Gadgetory

the mere five is opos latest mid-range smartphone featuring a facet design and premium build but does the mere five really stand out among the sea of cheap Android smartphones this is Bailey Stein with Android authority and this is my for review of the Opel mere 5 if there's one area where the mere 5 shines it's got to be design quite literally actually with individual cut glass sections on the back cover the mere five offers an increasingly popular reflective design in fact you'd be forgiven for mistaking the mere five for the older r1x weighing in at an average 160 grams and with a thickness of 7.65 millimetres the mere five feels comfortable in the hand the biometallic frame is a nice touch and combined with a smaller form factor makes the phone easy to grip with a single hand the power and volume buttons provide good tactile feedback and are positioned nicely along the sides of the phone one drawback to the faux glass rear cover is its tendency to collect fingerprints the same is true for the front of the device which makes it very difficult to keep them near five free of fingerprints there is a notification LED at the top-right as well as a five megapixel front-facing camera on the top left the three capacitive keys on the bottom menu home and back are sadly not illuminated I wish Oppo would have given us the option to use the Menu button is the multitasking button like Xiaomi does as the current implementation is to press and hold to access the multitasking menu which does seem to be a bit much the mere fives five inch qHD display looks about average but could definitely use a bump in resolution it's funny to think that the 960 by 540 resolution is just a quarter of rivals like the Asus zenfone 2 everything looks a bit blurry and while the low resolution may help the phone achieve longer battery life it does cause the display to take a major hit in quality overall there's also no display protection like Gorilla Glass so it would be wise to keep the factory-installed screen protector on even after am boxing the phone featuring the quad-core 64-bit Snapdragon 410 clocked at 1.2 gigahertz the mere 5 is packin a relatively low end processor well I did notice apps ticking a few more seconds to load dinner day performance was surprisingly good for the processing package luckily Oppo did include 2 gigabytes of RAM so you likely won't have to worry about not having enough unlike on some other devices coupled with the Adreno 306 the mere 5 is able to play most games without any issues thanks to the lower screen resolution frame drops are rare even in games like Need for Speed Most Wanted the Oppo me r5 supports 802 11 and Wi-Fi GPS and Bluetooth 4.0 carrier support will vary based on the model but the American version partially supports HSPA+ on a TMT and 2g on t-mobile there are also 4G LTE bands however with 1 4 7 and 17 being supported on the American version it is missing been 2 & 5 for AT&T and 2 and 12 for t-mobile which may cause problems for certain users in certain areas the rear speaker sounds pretty good with little distortion the placement is a bit unfortunate however as it makes it really easy to block when set on a flat surface battery life on the mere five was good but not great the twenty four twenty milliamp hour non use a replaceable battery was able to get me from 9:00 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. with just over three hours of screen on time that was with brightness set to 75% and Wi-Fi on for the entire day if you are a power user chances are better than not that this phone won't be able to make it through a full day of use light users on the other hand should have no trouble with battery life there is a normal power saving mode as well as a super power saving mode if you really need to just get a bit more out of the battery the eight megapixel rear camera produce mostly good looking images especially for the price as is the case with most smartphone cameras it performs best in well-lit environments I do appreciate the slider next to the focus point within the camera app that lets you adjust the exposure quickly if needed speaking of the camera app it's undoubtedly taking some inspiration from Apple there are many shooting modes however although there aren't many manual settings available the Oppo Mir five ships with color OS version 2.1 over android 5.1.1 lollipop color OS replaces a lot of stock Android elements including the Settings multi-tasking menu launcher and lockscreen that's not to say that color OS is bad however the animations are all very nice and the launcher offers some of the best customization options despite not having an app drawer maybe it's a problem on my end but I noticed that the multitasking menu would occasionally refuse to close certain apps I have to keep swiping until color OS realizes that I want to close the app and this can just be very frustrating I've had this issue before on other skins using an iOS style app switcher and I think that it could use some improvement in color OS perhaps the best aspect of color OS is the gestures that are offered out of the box not only do you have your standard double tap to wake draw letters for apps but you also have screen on gestures like pinch to open camera swipe three fingers to take a screenshot or adjust the volume with two fingers there's also a one-handed mode but I found the gesture to activate it to be a bit jarring at times the small things like the near lack of bloatware and the ability to swipe down from anywhere well in the launchers certainly add up to make a very good software experience overall the Oppo Mir 5 will be available for about 245 dollars depending on your region it's available in either white or blue with 16 gigabytes of internal storage you can expand that with a microSD card up to 128 gigabytes since the microSD card slot is separate from the dual SIM card slots you also won't need to give up one of those if you want extra storage the mere five has several strong points a nice design good speaker quality and a good software experience however the display resolution is very low the performance is slightly below average for what you can get and other options and I do feel that it is a tad overpriced with other Chinese smartphones like the meizu m2 note and Lenovo k3 note the Oppo me r5 is a tough sell well it does offer a superior design and build it falls behind in display resolution performance and most importantly price thank you for watching this video and please make sure to give it a thumbs up below if you enjoyed it also please make sure to subscribe to the channel if you'd like to see more content and feel free to leave a comment below finally be sure to visit the Android Authority website for additional coverage is we are your source for all things Android