The OPPO F15 has finally made its way to India, and it’s for those who are looking for a mid-ranger. The F15, which succeeds the F11 comes with 48MP AI Quad Camera setup, FHD+ AMOLED display, and sleek body. With this device, OPPO is once again out to seek domination in the mid-range segment amidst very intense competition. Did they succeed? Do check it out.
Why should you buy it?
Elegant fit and finish with a sleek build (on par with flagships)
Without a doubt, OPPO has been making some impressive yet attractive smartphones in the market, and the OPPO F15 is no exception. The latest outing from OPPO comes with plastic body finish and metal frame in the middle. Both sides are protected by Corning Gorilla Glass 5.
Overall, the build is premium, looks appealing when compared to other smartphones in the same category. The bezels around the display are extremely thin to ensure immersive multimedia viewing experience.
The lightness is instantly noticeable in hands, and the sleek dimension makes it ergonomically good to hold in one hand. It measures 7.9mm thickness and 172g in weight.
20:9 aspect ratio display looks neat!
The phone has a 6.4-inch FHD+ AMOLED display with 20:9 aspect ratio and a screen to body ratio of 90.7%. The display quality looks good with punchy colors, adequate brightness, and has a great viewing angle too. The text looks sharp, and sunlight legibility is decent too.
It also offers a couple of options under screen color mode — Vivid and Gentle. With ColorOS 6, the company has built a couple of features that aim to reduce eye strain when using the phone at minimum brightness in dimly-lit environments — Night shield and Low-Brightness Flicker-Free Eye Care. The phone also has an in-display fingerprint scanner.
Battery life
The OPPO F15 is powered by a 4000mAh battery with VOOC 3.0 fast charging. As far as the battery goes, the phone manages to deliver an excellent one and half day usage on intensive usage and can easily last you a couple of days on a single charge. Having said that VOOC 3.O makes juicing the battery a quick process as well.
In our OneCharge Rating, the OPPO F15 scores around 18 hours and 1 minute, which is good for a phone with a 4000mAh battery. It took about 30 minutes to charge from 0 to 50 and 1 and half hours for 0 to 100% with the bundled 20W VOOC 3.0 charger.
Competent camera
The phone has quad rear cameras with a 48-megapixel primary rear camera with f/1.7 aperture, 8MP 119° ultra-wide-angle lens with f/2.25 aperture, and also 3cm macro option, 2MP mono lens and 2MP depth sensor with 1.75μm pixel size, f/2.4 aperture. It has AI scene recognition, a Beautify option, nightscape, and night portrait. There is an anti-shake feature that uses EIS software and gyroscope hardware-based anti-shake technology.
The camera app interface is pretty standard with modes like night, panorama, expert, time lapse, slow motion, Sticker, Google Lens, HDR, AI scene recognition, and more.
During the right lighting conditions, the primary 48MP camera is capable of capturing nice images, with mostly accurate colors and good dynamic range, without going too heavy on the post-processing.
If you want to add a bit of saturation on your photo, the Dazzle Color option, similar to the Chroma Boost option, helps you. Having said that, we witnessed focus issues while shooting on the macro lens half of the time.
The Portrait mode works well in most of the parts, but at times we got quite a bit of distortion in our images. At night conditions, the dedicated night mode help users click images in really dark environments. In general, it uses a long exposure method to brightens up the subject and sharpens the image to a certain extent preserving the details. However, the output is not really quite up to the mark.
The selfie camera takes some social media-worthy images with accurate color and skin tone, provided the AI beautify if off. The edge detection in the front-camera is not up to the mark. Nevertheless, it captures some satisfying images at the end.
Check out the photos below:
Why should you not buy it?
Two year old chipset at this price point!
The OPPO F15 is powered by a MediaTek Helio P70 chipset with 900MHz ARM Mali-G72 MP3 GPU under the hood. On the storage front, we had 8GB LPDDR4x RAM and 128GB UFS 2.1 storage, expandable memory up to 256GB with microSD, which is a dedicated slot.
When it comes to casual usage, the chipset ensures smooth sailing; however, bringing in some intensive tasks, we witnessed a bit of lag and hung at times. At this price point, we expected MediaTek G90T or a Snapdragon 730G, but what we have here is a two-year-old Helio P70, which was first seen in Realme 3. Check out the benchmark below.
Priced on the higher side
The OPPO F15 comes in Lightening Black color, is priced at Rs. 19,990. Considering it as a whole package, the device is a bit overpriced. At this price or below, there are various options available like POCO X2, Realme X2, Redmi K20, Samsung Galaxy A50s and much more.
Other mentions
The OPPO F15 supports various connectivity options, including Dual 4G VoLTE, WiFi 802.11ac dual-band (2×2 MU-MIMO ) with VoWiFi / Wi-Fi Calling, Bluetooth 5, GPS/GLONASS/Beidou, and USB Type-C. The F15 comes with a bottom-firing single speaker. It is loud and offers good details at a higher volume as well. The call quality through headsets and loudspeakers was good too. The F15 is shipped with Android 9.0 Pie out of the box on top of ColorOS 6.1.2.
The OPPO F15 comes in Lightening Black and Unicorn White colors at a price of Rs. 19,990. It is now available on Flipkart and Amazon.in as well as offline stores.