minutes of PUBG, meanwhile, sapped just 6% of a charge. That’s about half what a mid-range or flagship phone would consume, though of course such phones will be running The Oppo A54 5G comes with Android 11 overlaid with Oppo's own ColorOS, but it's far from bloated. The only non-standard pre-installed app here is TikTok, so it's ideal if you prefer a streamlined experience that you can customize yourself.

Under the plastic case, Oppo has provided an interesting assortment of specs, with some thing you mightn’t expect. As far as numbers go, the A54 5G offers a 48 megapixel camera, plus three other cameras less likely to matter. The 48 megapixel camera is the better of the bunch, and works acceptably in low light, but not fantastic. You’ll get the shots if you hold still, but it’ll be blurry otherwise. Fortunately, daylight is hardly an issue at all.At 64GB, storage is a little low for this price but at least you can expand it via the microSD card slot. Battery life

As such, you’re getting a 6.5-inch 2400 x 1080 IPS LCD with a 90Hz refresh rate. This is the first point of compromise, as you can typically either get a more vibrant OLED panel (the Realme 8) or a more fluid 120Hz LCD (the Poco X3 NFC) at the same price if you’re willing to forego 5G. It’s a shame to see Google Feed jettisoned from its position to the left of the home screen, though. Still, there’s no dodgy widget screen in its place as with certain rival UIs, so I can appreciate the attempt at restraint at least.Sure enough, in daylight conditions, the Oppo A54 5G captures very bright and reasonably detailed shots, with a tad less oversharpening than the Redmi Note 10 5G. On one particularly sunny day, the Oppo dealt with the extreme brightness of the sun when shooting some cows in a field better than its Xiaomi-bred rival – albeit with the odd dose of overexposure.

The Oppo A54 5G feels good in your hand even if its plastic finish betrays the fact that this is a budget 5G phone through and through. It'll still show up every fingerprint going but we're starting to accept that this is just the price you pay for a nice finish - and the finish is nice, shifting color as it does under different light. As is customary at this kind of price, there's no wireless charging functionality here, so you're limited to USB-C. We found the phone lasted over a day's regular use without any difficulty, which is pretty much exactly what you could want from a daily phone. Stretching it further still is definitely possible, but obviously your mileage will vary depending on how you use it. Topping all of this is a 6.4 inch Full HD+ touchscreen display offering a bit of a surprise, with a Full HD+ panel running at 2400×1080. That’s a surprise simply because it’s so high, delivering 405 pixels per inch (405ppi), and higher than the usual HD+ panel seen in phones at this price point. Oppo has even included support for 90Hz, making the screen smoother than your typical phone at this price point.In practical terms, booting up PUBG Mobile yielded mid-level presets of HD graphics and High Frame Rate, just like those aforementioned rivals. Jumping into a game, it hit the same kind of 30fps frame rate in the lobby, with the odd dip down to 28 or 29. It’s an all plastic phone that looks a little premium yet isn’t, though given the price, that’s hardly a surprise. Features You can say more or less the exact same thing about the Oppo A54 5G’s battery as you can the Redmi Note 10 5G’s and the Realme 8 5G’s. It’ll clear a full day of usage with ease, even with an excess of screen-on time, and will likely stretch through a second day under moderate conditions. The dimensions of the phone are 162.9 x 74.7 x 8.4mm, with the Oppo A54 5G weighing 190g. It's not a small phone but its design means it feels easy enough to hold. It's worth it for the screen which we'll get into shortly.

The Oppo A54 5G attains something like parity when it comes to the GPU tests, which is an area where the Dimensity 700 chip isn’t quite so commanding. In 3DMark’s snappy one-minute Wildlife and Wildlife Extreme tests, the Oppo fell around 10 to 15% behind the Realme 8 5G. But in the more prolonged Wildlife Extreme test, it scored 2417 to the Realme’s 2308. This tool has the capability of resetting the hardware on your Oppo mobile phone and wiping out all of its data. Rather than chug along at a nice pace and run apps smoothly, our testing of the A54 revealed numerous slowdowns as we jumped from app to app, or even tried to use some of the standard functionality, though it was intermittent at best. Oppo, of course, has had a productive year further up the smartphone table with its Oppo Find X3 family. So can it work some of that same magic and make the Oppo A54 5G a fully rounded budget contender? Design and Screen The Oppo A54 5G features a 48MP wide camera sensor, which is the same spec as its two budget 5G rivals. However, it has a marginally wider f/1.7 aperture.Unsurprisingly, there’s no dedicated telephoto. Oppo does achieve usable 2x results by cropping in on that high-pixel-count sensor, but I wouldn’t advise pushing further to 5x. The results aren’t pretty. A photo at 2x zoom There’s a very good reason for this shared spec. Many an early 5G phone has run afoul of 5G’s thirsty nature, powering down well before the day is done. Until 5G modems get more efficient, brute force seems to be the safest bet in securing better stamina.