The OPPO family has been going crazy recently. OnePlus has released the 11R and realme has released the GT Neo 5. Both are great value Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 budget phones. If you don’t like the curved screen of 11R and the crap camera of K60, then GT Neo 5 is a very suitable choice. Plus the super cheap price and super fast charging makes it one of my most recommended phones to buy these days. If you’re looking to buy a mid-range phone, then you should check it out.
Design
I like the design of the GT Neo 5 a lot in its price range. It has a lot of design that other phones don’t have, such as the transparent area to the right of the camera module. You can faintly see the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 chip inside. Although this is just a decoration element, the real chip is not here. But it shows that realme is very confident in the chip performance of this phone.
This area is made transparent for another reason: this 25-color RGB light ring. It acts as a notification light and lights up in various states. Although I am not the kind of person who likes to put the phone screen down on the table, but from the design point of view it still looks good. By the way, the Neo 5 also adds an infrared emitter this time.
Display
While the Neo 5’s screen is theoretically the same panel as the OnePlus 11R, both are 1240P screens from Tianma. While both are excellent and bright, there are a few things the Neo 5 clearly does better. The most obvious is the refresh rate, which is clearly higher at 144Hz than 120Hz. And you can freely set the refresh rate for each application, with 4 refresh rates to choose from.
When you set the refresh rate to 90 or 144Hz, PWM dimming can reach 2160Hz. Since display manufacturers like BOE, TCL and Tianma have developed better and better screens, many budget phones can also use screens comparable to Samsung panels. I think this is the consumer like us should be happy about this.
Performance
Next I want to give a good shout out to the Neo 5’s performance. Even though it’s using a downclocked version of Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1, the game performance is surprisingly good. The first half of the K60, which is also a downclocked version of the chip, is the same as the Neo 5, trying to stick to the highest power to keep the game running at 60fps, but the second half of the Neo 5’s strategy is significantly more reasonable.
Unlike the K60 where the frame rate suddenly drops to down, the Neo 5 comes down to around 45fps at a slow pace.Although the average frame rate is about the same, the Neo 5 gaming experience is significantly better than the K60. The temperature is also not particularly high. Plus it also has the same game interpolation and Ultra-steady frames mode as Ace 2. That’s why I’m most satisfied with the Neo 5’s gaming experience among the recent 8+ Gen 1 phones.
Camera
The iconic IMX 766 main camera of the OPPO family phones has become the IMX 890 this year. The sensor is just as good as the 766, and I’d be difficult to pick out any obvious flaws. Although there is no help from Hasselblad or other traditional camera brands, but most scenes can still take good pictures.
At night I don’t recommend that you zoom in to take pictures two times or more, otherwise the pictures will become blurry.
There’s not much to say about the ultra-wide camera either, as it does have a very average performance. Like most budget phones, it’s not bad during the day, but it’s blurry at night.
The Neo 5’s macro camera is more interesting because it is a true macro lens. You can use it as a microscope to take all kinds of interesting photos. Although we won’t use this lens often, it’s a lot more useful than the useless macro camera that many phones have. When recording video with this camera, the footage will be more shaky because there is no image stabilization.
Video recording like Ace 2, does not support 8K, up to 4K 60fps. the ultra-wide camera only 1080P 30fps. the main camera performance as good as when taking pictures, but the ultra-wide camera is not only very poor image quality, and there is a bug.
This ghosting bug is not an occasional problem, as long as you use the ultra-wide camera to take video, there will be this problem. Anyway, even without this bug, because the image quality is really bad, Neo 5 ultra-wide camera can completely say goodbye to the video recording.
Video samples can click on the video at the beginning of the article to view.
Charging
Charging is definitely the biggest highlight of the Neo 5. We purchased the 240w charging version of it, which is by far the most powerful phone for charging. We’ve listed a few phones we’ve tested for comparison. This Neo 5, by far, is the fastest charging phone, with nine minutes to get it fully charged.Although they don’t have the same battery capacity, you can roughly see how big the difference is in their charging speed.
If you use another charger then only support up to 18w charging, so this 240w charger you have to be careful to keep well.
Let’s talk about this charger. Although it is much smaller than we expected, it is not light, weighing about the same as a phone. Charging protocols are not that much, in addition to SuperVOOC 240w, it also supports 65w of PD and QC 3.0 protocols, which is the regular level of the charger in the box.
Battery
Of course, charging faster comes at a price, the battery will be smaller than the 150w version. This 240w version will last a little less than the normal 5000mAh 8+ Gen 1 phone. For me, I prefer the 150w version. As a mobile device, the battery capacity is what is more important than the charging speed.
Of the recently released 8+ Gen 1 phones, if I had to pick a favorite, it would be the GT Neo 5. Not only does it have very unique selling points, such as the world’s fastest charging speed, and the best gaming experience in its price range, but it’s also very cheap. In addition to the ultra-wide camera recording is worse, there are no other disadvantages. I do recommend buying it.
