Oplus XonPhone 5 flash review: One among the herd

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Oplus XonPhone 5 flash review: One among the herd

Oplus XonPhone 5 Volume Rockers

The Oplus XonPhone 5 competes against the likes of Micromax Canvas Unite 2 A106, Asus Zenfone 4 and the Xiaomi Redmi 1S. The company had sent me a unit of the XonPhone 5 for a couple of weeks and here are my impressions about it.

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Build Quality & Design

Oplus XonPhone 5 Back

The XonPhone 5 has a metallic rim in the sides and perforated dots on the back offering a solid grip. The bezels on the side are minimal so you won’t have a hard time reaching edges of the screen. The camera lens on the back is protruding and looks very cheap and would also lead to scratches on the camera lens.

There is a speaker grill on the top of the screen, along with a proximity sensor. The back, home and menu capacitive buttons are below the display. The volume buttons separated and their ergonomic placement is slightly off so you might hit the wrong buttons at times. A similarly shaped power button is placed on the right side. The microUSB port and the headphone jack are at the top.

Display & Audio

Oplus XonPhone 5

The 5-inch 720p IPS LCD display is sharp and its viewing angles are surprisingly wide. The colours are vivid but feels a bit cold (due to its bluish tinge) at the same time. The outdoor visibility is not good due to its reflective glass panel. The multitouch capacitive display is quite responsive to touches, and accurate at that.

It’s loudspeaker produces very shallow sound. Even the earpiece has low volume levels so the calls weren’t as clear as I would’ve liked. The bundled headphones have below par sound quality and are uncomfortable to wear for long durations.

Camera

The Oplus XonPhone is equipped with an 8-megapixel rear camera with autofocus and an LED flash. Even though the camera specifications look good on paper, the image quality is average. The autofocus lens has some problems focusing on the correct area. The macro shots are better than average but the details in the other photos is below average.

One shouldn’t even think about getting respectable shots in low light conditions. The videos recorded with the device came out pretty well. The 2-megapixel front-facing will get the job done for video calls and selfies (only in good lighting conditions).

Performance

The device is powered by a 1.3GHz quad-core MediaTek MT6852 processor, Mali-400MP GPU and 1GB of RAM. The XonPhone 5 is the only Android smartphone which offers 16GB of internal storage at its price.

It runs a near-stock version of Android 4.4.2 KitKat with custom icons which looked like lifted from the MIUI. Even after a software update, I experienced frequent frame drops in the UI. Apps run well, they open and close fast. Asphalt 8 was playable, and web browsing was quite fast and stutter-free on Chrome.

Battery Life

The one area where I liked its performance is battery life. It features a 2,000 mAh removable battery and the device consumed very little power when sitting idle. I had set up all my basic email and social networking accounts. It managed to get around 3.5 hours of screen-on time. But the battery depleted fast while watching videos. The device will last a day with moderate usage.

Conclusion

The XonPhone 5 is a decent device for its price (Rs. 7,990) , especially its solid build quality. It has a good display and high internal storage but its UI makes it hard to recommend against other budget devices like the Xiaomi Redmi 1S and the ASUS ZenFone 4.