OPPO F5 Youth Review

OPPO F5 Youth came shortly after the standard Oppo F5 hit the shelves in the Philippine market. The handset is gunned for the younger audience offering a more affordable price and a shed-down spec sheet. OPPO is still marketing the handset in the selfie segment with AI Beauty Technology. 

OPPO F5 Youth Review

Despite the cheaper offering, could the OPPO F5 Youth persuade you to buy it instead of the F5, or other selfie handsets for that matter? We’ll see about that at the end of our review.

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Design

The OPPO F5 Youth comes in the same melting pot as the standard F5. The handset comes with a faux-metal unibody plastic design. Its front-glass panel features the 18:9 aspect ratio that’s very evident in 2017 handset design. Subtle curves are present at the back panel and in the chamfered edges making the handset easy to hold. The Oppo F5 Youth’s body offers a good grip with its silky matte finish. Just like any other OPPO smartphones, there’s a quality craftsmanship present in the OPPO F5 Youth.

The Oppo F5 Youth features dedicated slots for two SIM cards and a microSD card. The tray which houses these slots can be found on the right side together with the power button. Meanwhile, the left side is a home to the volume rocker. The bottom side is where you find the microUSB slot, the microphone, 3.5-mm headphone jack and the speaker grill.

Display

The OPPO F5 Youth borrows the all-screen display from its older brother. Its 6.0-inch FHD+ display with 2160 x 1080p resolution is one of its strongest points. Just like the OPPO F5, the F5 Youth is a big phone. But make no mistake, the 18:9 aspect ratio makes the handset easier to grip even with one hand. Its screen-to-body ratio is 84.75% which is quite impressive, thanks to an almost bezel-less front panel.

The screen itself is something to brag about. It is crisp in most angles, even in oblique ones. This full HD+ display registers brighter and color accurate than any other FHD+ screens I’ve used. The pre-installed screen protection easily picks up scratches but there’s a layer of Corning Gorilla Glass 5 so you don’t have to worry when your phone had unwanted bumps and falls.

Performance, Gaming, Multimedia

The Oppo F5 Youth is an impressive selfie handset. The same reason the company uses to lure you into their army of O-Fans; but even though it is loaded with selfie-centric AI features, it still boasts quite impressive internals. There’s a MediaTek MT6763T Helio P23 coupled with 3GB of RAM to keep things in smooth fashion.

In our time with the OPPO F5 Youth, we had only experienced rare hiccups. Otherwise, the handset is very responsive when pulling up daily apps. We ran an Antutu Benchmark and a PCMark Performance benchmark. The OPPO F5 Youth scores 68913 and 3853, respectively. In real world usage, the handset coped really well with gaming apps like Mobile Legends and Arena of Valor in high settings.

In running graphic intensive games, we experienced a drop in rendering. We also noticed a tolerable heating of the handset when subjected to longer playing time. Of course, it is also worth-noting that playing in screen this big improves overall gaming experience. Speakers also shoot decent audio; it’s crisp and nicely balanced but not to the point that it’ll make you at awe.

Camera

Let’s get right into the selfie camera first. The OPPO F5 Youth is designed primarily to give you better looking selfies with the company’s A.I. Beauty Tech. Selfies from the handset’s 16MP camera are great. They're natural yet crisp in details. What I love about the selfies is that it offers well-balanced colors even when using high levels (it has 1 to 6 levels) in its built-in beauty mode software.

The screen flash also helps everything lighted in low-light environments. The front camera also features other essential modes like Timelapse, Video, Photo, Beauty, and Panorama. You can also toggle the depth effect feature to give your selfies artificial Bokeh effect. The front camera is also great in video calls. It has better tracking capability than any other selfie-handsets I’ve tested. Here are the selfie samples:

The rear camera is a 13MP sensor with f/2.2 aperture. It still comes with the same modes as that of the front camera, except that it includes the Expert mode, commonly known as the Pro mode. The rear-facing camera is also a solid performer as the selfie camera. For its price, the the sensor produces bright stills with great contrast.

If you won’t tinker with bolts and nuts of the camera app, you’ll find yourself using the popular Auto mode. This produces engaging photos with decent clarity and color accuracy. Dynamic range is also on-point. The sensor is fast to focus subjects. Low-light photos are good but tend to get noise.

The Panorama mode is also a nifty feature which allows you to get a 360-degree shot. The Timelapse is also interesting when recording great sceneries wherein 10 minutes of recording will render one minute of fast-forwarded video. Check out our sample Timelapse on a windy beach in Gigantes Norte, Carles, Iloilo.

In video mode, the OPPO F5 Youth also performs well. On paper, it records up to 1080p video at 30fps. The handset can produce great videos under good lighting conditions. However, focus could also tend to be unstable resulting in blurring of some parts of the output. Check out our sample pictures below under different lighting conditions:

Good Lighting Condition

Good Lighting Condition

Good Lighting Condition

Good Lighting Condition

Good Lighting Condition

Normal Lighting

Slightly Dimmed Environment

Low-light Environment

Low-light Environment

Great lighting condition

Overcast Environment

Software

The OPPO F5 Youth boots with Android 7.1 Nougat with ColorOS 3.2 on top. The skin is a reminiscent of Apple's iOS wherein every installed apps are placed directly in the Homescreen. It also offers iOS-like Notification Shade and Control Center. It's neat and clean compared to other Android skins I've used.

I also love the fact that ColorOS also supports Facial Unlock in OPPO F5 Youth. It gives a refreshing and fast way to unlock the handset. You may also take advantage of other nifty features like the OPPO Game Acceleration suite.

Call Reception, Cellular Connectivity

We had no issues using the phone in calls. We have tested the phone under different signal strengths and it turns out that the receiver registers loud and clear in most conditions. Browsing through LTE network renders page in a fast pace. There are just instances that we need to refresh the cellular connection (turn off and on) to reconnect to the internet; but it’s nothing to worry about.

Battery

OPPO F5 Youth’s battery is rated at 3200 mAh. The display size and resolution play a big part in its battery performance. But we are surprised that it got 8 hours and 37 minutes in our PC Mark Battery Performance Test. To give you an idea, here are the PC Mark scores of its closest competitors in our tests:

Vivo V7 – 7 Hours and 36 minutes

Huawei Nova 2i – 8 Hours and 26 Minutes

Asus ZenFone Max Plus – 8 Hours and 46 Minutes

In a day of real time performance, we tried 2 hours of Facebook and Twitter via LTE, 1 hour of Spotify streaming via LTE, 1.5-hour Mobile Legends gaming, two dozens of shots using the camera, occasional emails and text messages, 15-minute calls and one hour browsing the web. We still got 32 percent by the end of the day.

The Wrap

All the while I thought that the OPPO F5 Youth is going to be a shed-down version of the OPPO F5. It might be true but I could hardly tell that this is a downgrade from the OPPO F5 based on performance. It feels like a handset worthy of its own name and place, not just in OPPO F5’s shadow.

The design might be borrowed from its older brother but it still refreshing to see another 6-inch 18:9 screen from the same company that gave us premium-looking handset in an affordable price standpoint.

And there comes the internals. Trust me, the OPPO F5 Youth is a worker. Suffice to say, there’s a lot more muscle here than what I actually expected. For its price, it does every job given to it with ease. I also love OPPO’s take on selfies. The AI Beauty Tech is definitely the one to beat in this segment.

Pros:

New 18:9 FHD+ display

Great Design and faux metal construction

16MP Front cam with AI Beauty Tech

Decent battery life

Good Performance

More affordable price (now at Php 12,990)

Face Unlock

Dedicated Slots

Cons:

32GB internal storage only

Micro-USB port

No fast charging feature

OPPO F5 Youth Specs

6.0-inch FHD+ LTPS TFT LCD Display, 1080 x 2160 pixels, 402ppi
Corning Gorilla Glass 5 Protection
MediaTek Helio P23 (MT6763T)

2.5 GHz octa-core CPU
Mali-G71 MP2 GPU

3GB of RAM

32GB Internal Memory, expandable via microSD card (up to 256GB)

13MP Rear Camera, f/1.8 aperture, PDAF, LED Flash
1080p at 30fps video recording

16MP Selfie Camera at f/2.0 aperture, AI Beauty, Screen Flash

4G LTE, 3G, 2G

Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n, WiFi Direct, Hotspot

Bluetooth 4.2, LE

GPS, A-GPS

FM Radio

MicroUSB 2.0

USB OTG

3.5mm Audio Jack
Gyroscope, Proximity, Compass, Accelerometer Sensors

Fingerprint Sensor
Face unlock

Android 7.1 Nougat with Color OS 3.2

3,200mAh Li-Ion Non-Removable Battery
Black and Gold

Php 12,990 Official Price in the Philippines