Nobody would call the Oppo A5x a fast phone, but for its budget asking price, what it delivers is truly exceptional.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Huge, long-lasting battery | Slow performance |
| 3 OS Upgrades and 6 years of security updates | Mediocre cameras |
| IP65 rating | Bland design |
Score: 4/5
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In this review
Oppo A5x Specifications
Oppo A5x Design
Oppo A5x Camera
Oppo A5x Performance
Oppo A5x Battery
Oppo A5x Conclusion
Ethical disclaimer: The Oppo A5x used in this review was loaned to me by Oppo Australia for the purpose of this review, and it’s going back to Oppo when I’m done.
Oppo’s only influence on this review has been supplying the handset (it would be tricky to review without it!) and as such all figures, observations and opinions are my own without any oversight or early access to this review on Oppo’s part. That’s as it should be, but ethical disclosure is, it seems, a dying art in an age of AI slop reviews. For more on ART’s ethical position, see here.
Design
The most common thought that goes through my mind when testing a budget phone – and at $219 outright, the Oppo A5x sits neatly in that bracket – is what compromises have been made to meet a price point.
The design of the Oppo A5x shows rather clearly one of the areas where Oppo has kept matters on the more affordable side. It’s built around a 6.77 inch 90Hz capable display, which is a fine size, but it’s only got a resolution of 1604×720, which limits it to 720p.
That’s a pretty common play in the budget space to this day, though shopping around can sometimes find 1080p capable phones around this kind of price.
The other low-cost aspect of the Oppo A5x’s design is that it’s a remarkably plain phone. Here in Australia, Oppo offers it in Laser White or Midnight Blue finishes; it’s the latter that I’ve reviewed, and while I’m a notable fan of blue as a phone colour, this is a darker hue that often appears more black or dark grey than blue.
It appears that Oppo does produce a slight variant of the Oppo A5x in “Tranquil Lake Green” as well, though that’s a phone with quite a few internal differences compared to the model I’ve tested, so be careful when shopping online to ensure that you get the phone you’re planning to buy.
Controls for the Oppo A5x all sit on the right hand side, with volume above a combination fingerprint reader and Android assistant/power button, while at the base you’ll find USB-C for power and data next to a classic 3.5mm headphone jack if wired headphones are your style. The left hand side houses a dual Nano-SIM/micro SD card slot, and that’s your lot.
Well… nearly.
There’s one single design area where the Oppo A5x is actually exceptional, and it’s in the surprising area of water resistance.
So many budget phones simply mumble something about being “water repellent” (which, as I explain here, doesn’t really mean much of anything), but the Oppo A5x is rated at IP65; that won’t protect it against your adventures in the depths of the sea, but it’s a lot more in terms of tested endurance than you see from many competing handsets in this price bracket.
Camera
Oppo has long prided itself as being a “camera phone” company, but when you’re building to a lower cost, this is an area where compromises are often made.
Everyday plain photo? Not a big problem, but that’s expected, even at this price point.
That’s absolutely true for the Oppo A5x, which features a simple 32MP wide sensor at the rear and a 5MP front-facing camera, which is very simple recipe given many competitors at least stretch to a 50MP sensor, even at this price.
We have thankfully gotten past the point where most budget smartphones offer up truly dreadful cameras, but you’ll still need plenty of patience and good light to get much that’s all that exciting out of the Oppo A5x.
This isn’t a bad shot, but it was shot in moderate light, and the Oppo A5x insisted on a long, slow low light exposure, which meant it was glacially slow to take.
There is of course no optical zoom on a single wide lens, and cropping in with digital zoom at up to 10x quickly falls apart.
Normal photo with the wide lens? Fine.
2x digital crop? That’s OK, though you’re not getting particularly close, of course.
10x zoom (maximum distance). ARGH IT BURNS IT BURNS.
If you’re the selfie type, the Oppo A5x does a little better than you might expect, though it can’t do anything to make me look good. That’s not the fault of the Oppo A5x.
Performance
The Oppo A5x is built around a Qualcomm Snapdragon 6s 4G Gen 1 with (for the Australian model as tested) just 4GB of RAM and 128GB of onboard storage.
It appears that some international variants may bump that up to either 6GB or 8GB of RAM, but 4GB is all we get here.
Phones with 4GB of RAM in 2025 tend to be slow, because that level of RAM often becomes the bottleneck on performance. So how does the Oppo A5x compare?
Let’s start with Geekbench 6, comparing against broadly similar priced handsets at the time of writing this review.
As I’ve noted elsewhere recently, phone prices vary over time, but at the point where I’m writing this, the above phones sit between a price range of $179-$299.
The Oppo A5x is outdone here rather obviously by the Motorola Moto g05 and Samsung Galaxy A05s, but the reality at these levels of performance is that they’re all on the slower side, ultimately.
The Oppo A5x does fare a little better if we look at GPU performance, by way of 3DMark Slingshot Extreme.
Real world usage of the Oppo A5x is similarly a turgid affair. Forget multi-tasking, and be ready for some significant lag whether you’re launching the camera, opening a web page or running most standard Android apps. This again isn’t a huge surprise at this kind of price point, but I do feel that it’s exacerbated by the low level of RAM on the Oppo A5x.
Like everything Oppo, you’re faced with ColorOS, overlaid on top of Android 15, but this is where Oppo’s doing something rather special for such a cheap phone.
Most budget phones only see a single OS upgrade, if that, but Oppo is reportedly providing three OS upgrades and six years of security updates, which is truly exceptional for a phone at this kind of price.
It’s simply a new benchmark for what to expect out of low cost phones and how long they might last and be supported for, and I for one tip my cap to Oppo in this respect.
One feature you don’t get on the Oppo A5x is any level of 5G support.
This is a 4G phone, plain and simple, but there’s little risk of Australia’s telcos decommissioning 4G within the phone’s likely lifespan – and certainly not within the scope of that promise of Android OS and security updates.
Australia’s 4G networks aren’t the fastest critters out there, and they’re constantly busy; testing with the Oppo A5x in Sydney on the Telstra network typically hit speeds of between 25-50Mbps down; while the 4G LTE specification can fly faster than that, congestion plays its role there too.
Battery
The Oppo A5x’s other superpower hides within its frame, with an impressive 6,000mAh battery to keep it ticking along. While it’s not the first 6,000mAh phone I’ve tested, typically that kind of power has either been the province of gaming phones or phones that sold very specifically on their battery prowess.
The Oppo A5x just has a big battery, and that can be a big plus, as long as it’s capable of reasonable battery power management.
As is always the case, how you use a phone has a huge impact on how long its battery lasts day by day; you can find out more about how I test mobile phone batteries here, but as always my first stop is my YouTube 3 hour battery test.
So how did the Oppo A5x fare here?
The obvious caveat here is that the Oppo A5x is only pushing out pixels to a 720p display, but the only phone in that comparison test that has a 1080p display is the Samsung Galaxy A05s, with the Motorola having a similar 720p screen to the Oppo and the HMD trailling below that.
Those figures for the Oppo A5x are (once again, here’s that word) exceptional, and it can carry through to day to day performance again, though with the observation that the slower nature of the Oppo A5x’s performance also means you’re less likely to stress it in a hardcore way when it runs in the leisurely fashion that it does.
The Oppo A5x supports Oppo’s own proprietary SuperVOOC charging standard at up to 45W, which is very rapid for a phone in this price bracket, but you’d basically need to have an existing SuperVOOC charger to hand to top it up that way, because there’s no included charger in the box.
Oppo A5x: Alex’s Verdict
When you’re buying in the budget space, your first priority is always cost. If you simply can’t afford a specific phone, it doesn’t really matter if it’s $250 or $2,500, after all.
Your second priority can vary, depending on how you actually want to use a phone, and this is where you have to weigh up which compromises have been made to meet that budget price.
The Oppo A5x has phenomenal battery life for a $219 phone, and it’s matched with an excellent promise of future support that really does add a significant layer of value to the equation.
The balance there is that it’s not a fast phone, though it’s within scope for a phone at this price, it’s not particularly nicely designed, though hardly terrible, and its cameras are quite ordinary, which is unusual for Oppo given its general camera phone reputation.
I would argue that the Oppo A5x gets the balance very right for most phone buyers, because a phone with a flat battery is just a brick, and it takes quite a long time for the Oppo A5x to get there.
Combine that with a very long support cycle for such an inexpensive phone, and I reckon you’ve got a budget winner here.
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Oppo A5x: Pricing and availability
The Oppo A5x retails in Australia for $219 outright.
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About the Author
Hay alex.
thanks for this review. i call this perfect timeing, as im looking for a phone like this and thinnk this one will be good for me.
your review just made me feel better about that statment so thanks for that