When I was using the Oppo R5 as my daily driver, I noticed that the phone didn’t last for particularly long, often dying or coming very close to dying before a typical day was complete. It’s been a long time since I’ve used a smartphone that has completely died at around 3pm, which was after just 7 hours of typical moderate use. This isn’t a great result at all, and going by the benchmarks below, the Oppo R5 has one of the worst battery lives of any smartphone I’ve recently reviewed.
The R5 does have a number of power saving features that can be activated to try and eek out as much life as possible, but even when I had a selection of the features enabled, it didn’t improve my daily battery life experience by a significant amount. It’s painfully clear that to achieve such a slim handset, battery life has had to be sacrificed, and for most people that’s going to be a sacrifice not worth taking.
