Stunning Oppo R5 Announced As The World’s Thinnest Smartphone

Oppo Electronics today announced two new handsets, the N3 and the R5. While the N3 will attract photography fans with a 16 megapixel camera mounted on a 206 degree rotating motorised mount, it’s the R5 which will attract the attention of the fashion conscious smartphone buyer.

At 4.85 millimeters thick, the Oppo R5 is the latest holder of the moniker ‘world’s thinnest smartphone’.

Something has to give to get down to that thickness, and that means the specifications are slightly down on ‘flagship’ status, but still more than competent. It sports the SnapDragon 615 octa-core processor, running at 2.1 GHz. The handset comes with 2 GB of RAM, and 16 GB of storage. The battery is unsurprisingly svelte for an Android device at 2,000 mAh, while the display is a relatively large 5.2 inch AMOLED unit.

With very little width to go with the lack of depth, the weight is down as well to 155g. Just how practical a handset at under 5mm can be is something that will have to wait until review units become available.

It’s worth noting that Oppo has dealt with the issue of camera optics in the R5 in the same way as Apple has on the iPhone 6 – the camera lens bulges out of the main frame and is not counted in the ‘thickness’ of the handset.

The Oppo N3 is the natural successor to the Oppo N1 and sports flagship stats to match the competition, specifically a quad-core SnapDragon 801 running at 2.1 GHz, 2GB of RAM, and 32 GB of on board storage. It also has a fingerprint scanner (on the rear of the device and not built-in to the home key) as well as the aforementioned motorised camera that will work as the main rear facing camera, and as a super-selfie camera at the touch of a button.

Pushing out a high-spec phone like the N3 is to be expected from Oppo, who picked up critical acclaim for the N1, as well as a lot of love from the geekerati for its compatible with the CyanogenMod operating system.

It’s the R5 which is going to attract attention. Yes the specs are down (and I suspect that the slower processor is more down to heat dissipation issues than Oppo wanting less performance), but it more than matches many of the mid-range handsets that have illusions of being top-end handsets. In any case the R5 is going to be aimed towards the more fashionable smartphone purchasers, rather than the hackers and modders of the mobile world.