Oppo Find X5 Pro leak makes it sound almost identical to the OnePlus 10 Pro

We recently saw the surprisingly early launch of the OnePlus 10 Pro, the latest top-end phone from OnePlus that was expected in March or April - and if you didn't like the look of it, you're certainly not going to be impressed by Oppo's next phone if this new leak is correct.

Popular leaker Digital Chat Station posted on Chinese social media site Weibo with some specs of the Oppo Find X5 Pro, the upcoming top-end phone from OnePlus' sibling company - the post was deleted, but not before people screenshotted it.

"Wait," we hear you ask, "since Oppo's last top phone was the Find X3 Pro, surely the next one is the Find X4 Pro, not Find X5 Pro?" and we're with you, but some leakers think Oppo will skip the number 4. 

In China, it's an unlucky number and it's associated with death. This is despite the fact that the company has already used the number, notably in the Oppo Reno 4 family, but we'll stick with the leakers on this one to be safe.

The specs list Digital Chat Station provided sound incredibly familiar to people who know the OnePlus 10 Pro.

There's the 6.7-inch QHD 120Hz AMOLED screen, Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipset, 5,000mAh battery with 80W wired and 50W wireless charging, 32MP front-facing camera all in common.

There are a few differences though, and all but one are in the photography department. The other is the design - Digital Chat Station shared a render which you can see above in the Twitter embed, and it's similar to the Find X3 Pro.

But now onto photography - while the OnePlus 10 Pro has a 48MP main, 50MP ultra-wide and 8MP telephoto combination, the Oppo Find X5 Pro has a 50MP main, 50MP ultra-wide and 13MP extra camera, though we don't know what the latter one does. 

There's also the MariSilicon X chip, a neural processing chip announced last year, that will bring some extra AI processing smarts to the phone's photography.

Analysis: why are the two phones so similar?

We don't need to bring in Poirot to figure out why Oppo and OnePlus have designed such similar phones - it's because they're basically the same company.

Following a merger in 2021, the two brands - which were already owned by the same company - joined together, so now they share both research and R&D teams. 

So there's no plagiarism going on here, but the question still stands, albeit with a different emphasis: why? And we don't have a good answer for that.

There's no benefit to users for two near-identical phones being on the market. It makes it harder for potential buyers to decide which mobile to buy. 

Rather than parse through the intricacies of the MariSilicon X or 48MP vs 50MP main cameras, people might just opt to buy the newest Galaxy or iPhone instead of trying to work out which is best out of the Oppo and OnePlus.

This isn't the first time we've seen OnePlus and Oppo bump heads, as the OnePlus 8 Pro and Oppo Find X2 Pro were also incredibly similar, and it was also hard deciding which was best of those two.

Perhaps that's why OnePlus is jumping the gun with its 10 Pro announcement: so it can see some temporal distance from the new Oppo phone. But we'd still just rather just see the brands make distinctly different ones.

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