When the Apple iPhone X announced, there were a lot of critics of the weird-looking notch. In just less than 5 months, the notorious Apple iPhone X notch has adopted by a lot of Android smartphone including the OPPO F7 that I’m reviewing now.
The OPPO F-series that focus on Selfie-taking has no different on the OPPO F7. It boasts a 25-megapixel front-facing camera with Artificial Intelligence-based beauty features.
I won’t be going through much on the design and hands-on as I’ve posted it previously with an unboxing video
HERE!. I’ll be talking more on its display, performance, camera and battery life.
Display
The display is one of the main talking points, featuring an almost edge-to-edge display with minimum chin, accompanied by a small notch (comparing it to the Apple iPhone X). Although it has a huge display, the footprint of the device is equal to the conventional 16:9 ratio, 5.5-inch display smartphone.
The 6.23-inch has a 2,280 x 1,080 resolutions that translated to 19:9 aspect ratio which looks appealing especially playing movie and video. In the beginning, it may look and feel weird with the notch covering some area of the display. I was able to get used to it after few days of using it. The Android Oreo on the OPPO 7 are not optimized for full-screen display, thus users get the option to switch off the “Notch Area Display” if they encounter any app content that blocked by the notch.
Although it’s not an AMOLED panel, the color reproduction, brightness, and viewing angles are pretty good.
Camera
OPPO equipped a 25-megapixel SONY sensor with f/2.0 aperture on the front camera, boasts of A.I. Beauty and HDR capability. The A.I. algorithms are capable to recognize genders and judge how much beautification is needed. You can still manually pick the levels of beautification along with various filters. The sensor is also capable to preview the actual output live before you hit the shutter button.
Just like most of the new smartphone, AR stickers are available in the camera app.
As for the rear camera, it packed with 16-megapixel f/1.8 aperture lens that able to handle low light environment quite well. It also able to capture decent details and well-saturated colors photos. 4K video recording is not supported and there are no OIS or EIS, thus shaky videos are very much noticeable.
Here are some photo samples;
(all the photos were not post edited/touch up and uploaded to Flickr straight from the OPPO F7)
Click on the image for high-resolution viewing
Front 25-megapixel selfie camera with Depth-of-Field & A.I. enabled
Front 25-megapixel selfie camera with Depth-of-Field & A.I. enabled
16-megapixel rear camera, auto mode & flash off
16-megapixel rear camera, auto mode & flash off
16-megapixel rear camera, auto mode & flash off
16-megapixel rear camera, close up, auto mode & flash off
Performance & User Experience
The new chip from MediaTek, Helio P60 is an octa-core processor based on the 12nm FinFET process and also it’s also the first chipset used by the company supports A.I. processing. The mid-range processor surprising good in term of performance and as well battery management.
I did some performance tests, the new P60 is actually more powerful than same range, Qualcomm Snapdragon 636 and scored impressively 139,305 in AnTuTu and 38fps in GFXBench’s T-Rex test.
OPPO F7 able to handle major of the new mobile games like PUBG, NFS, and Asphalt 8 with no hiccup.
The device offers two variants which are 4GB of RAM with 64GB onboard storage and 6GB of RAM with 128GB storage. Storage expansion is not an issue even you need use two SIM card concurrent as it has a dedicated microSD card slot.
OPPO F7 runs on ColorOS 5.0 UI on top of the Android Oreo 8.1 out-of-the-box. The iOS-inspired UI is still present in the skin but added a lot of unique features such as Face Unlock, Swipe-up Gesture Navigation (similar to Apple iPhone X), Raise to Wake and Full-Screen Multitasking.
Authentication with the fingerprint sensor on the rear works pretty fast and accurate, whereby the Face Unlock implementation worked pretty well and quick most of the time. OPPO claimed the Face Unlock has 128 points recognition when you registered face.
The speaker of the F7 does get very loud but it tends to get crank and distorted when set to maximum level. The 3.5mm audio jack is still available on the device and it has this Real Original Sound that helps lift the mids and low-end frequencies.
Battery Life
Oddly the ColorOS doesn’t show battery usage info such as SOT but the 3,400 mAh battery is able to last through a full day comfortably even on heavy usages. This is thanks to the power efficient 12nm SoC and Android 8.1 OS.
The OPPO’s well-known VOOC Flash charging was missing and it’s totally not supported even charging it with VOOC Flash Charging charger. The provided 10W brick able to fully charge the flat OPPO F7 under two hours which is just fine.
Verdict
The company has finally brought a major upgrade and the design makeover. Notch trend is here to stay as the upcoming Android P will be part of the feature. With the price of RM 1,399, it gets a well-performed processor, bright and huge 6.23-inch display also intelligent selfie camera. The shortcoming from the OPPO F7 is the poor bokeh-effect execution, outdated microUSB port, and too heavily inspired iOS UI.
The OPPO F7 may face a very tough competition with others strong competitors like the vivo V9, ASUS ZenFone 5 and more budget-friendly Xiaomi Redmi Note 5.
OPPO F7 4GB variant is available now for RM 1,399 whereby the 6GB model will be priced at RM 1,699 and will be available later this month
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