OPPO launched its selfie-centric OPPO F1 smartphone in the new ‘F series’ for Rs. 15,990 in last month. The phone has a sleek design, metal body and comes with an 8-megapixel front-facing camera, which is the main highlight of the smartphone. How good are other aspects of the smartphone? Is it worth the price? Let us find you in the complete review.
Unboxing
We unboxed the OPPO F1 recently, check out the unboxing video below.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lq7ENVifBj0
Box Contents
- OPPO F1 smartphone in Golden color
- Earphones with microphone
- 3-pin charger (5V-1A)
- Micro USB cable
- SIM ejector tool
- Clear case
- Quick start guide
Display, Hardware and Design
The OPPO F1 has a 5-inch IPS display with a pixel resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels and a pixel density of around 294 PPI. Even though the display has 2.5D glass on the front and Gorilla Glass 4 protection, it is not sharp compared to a 1080p screen. The display is bright, has decent viewing angles and offers vibrant color output. The sunlight legibility is good too, but it is not as good as a Super AMOLED display.
The smartphone is 71mm wide, which makes it compact to hold, but it is 143.5mm tall, which is too tall compared to most other smartphones with a 5-inch screen, mainly due to huge bezels.
On the top there is a 8-megapixel camera with f/2.0 aperture with sensor size of 1/4 inches, which is good for selfies and video chats. It doesn’t have a flash on the front, but it has option to use the screen as a flash light. Images taken using the front-facing camera are sharp with vibrant colors. Using the screen as flash is not bright enough so there is a lot of noise if you are shooting in low lighting conditions.
It has the usual set of proximity and ambient light sensors next to the earpiece. There is also a notification LED on the right corner, which is hardly visible when it is off. This glows only in white color. It also has magnetic sensor and gyroscope.
The usual set of capacitive touch buttons below the display. These are not backlit, but offer haptic feedback when pressed.
The phone has a metal alloy body and a metal frame. “The metal body is treated with zircon sand surface coating for a smoother finish that is softer to touch,” says OPPO. Even though the surface is smooth, but it doesn’t slip out of your hands easily. You can also use the bundled clear cover that offers a better grip.
The power button is present on the right side and the volume rockers are present on the left side of the phone. Both these have a metal build. The micro USB slot is present on the bottom, along with a primary microphone and the 3.5mm audio jack is present on the top.
On the right side there is a hybrid SIM slot that can be removed using the bundled ejector tool. This lets you use a micro SIM on the primary slot and the second slot can take either a nano SIM or a microSD. It accepts cards up to 128GB.
There is a 13-megapixel camera with single LED Flash on the back. The OPPO branding is present below the camera and the loudspeaker grill is present on the bottom part of the back. The phone weighs 134 grams. Overall the build quality of the phone is good.
Camera
The 13-megapixel camera with LED Flash, f/2.2 aperture and Phase Detection Auto Focus (PDAF) is good. The camera UI is simple and is similar to earlier Oppo smartphones. It has toggles for flash and the front camera on the left. On the right it has options menu, shutter key that also lets you switch between photo and video and an image preview window.
It has several camera features such as Beautify, Filters (Natural, Bright, Afternoon, Sunrise, Warm, Nostalgic, Tokyo, Sunlight, Gothic style, Yellowing and Mono), Panorama, HDR, GIF, Audio Photo and Super Macro. It also has RAW image capture support.
It also has Slow Shutter option that takes advantage of the custom hardware and software to capture which lets you take pictures with up to 16 seconds of shutter speed. You need a tripod for shake-free images.
The Ultra HD mode lets you take images with a resolution of 51MP (8320 x 6240 pixels). This just increases the resolution of the images by stitching more images together, similar to the Super Zoom mode in the Find 7. This definitely offers more details since it has more resolution, but the quality is the same.
Daylight images were good in ideal lighting conditions and have great details, but some images are dull if the lighting is poor. Macro shots are pretty good with great details, thanks to the f/2.0 sensor. Focus is also quick since it has PDAF. HDR shots are good and are brighter than the normal shots since the saturation is more. Low light shots are just average, but the phone can’t handle completely dark conditions.
Single LED flash offers an ample amount of light to brighten the environment in dark. Some images look washed out if you are shooting close-ups.
Check out some camera samples below (Click the image to view full resolution sample)
Check out the complete set of OPPO F1 samples here. It can record videos at 1080p full HD resolution at 30 fps. Video is decent offering vibrant colors, but it is not sharp. It has slow motion recording but it has an output resolution of 720 x 480 pixels, so it doesn’t have much details. Check out the 1080p video sample below.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8QPxnkJGcc
Software
It runs on Android 5.1.1 (Lollipop) with highly customized Color OS 2.1 on top. The company doesn’t say when it will get the Android 6.0 update. You can long press the homescreen to add widgets, effects, change wallpapers and themes.
The notification panel has quick settings with several toggles. Eye protection mode adds a yellowish tint to the display so that it doesn’t affect your eyes when you are reading in the dark. Below the toggles there is a brightness adjustment slider. Motion features include, Flip to mute, easy dial, auto answer and Hands-free switch. It has double tap to wake up, option to open the camera, flash light or control music by a gesture, when the screen is off.
Out of 3GB RAM, you get 2.87GB of usable RAM, out of which about 2.07GB of RAM is free with just the default apps running in the background. Out of 16GB of internal storage, you get just 6.4GB of storage out of the box. It doesn’t even have option to move apps to the SD card, so this storage is definitely not enough if you install large games.
Apps
Coming to apps, the smartphone has a range of pre-loaded apps and the usual set of Google Apps. It also has O-Cloud, Oppo’s own cloud storage. Other apps include, File Manager, Kingsoft Office, Backup and Restore, Sound Recorder and more. Since it doesn’t have a separate apps menu, all the apps are present in the homescreen itself.
Music Player and FM Radio
The Music player is simple and can play a range of audio formats. It has Real Power Sound tech option that uses a special audio processing for enhanced audio output. The bundled earphones are decent and the output is clear with third-party in-ear headphones. The loudspeaker output is good as well. It also has FM Radio, but it doesn’t support recording.
Dual SIM and Connectivity
It has 4G connectivity with support for TD-LTE 2300MHz (Band 40) and FDD-LTE 1800MHz (Band 3) for India. Both the SIMs support 4G, but you can enable 4G only in one SIM at a time, while the other goes to 2G. It has Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.1 and GPS. Sadly, it doesn’t have dual-band WiFi or ac. It also has USB on-the-go (OTG) support, but you need to enable the OTG connection option from the ‘more’ category in the settings.
Performance and Benchmarks
Coming to the performance, the Snapdragon 616 64-bit processor (Even though CPU-Z shows it has Snapdragon 615) with four ARM Cortex A53 cores clocked at 1.50 GHz per core and four Cortex A53 cores clocked at 1.21 GHz per core offers good performance without any lags. 3GB of RAM is more than enough to run several apps in the background. The phone gets a bit warm on intensive gaming and 4G usage, but it doesn’t get too hot. Check out some synthetic benchmark scores below.
AnTuTu Benchmark 5
It scored 40555 points and lies behind the HTC One A9 that is powered by a Snapdragon 617 SoC.
Vellamo 3.1 MultiCore
It scored 1781 points and topped the Vellamo 3.1 Multicore benchmark.
Geekbench 3 Multi-Core
It scored 2998 points in the Geekbench 3 Multi-Core benchmark.
3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited
It scored 9172 points in the 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited GPU benchmark. Check out the complete set of OPPO F1 benchmarks here. It has Adreno 405 GPU clocked at 550 MHz. We tried several high-end games. Most games were smooth and the graphics was good.
Battery life
Coming to the battery life, the 2500mAh battery offers good battery life. Even with heavy use it lasts for a day and last for more than a day with average use. It has power saving mode that reduces the screen’s brightness, disables haptic touch feedback and turns off connectivity features to save power. There is ultra-long standby mode that offers basic functions such as calling and SMS, to extend the battery life.
It achieved a One Charge Rating of 13 hours and 58 minutes, which is good, mainly due to brilliant talk time, but other test results are good as well. Check out the complete set of OPPO F1’s battery test results here, to know more about the battery life of the smartphone in detail. Even though the Snadpragon 616 processor has Quick Charge 2.0 support, OPPO has not made use of this feature, so it takes about 2 hours to charge the phone fully with a 2A charger.
Conclusion
At a price tag of Rs. 15,990, the OPPO F1 is not an impressive smartphone. It has a HD display, while most other smartphones in the price tag are available with a 1080p screen. It does a good job when it comes to selfie camera or even the rear camera. The build quality and design are impressive, performance and the battery life are good as well, but the phone has just 6.4GB of usable storage and doesn’t let you move the installed apps to the SD card. OPPO should look into to and enable the option to move apps to the SD card, if it is possible.
Since this has a hybrid SIM slot, you can’t use both the SIM slots at a time, if you want to use the expansion slot. For a phone with very less internal storage, a dedicated expansion slot is important. These things and steep pricing makes the phone hard to recommend in the price range, even though the phone is good in several aspects. To summarize, here are the pros and cons of the smartphone.
Pros
- Good build quality and design
- Good performance
- Good cameras
- Good battery life
Cons
- Average display
- Only 6.4GB of user storage without option to move apps to SD card
- Hybrid dual SIM might not be useful for everyone