Every time we think that all of the bits and pieces that make a smartphone cannot be packed into a thinner form factor, someone out there has to go and one up every other manufacturer by putting their latest smartphone on a diet.
This time it’s Chinese smartphone brand Oppo who have just announced their latest smartphone, the Oppo R5, which rises just 4.85mm off a desk (when laid flat) making it the thinnest smartphone in the world.
Given the space constraints you would think that Oppo would have skimped on the internals but the R5 is actually rather well endowed in the hardware department. A 5.2 inch full HD AMOLED display sits atop an eight core Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 processor with 2GB of RAM and just 16GB of internal storage which may be a tad small given the lack of microSD card slot. A pair of f/2.0 aperture cameras, 13 megapixel at the back and 5 megapixel at the front, join an LTE radio and a small 2 000mAh battery in making up the 155 grams of weight.
The folks at Oppo say that they’ve used a special phase-shifting material to combat the heat generation that plagues most thin smartphones but while we can appreciate that making a smartphone thinner and sexier isn’t necessarily a bad thing the fact that the Oppo R5 doesn’t have enough space to handle a standard 3.5mm headphone jack means that we’ve transitioned to silliness for the sake of it.
Don’t expect the Android powered Oppo R5 to hit South African shores anytime soon, but definitely expect to see a rush from a few other manufacturers to slim down their next few smartphones to get closer to what the competition offers.
[Via – Engadget]
