A weekend in Paris with the Oppo Find X5 Pro

2022-07-31

Paris. The city of lights, the Eiffel tower, the Louvre, the Notre Dame, the Champs-Elysees, the Arc de Triomphe, and Roland Garros. As you may know if you follow tennis, this is one of only four yearly Grand Slam tournaments, and the only one of the bunch that features a clay court. Thus, it’s rather unique, nicely fitting the city it’s set in.

What does any of this have to do with smartphones, you may wonder? Well, Oppo has been a premium partner of Roland Garros for three years now and it’s recently announced that it’s renewed its partnership with the tennis competition for this year and the next. To celebrate, the company kindly invited me to attend the Women’s Singles Final at Roland Garros, which took place last Saturday, on June 5.

For someone who’s never attended a tennis Grand Slam tournament in person, this was understandably quite exciting, and thus I wanted to try something new and create this feature which is in part a travel report and in part a real-world hands-on experience, away from cold hard numbers, spec sheets, and testing labs.

And what better phone to go to Paris with than Oppo’s latest flagship, the Find X5 Pro? It’s been my handy companion throughout the weekend, while I explored the city as well as the Roland Garros stadium, as you’ll see below - note that all the photos in this article that aren’t of the Find X5 Pro have been shot on the Find X5 Pro. So, if you’re ready to join me, let’s go to Paris!

Friday: Notre Dame and Louvre to Arc de Triomphe

As the flight landed midday on Friday, it was off to the hotel for a quick and efficient check-in, and a similarly quick top-up of the Find X5 Pro’s battery as I wanted to make sure it was at 100% when I left. Thankfully, this is very easy to do with the Find X5 Pro’s incredibly fast charging - that is, if you don’t forget to pack the cable and charger that came in the box. I didn’t, and so around 4PM it was time to head towards the touristy areas.

The top-up itself was just a matter of minutes, which weirdly still can’t be said for the flagship phones people buy most (looking at you, Apple and Samsung). Seriously, there’s no overstating how great it is to be able to charge your phone for 15-20 minutes (if it’s not dead already) and basically have enough juice in it to last you the rest of the day.

From this point on, I spent a lot of time on Google Maps trying to locate interesting tourist attractions to go to, then getting directions for them, searching for restaurants to eat at, supermarkets to buy water from, and so on. It’s not an exaggeration to say the Find X5 Pro was almost always in my hand, and was used a lot - and still, it made it through the eight or so hours I was out and about without a hitch. It also stayed cool the entire time, with not even a hint of overheating despite heavy use of GPS and mobile data and a lot of multitasking. I didn’t have any time to play games during my trip, but for this type of use on the go the cooling system inside definitely worked very well.

The screen is outstanding too, it’s incredibly nice to look at, and the side curves help with the back gesture a lot when you use gesture navigation - your finger never goes over anything sharp, thanks to the way the screen curves into the frame. I’ve never encountered any accidental touches because of the screen curves either.

While the Parisian sun was missing in action for most of the weekend, it did come out here and there and the Find X5 Pro’s display was easily legible even in direct sunlight, although it’s fair to note here that the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra goes even further when needed. On the other hand, I never felt the need for more brightness throughout my time with it.

To reach the central areas, I took the Paris metro, which should probably be a tourist attraction in its own right, what with it being among the world’s oldest systems and all that. The trains are interesting too, for the controversial use of rubber tires on some of the lines, which makes for a very distinctive smell when one of the trains leaves the station, but also a very distinctive noise - and this you can hear even from inside a train. I’ve used the metro system for practically all my travels through the city during the weekend, and it was a fun experience.

I got out near Notre Dame and documented the state of its repairs from afar, and they seem to be progressing nicely. It was then a half an hour or so stroll in the adjacent area before I found a restaurant that seemed not to be of the tourist trap variety, where I had the pretty amazing lunch you can see among the photos above.

Next up was what for many people might be one of the main events when in Paris: the stroll from the Louvre museum to the Arc de Triomphe. With stops on the way, mainly for photo taking opportunities, and I have to say the experience of shooting with the Find X5 Pro is just great, even if you are missing out on long zoom because of the lack of a periscope camera (Hi, Apple!).

Shot-to-shot times are pleasantly surprising, even after having handled a bunch of flagships from other companies in recent months. The Find X5 Pro’s camera app is the smoothest one I’ve ever used, on any phone. It’s just buttery, with the usual Android exception of switching between cameras - this is smoother than on other Android devices, but still not quite as smooth as on an iPhone.

As you’ll see, there’s practically no quality penalty going from the main shooter to the ultrawide, and that’s still a tough nut to crack even in 2022 for most Android devices, and the color science seems very well matched too between the three sensors, so it won’t instantly, obviously seem like you had three different cameras with you. Sure you can still see some differences here and there if you go looking for them, but overall, the results are impressive and the experience of shooting with the Find X5 Pro is, so far, second to none.

Starting off at the Louvre, of course everyone knows the iconic pyramid which is now the entry point to the museum, but the sheer scale of the older museum buildings surrounding it might be baffling at first - or awe-inducing. Or both. It’s just a huge complex, and unfortunately there was no time to sit in line and visit, but even walking around it takes quite a long time. It’s just that big.

It’s also aligned, in a straight line, with the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel right next to it, the Luxor Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde, the Arc de Triomphe, as well as the Grande Arche de la Defense which is in the office district a few miles to the northwest. If you sit just right in the Louvre area you can just about make out all of these monuments ‘through’ each other, if that makes any sense, since they’re all aligned. And thus the awe returns.

Advancing towards the famous Champs-Elysees I crossed the Jardin des Tuileries and the Place de la Concorde, and then it was a very slight uphill journey to the Arc de Triomphe and its crazy roundabout which has no road markings and seemingly no rules for yielding. This makes for a symphony of honks a lot of times, but even though I spent over 20 minutes around there, I witnessed zero crashes. So despite the presumed madness of this system, I guess it actually works?

It was already late at this point so it was back to the hotel by metro again, for a very tasty dinner, and some rest as Saturday was a big day - it was all about Roland Garros.

Saturday: Roland Garros during the day, Montmartre during the night

As the hotel was within walking distance to the stadium, I did walk through some very quintessentially French small streets, savoring plant-infused balconies left and right. It was refreshing to be off the main tourist avenues, and just have this bit of the city to myself on the way to the Women's Singles Final at Roland Garros.

Once there, entry was a breeze and I explored the grounds a bit before heading into the Court Philippe Chatrier, which is the new name of the main court at Roland Garros. This was completely torn down and rebuilt between the 2018 and 2019 tournaments, and then in 2020 it finally added a retractable roof, thus ensuring that the most important matches can take place regardless of the weather. This was very useful as it started raining just as Polish player Iga ?wi?tek won the final she played against Coco Gauff from the US. The roof closed without any disruption in the game, very quickly and silently.

Generally in tennis tournaments the sponsor logos around the court all share the same background color, so as to not be too distracting to the players, and at Roland Garros this background is green as you can see - which coincidentally or not matches Oppo’s brand very well (and Rolex’s too, for that matter).