The OPPO F5 will be their first 18:9 smartphone which would go head-on with the Huawei Nova 2i. With the screen dominating most of the front, the fingerprint sensor is now moved towards the back. While the placement at the rear might be an inconvenience for some, OPPO believes it is a better idea to unlock your phone using your face.
Facial recognition isn’t new and we’ve seen newer iterations with Samsung’s Iris scanning and Apple’s new Face ID. According to OPPO, their facial unlock feature on the F5 can be easily unlock in an instant. They added that Face Unlock is convenient and safe but you can always select other unlocking methods such as fingerprint, password and pattern unlock.
Compared to fingerprint, Face Unlocking is normally perceived to be the least secure method of protecting your device from unwanted use. In most scenarios, it can be fooled by a photo and there are implementations that require you to blink which makes it slower and less efficient compared fingerprint security. It would be interesting to see if OPPO can pull off a faster facial unlock that’s fool-proof on the F5.
From their latest promo video, there will be a total of 3 F5 models – OPPO F5 Youth, OPPO F5 6GB and the standard OPPO F5. From the looks of it, the OPPO F5 Youth is a lite version while the F5 6GB is the higher-spec variant with more RAM. At the moment, it is expected to come with a 6″ edge to edge full view display and it could be running on a newer Snapdragon 660 processor with 4GB RAM on the standard model.
All shall be revealed early next month as the OPPO F5 will be launching on 2 November in Malaysia. Check out OPPO Malaysia’s latest F5 video below:
