As always at this time of year, new models sprout from the factories of the smartphone manufacturers.

The breeding ground for this annual event is the Mobile World Congress, which took place at the end of February.

Even if the world's largest mobile communications fair is not the old one yet because it seems battered by the pandemic and many manufacturers and visitors are staying away this year, it still marks the annual change in smartphone models.

Marco Dettweiler

Editor in Business.

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But only in time.

The stages will be set up elsewhere.

Samsung, which traditionally opens the round of introductions, has not celebrated the premiere of its new S series in Barcelona for several years.

Oppo could have used the stage for itself.

But the up-and-coming company from China showed its new flagship a few days earlier, even though it had a stand at the MWC.

Oppo is slipping more and more into the former role of Huawei.

Ever since former US President Trump decreed that Huawei was banned from using Google services, making their smartphones meaningless outside of China, Oppo has taken on the role of innovation driver.

The company ranks fourth in Europe behind Apple, Samsung and Xiaomi.

Oppo Find X5 Pro

For their new flagship Find X5 Pro, the Chinese have dug into the box of technology again compared to the predecessor.

Oppo provides its own chip for the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 processor unit.

The Marisilicon X is an NPU (Neural Processing Unit) that only takes care of image processing.

Google and Vivo also use their own NPU, but the Marisilicon X from Oppo is currently the most powerful neural processor for artificial intelligence in the Android world.

On the hardware side, the Chinese have opted for an unusual but interesting arrangement of the optics.

Wide angle and super wide angle got the same sensor.

With a maximum resolution of 50 megapixels and the identical settings, the images look pretty much the same except for the detail, so they have the same colors, contrasts and so on.

And the pictures that take the wide-angle and super wide-angle are good.

The competing flagships from other manufacturers don't do any better.

As far-sighted as this decision was for wide-angle and super-wide-angle, the choice of zoom is short-sighted.

The Find X5 Pro only manages a double optical zoom.

If you want to get closer to your subject without physically moving towards it, you can zoom digitally, which results in blurred images in some situations.

We don't want to do without a five or tenfold zoom.

A look at the back of the Find X5 Pro shows that the Chinese also have a flair for marketing and design.

Hasselblad is right behind the lettering Oppo.

Huawei has already had good experiences with the partnership of European companies from the field of photography with Leica and Nokia and Vivo with Zeiss.

Oppo has chosen the traditional company Hasselblad so that it can also brag about a partnership.

Oppo needs few big words to convince with the design and the processing quality.

The back of the Find X5 Pro is ceramic, which is said to be more scratch-resistant than the competition's Gorilla Glass backs.

The material is shaped in such a way that the camera module rises out of the surface like a small hill on whose plateau the optics are embedded.