises had to be made, and this includes the camera setup.
At the back you’ve got a primary 50MP wide lens and a 2MP monochrome lens. The secondary lens there isn’t for your moody noir portraits, but instead just as a focusing lens for portrait effects. Speaking of portrait effects, at the front the Oppo A5 Pro runs with an 8MP selfie sensor.
That’s a very basic recipe for a phone that costs $399 for sure. By way of comparison, the recently reviewed CMF Phone 2 Pro retails for $50 more than the Oppo A5 Pro with triple rear lenses (50MP Wide / 8MP Ultra-Wide / 50 MP Telephoto 2x) and a 16MP front facing camera, quite a step up from the choices Oppo has made here.
It is still feasible to get decent photos from what’s effectively a single-lens camera phone, though I found with the Oppo A5 Pro I had to work a little harder than I would have liked.
Low light situations aren’t typically handled well by budget cameras – including the Oppo A5 Pro.
That it’s not a good low light shooter isn’t unexpected, but what did surprise me was how often the it struggled with simple exposure parameters, often overexposing shots in a way that wasn’t pleasing. Most phones can manage decent everyday standard lighting shots, but here I had some distinct troubles.
What’s at the end of the tunnel? We may never know.
I would have killed for an ultrawide lens here to make the most of my vantage point… but no.
Within Oppo’s camera app, you can select an automatic 2x “zoom” – as always, that’s just a digital crop – and this is acceptable, although it’s really nothing you couldn’t do in post-processing anyway.
An Opera House in some harbour somewhere. Probably famous.
Again, ultrawide would have been nice.
2x digital zoom version, and this is OK for what it is.
What happens if I push it to the maximum 10x zoom?
Bad things happen, that’s what.
The IP69 rating on the Oppo A5 Pro should make it suitable for quick underwater photography, and while that could have some appeal, the generally mediocre nature of the Oppo A5 Pro’s cameras makes me wonder if it would be worth the effort.
Selfies are acceptable for a mid-range phone,
though there’s no hope of beautifying my potato-shaped head.
Again, this comes down to choices. If the rugged nature of the Oppo A5 Pro is more important to you than the cameras, then this might be a trade worth making – though it’s not one I’d be happy making myself at this price.
Performance
Behind its rugged frame, Oppo made choices when it came to equipping the Oppo A5 Pro with its core engine. It’s powered by a Mediatek Dimensity 6300 processor paired with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. That’s a generous storage allotment, and as already noted, you can boost it up with microSD card storage too.
Mediatek’s lower cost processors are often not the best in class, so I was curious to see how it would run compared to phones at or around its price point. It’s true for all Android phones that prices do drop over time, but what I’ve compared with are phones at similar prices at the time of writing this review.
Here’s how the Oppo A5 Pro compares using Geekbench 6’s CPU test:
That’s… not great. Maybe it redeems itself with scorching GPU power?
Nope.
The Oppo A5 Pro isn’t a seriously slow phone, but it’s undeniably underpowered compared to what you can get for this kind of money, sitting more in a class of phones that can be yours for anywhere from $50-$100 cheaper, sometimes more.
On the software side, it runs on Android 15 with Oppo’s own ColorOS sitting on the top. Oppo doesn’t have the strongest track record when it comes to updates, but it’s promising (with a hat tip to Whistleout) six years of security updates and five years of OS updates, which is good for a phone at this price.
What isn’t – though it’s predictable – is the quantity of additional apps that Oppo installs as part of the Oppo A5 Pro’s setup routine.
This isn’t just Oppo’s own inhouse apps and App Market, but also (predictably) the Booking.com app, Temu, TikTok, Facebook, AliExpress, LinkedIn, WPS Office and 10 low budget Android shovelware games.
While you might want some of those anyway, I’m willing to bet that few consumers want all of them. They can be uninstalled, thankfully.
Battery
So far, it’s not looking quite so good for the Oppo A5 Pro, given its mediocre cameras and well below par application performance – but again, Oppo has made some choices.
On the battery side, it boasts a 5,800mAh battery, nicely above the 5,000mAh average you get with most Android phones.
As always battery life is variable depending on usage, and here I turn to my standard YouTube battery test to give a comparative picture of smartphone performance. For more on how I test smartphone batteries, click here.
Here’s how the Oppo A5 Pro compares against that same crop of smartphones:
The Oppo A5 Pro blitzes the field here, though I should note that with a 720p display it’s not quite crunching the same number of pixels as its competitors, which would help out a little in battery life terms. Still, this is a good, long life battery phone.
The Oppo A5 Pro supports Oppo’s fast “SuperVOOC” charging at up to 45W. SuperVOOC is its own standard, and that’s often meant that Oppo would include a compliant charger in the box to allow consumers to make the most of their charging experience.
That’s not the case with the Australian model, however. I did find using some higher power USB-PD chargers did bring up a charging screen that suggested that the phone was leveraging faster charging, but either way you’ll have to bring your own charger into play to keep it topped up.
Oppo A5 Pro: Alex’s Verdict
The reasons to buy the Oppo A5 Pro are twofold; the battery life is excellent and it is a seriously durable phone without a shadow of a doubt. At $399 if you’re constantly finding that your phone dies out due to environmental conditions (or your own clumsy fingers) then it may be that Oppo’s choices in its design and build are worth your money.
However… I’m not convinced that this is a model that will suit a wider consumer audience, because what you’re missing out on in return, even for a budget phone, are better cameras and better application performance.
While battery life is quite fundamental to the smartphone experience and I often lean more towards phones with good battery life, I also want to be able to fully utilise the cameras on a phone and not be left wanting by slow app experiences when I’m using a phone.
That makes the Oppo A5 Pro – I’m still not quite sure what makes it “Pro”, honestly, that’s usually a suffix used for camera-centric phones, but I digress – a real niche phone. If you really need that durability then it could be a very smart buy – but if you don’t, better phones are available.
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Oppo A5 Pro: Pricing and availability
The Oppo A5 Pro retails in Australia for $399
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