Oppo A52 review

Where to buy

At a time when you might think that Oppo would be conceding the lower budget market to stablemate realme, it’s instead firing ahead with its own value-centric offerings. For just $280, the Oppo A52 appears to be delivering the impossible, with a large display, quad camera and 5,000mAh battery. While it does have a few rough edges as you’d expect from any budget phone, there’s still a phenomenal amount of general value in the Oppo A52.

Design

Design

• 6.5 inch FHD+ display is a corker
• side-mounted fingerprint sensor
• screen protector pre-applied

• Read our full review of the Oppo A52's design

  Many lower-cost phones opt for size over clarity, offering up 720p or sometimes worse displays, but that’s not where Oppo’s gone with the Oppo A52. It features a 6.5 inch, 2400×1080 FHD display with a left hand side “hole punch” style selfie camera at the top.

  One feature I love about Oppo’s phones is that they tend to put screen protectors on in the factory to give you an additional protection layer. That’s certainly the case for the Oppo A52, but it did introduce the tiniest annoyance when I was using the Oppo A52. In order to accommodate the selfie camera, the screen protector needs a hole in it where the camera is. The hole is slightly larger than the camera hole, and on my review unit it was also slightly offset. Maybe it’s just me, but I found it just slightly annoying to glance down at the Oppo A52 and see this not lined up properly. Yes, that’s a pedantic criticism.

  Where we are starting to see some phones in this kind of price range adopt in-display fingerprint sensors, Oppo has instead gone for a side-mounted combination fingerprint sensor and power button, which sits in its own little groove on the right hand of the phone. It’s a neat design that makes it very easy to locate the sensor for unlocking. It’s also a very fast sensor, although I lack the tools to pick whether that’s a matter of great sensitivity or low security checking on its part.

  Oppo sells the Oppo A52 in a range of colours. We tested the Twilight Black version which comes with a plastic glossy back that predictably picks up fingerprint grime rapidly. The rear camera sensor does present a significant camera bump, although you can mitigate that with the supplied clear case. As always, it’s a good idea to have a case on any phone, even a lower-cost one, and the fact that it’s supplied just adds a little extra to the Oppo A52’s value proposition.

Camera

Camera

• Quad cameras can produce nice images, but not quickly
• no dedicated macro mode

• See sample photos and read our full review of the Oppo A52's camera

  The real standout for the Oppo A52 is the fact that it’s got four camera sensors sitting on the rear of the phone, with a standard 12MP sensor joined by an 8MP ultrawide, 2MP Macro and 2MP depth sensor. Getting four sensors – three if you take into consideration that the depth sensor is just adding, well, depth – in a phone under $300 shows just how hard the value segments are pushing the mid-range and flagship phones in terms of features.

  You’re not getting flagship performance, however, or even the kinds of performance we’d expect out of mid-range phones, though. While there’s lots of scope for creativity across standard, wide and macro lenses, actually using the Oppo A52 as a camera does pretty quickly show off its weaknesses.

  Take the macro lens, for example. It’s a standalone sensor, but oddly Oppo doesn’t see fit to offer a macro shooting mode on the default camera app. Instead, you’ve got to rely on the AI recognising that you want to use the macro lens, then switching to it, and then focusing before you can take the shot.

  By that time, it’s likely that the bee you wanted that spectacular close-up shot will have flown away.

  Actually, you’ll need decent luck with any fast-moving subject across any of the Oppo A52’s lenses, because like just about any budget phone, fast shutter speeds are not what it does.

  Oppo does include a range of zoom modes, but there’s no optical zoom sensor on this phone at all, and it’s immediately obvious when you do zoom into anything. The level of noise can get annoying really fast, and in almost every case you’ll do better taking a standard shot and cropping in after the fact.

  The Oppo A52’s low-light performance is rather mixed. As you’d expect with the standard shutter it can struggle when the light dips, but Oppo does include a long exposure AI-led “Night” mode that can improve dull light shots to a degree. It’s less impressive when you’re shooting in actual darkness, but again, what do you expect at this price point?

  Around the front, the 8MP selfie camera produces decent shots with a predictable “beauty” filter if you like that plastic look in your shots.

  While it can’t quite live up to the promise of a quad-camera if you were expecting a competitor for 2020’s best flagships, the Oppo A52 still manages to give you decent creative tools for most photo situations.

  Oppo A52 sample photos

  

  

  

  

  

Performance

Performance

• Snapdragon 665 sometimes struggles
• ColorOS continues to improve

• View test results and read our full review of the Oppo A52's performance

  Where MediaTek’s cheaper processors once ruled the budget space absolutely, we now see more and more phones opt for Qualcomm options, albeit cheaper and low power options as you’d expect. The Oppo A52 runs on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 665 processor with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of onboard storage. That’s average within this price space, but you can bump it up with a microSD card. One nice touch here is that the SIM card tray is of the triple card type, with two dedicated nano SIM slots and then a microSD card slot as well.

  The Snapdragon 665 is a decent performer within its price category, but predictably it doesn’t help the Oppo A52 notably sit above its competition in benchmark terms. Here’s how the Oppo A52 compares to other phones in its price range using Geekbench 5’s CPU test:

  And here’s how its Adreno 610 GPU compares using 3DMark Slingshot Extreme:

  The Oppo A52 mostly performs as you’d expect a budget phone to, although I did note from time to time that it would lag and require a closedown of running apps before it really wanted to get back into gear. That’s not uncommon in this price range, although phones that run more clean Android tend to avoid it a little better than the Oppo A52.

  As with all of Oppo’s phones, the Oppo A52 uses its own ColorOS on top of Android; in this case it’s ColorOS 7.1 on Android 10. ColorOS has come a long way since its early iOS-mimicking roots, but there’s still a few rough edges along with those performance hits. It’s great that it explicitly asks you for access permissions when launching Oppo’s own in-house apps… but it’s still rather mystifying why apps want so much access to your data in the first place!

Battery life

Battery life

• 5,000mAh battery provides easy two-day battery life
• USB C charging

• View test results and read our full review of the Oppo A52's battery life

  The Oppo A52 joins a growing crowd of budget phones that manage to pack in a full 5,000mAh of battery capacity behind their glassy frames. That’s a lot of power to play with, and the use of a lower-spec processor does give the Oppo A52 plenty of scope for great battery life.

  In our standard battery test, running a YouTube video full screen at maximum brightness and moderate volume for an hour, the Oppo A52 managed fair but not exceptional battery life. Here’s how it compared against a range of similar handsets:

  That was a lower figure than I’d like to see on a phone with a battery that large, but in more anecdotal daily usage the Oppo A52 showed no issues lasting through into two days of usage if you do happen to forget to charge it overnight. Charging is via USB C, which is pleasing in a market where there’s still more than a few phones grimly sticking to microUSB charging instead.

Verdict

Verdict

How we score our reviews

• A quality phone for the money

Should you buy it?

Making your choice when picking a budget phone certainly isn’t easy right now, with exceptional phones available from the likes of Nokia, Motorola and, indeed, Oppo. The Oppo A52 doesn’t quite live up to the promise of that quad camera or that 5,000mAh battery. You’re not getting a flagship for a budget price, but what you do get is very good indeed, and well worth considering if you’re after a more affordable handset.

Pricing and availability

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Specifications

Images: Alex Kidman

Note: We tested the Australian version of this product which is identical to the global model.