I do live close enough to their Mountain View office to deal with them directly, which factored into my purchasing decision But I’d still recommend their disk players to anyone looking for an excellent all-format player that competes well against prestige brand units costing many times more.I can’t speak for the phone though.

Just one important observation:  their DVD player was very hackable, and Oppo even told you how to do it.  But due to the legal bullshit surrounding Blu-Ray (as opposed to the open source HDTV), some of that “hackability”, such as the ability to skip through the warnings, previews, promos, propaganda, has gone away.

I ended up rooting and installing CM7 (at the time).  There was an option in CM7 which would allow you to move “phone only” apps to the SD card like you could with most other apps.  That was a life-saver.  Of course, you don’t want to move anything “mission critical” to the SD in case the card breaks or is removed, but things like some “phone only” games or apps like IMDb?  Send them to the card.

I also think that the 32 GB is “enough” is much like the no one will need more than 640k. The nice thing about SD cards is that I can switch as I need and if 32 GB isn’t enough, I can easier throw in another 32 GB or add a 512 GB or whatever SD card comes out.

My wife also uses a SD card for her camera, so it occasionally is nice to just plug it directly into the phone to review pictures while she starts burning through the next card.

I totally appreciate that for some people it’s essential.

Don’t fall into the trap that says, “if my use case doesn’t require Widget X, then anybody who wants Widget X must be wrong.”

There’s nothing “selfish” about wanting an optical drive in a laptop if you have a use for it.

I use cloud storage pretty heavily anyway (Dropbox and SugarSync), but that only accounts for certain data on my iPhone. Music etc. is all on-phone, and I totally see the advantage of being able to upgrade the storage later, for a fraction of the cost (big storage i devices can come at terrifying prices).

That aside, it’s no secret why the carriers are pushing for those slots to go away.  They want you to store your music “in the cloud” and then pay them to access it each and every time.

source: http://www.engadget.com/2012/12/12/oppo-find-5-launch/

From Wikipedia:

OPPO Digital, Inc., is an electronics manufacturer based in Mountain View, California United States. It is primarily known for its upconverting DVD and Blu-ray Disc players.
OPPO Digital Inc. and oppo-bluray.co.uk (Europe), OPPO Korea, and OPPO.COM (China) are the same brand, but completely different divisions. OPPO Digital Inc. designs and manufacturers its own products to facilitate regional needs.
OPPO Digital was founded in California in 2004. Their first product was the OPPO OPDV971H Up-Converting Universal DVD Player.

Each to their own of course :) I suppose I was more trying to work out if it were one of those slightly selfish demands like disc drives on laptops, which for most people are pretty redundant.

I don’t know about Oppo, but Huawei has been guilty of this (producing Motorola phone clones that were so strangely identical that they had the same firmware bugs).