There’s a certain appeal to a pocketable smartphone. A phone that just slips away into jeans such that you don’t even feel its presence. A phone that sticks to the basics, does all the essentials but isn’t really aiming to replace your tablet, laptop and perhaps even your kitchen sink! For better or worse, we’ve mostly been relegated to the entry level segment for such handsets and the experience of using these phones has been less than exemplary. Enter the Oppo Joy 3, yet another entry level device, which somehow managed to leave a unique impression. Despite the seemingly good usage experience, do we feel that it is worth a recommendation? Read on our review of the Oppo Joy 3 to find out!
Design
Calling the design of the handset spartan might be stretching it. This is quite literally a black bar, a touchscreen slate that has no visibly identifying marks to it from the front. A slate that even at the back could pass off as any generic smartphone were it not for the Oppo branding. Beneath the unassuming shell however lies a solid build. A hard plastic frame runs around the entire body with the front and rear panels being placed within the confines of that frame. This drastically minimizes the chances of damaging the screen or rear of the phone in case you bump the phone or even drop it at the corner.
A 4.5inch display sits proud up front with a 2MP front facing camera above it alongside the earpiece. To the right of the phone is the power button while the left side hosts the volume rocker. Tactile feedback from both the buttons is less than ideal as they tend to be on the mushy side.
Below the display lie three capacitive buttons that correspond to menu, home and back. As we mentioned earlier, there’s nothing really extraordinary here worth talking about.
Move over to the back and the rear camera is placed up top with a single LED flash below and under it is a silkscreened Oppo logo. At the bottom left corner is a small speaker grill. The steel grey back and the inky black front offer a nice enough contrast to offer a modicum of visual appeal. The handset measures 132.8×66.6×8.95mm and weighs in at 135g. All in all, the Oppo Joy 3 offers a svelte little package that combines a self-effacing design with very good ergonomics.
Software
Dubbed Color OS 2.0, the software on the Oppo Joy 3 is a mixed bag. The entire interface is a heady mix of elements that we’ve come to expect from Chinese OEMs. Despite the heavy skinning, we found that performance was slick and smooth throughout. The basic organization is the same as what we’re used to.
The lockscreen has three shortcuts that correspond to the dialer, home and messaging apps. Swiping it up drops you into the home screen which has an iPhone like organization, a theme that is common across most Chinese Android OEMs. You can place widgets here and compile applications into single folders.
Drop down the notification shade and you’ll notice a fair amount of persistent toggles. We like this modification that puts the essentials right on top over the stock Android version wherein the toggles are hidden in a separate pane altogether. The entire interface accommodates a degree of customization and there are some nice bits thrown around including the ability to display data transfer speeds directly on the menu bar. We usually don’t approve of OEM skins on smartphones but Oppo has done a good enough job here and the amount of polish ensures that the system remains smooth and slick throughout and if you don’t like it, you can always slap on an alternate launcher.
Performance
The Joy 3 is anything but a powerhouse. Powered by a 1.3 GHz quad-core MediaTek MT6582 processor with Mali-400 MP2 GPU paired with 1GB of RAM, you really shouldn’t expect much in terms of gaming from this device. Even multitasking is something you’d have to keep in check to ensure a favorable experience. High end gaming is completely out of the question but the likes of Angry Bird 2 work well enough with the occasional frame drop. We’ve maintained that specifications aren’t key to the handset but there’s a bare minimum that has to be met. Unfortunately, the Oppo Joy 3 is lacking a bit too much in the specs department and while the general usage experience was surprisingly slick, stepping into the 3rd party apps territory made multitasking a bit of a pain. Benchmarks on such a device aren’t entirely relevant but we’ve still put the phone through its paces to see how it compares to the competition for better or worse.
In the AnTuTu benchmark, the phone scores 18800 points placing it towards the lower end of the spectrum.
In the Quadrant benchmark, the phone scores 6568 points that places it above some devices like the Canvas Doodle 4 but the phones lies well below even the Moto E.
Nenamark is a GPU centric benchmark where the phone scores 55.6 points and lies squarely in the middle of our test bench of devices.
Display
The Oppo Joy 3 is equipped with a 4.5 inch display. The resolution is 854 x 480 pixels which results in a pixel density of 218ppi. The panel while usable is far from the sharpest out there. There’s a distinct lack of sharpness around the edges of icons and even text giving everything a slightly blurred look.
It wouldn’t be unfair to say that Oppo Joy 3 has perhaps one of the more natural looking display panels around this price point. Color reproduction is nice and vibrant and the screen goes sufficiently bright. Outdoor usage is more than feasible.
Camera
Compromises have to be made to achieve such a low price point and it is quite unfortunate that the camera module was the one to take the maximum hit in this regard. Long story short, the camera is poor to say the least. Let’s leave aside the ancient 5MP sensor aside for a minute and just talk about general image quality.
The level of detail is just about average and a 100% crop shows that there’s a surprisingly high level of noise even in a brightly lit scenario such as the one above. Details also tend to get mushed together. The bigger surprise is the apparent lack of an auto focus mechanism. Try as you might, the phone just wouldn’t get a focus lock on anything placed near the phone which makes us believe that the handset packs an EDoF system.
Low light shots are predictably prone to noise. This particular shot is however out of focus due to the inability of the camera to focus so close. Additionally, the last shot demonstrates the slow shot to shot time as well as the general sluggishness in the camera application that tends to create blurry shots more often than not. Video captured by the phone is particularly bad and you’d be better off not capturing the occasion altogether given how dark, blurry the video is with dropped frames all around.
Battery life & Connectivity
Connectivity options on the Oppo Joy 3 are as bog standard as they come. With Dual SIM support as well as 3G HSPA+, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0 and GPS, the device has all the essentials so there’s nothing to complain about here. That said, there’s really no getting around the fact that there’s just 4GB of built in storage on the handset. Of this there’s under 2GB available at first boot making that SD card slot critical. The phone does support USB OTG as well which can be used to augment storage as well. The Oppo Joy 3 is equipped with a 2,000 mAh battery which proves to deliver excellent standby times. Given the lowly processor and large battery capacity, two days of light usage can be easily obtained. With moderate usage, we regularly obtained a full day of usage from the phone and screen on time of about 4 hours.
Conclusion
As far as small phones go, the Oppo Joy 3 is a handy little device that offers a very nice usage experience and a solid build. We liked the display used here as well as the excellent battery life. The camera on the other hand was more of a miss than a hit.
While our impressions of the handset were generally good, it gets thrown into a tizzy when you factor in the price point. Priced at Rs. 7,900, the Oppo Joy 3 is grossly overpriced in our opinion and faces formidable competition from much higher specced devices from the likes of Yu and Mi. Drop the price to around the Rs. 5,000 mark and the Oppo Joy 3 becomes a device worth a second look but the truth remains that despite the good experience, we can’t really recommend the phone at this price point.
Pros
- Build quality
- Battery life
Cons
- Price
- Camera performance