OPPO Malaysia quietly rolled out OPPO A7 in Malaysia market. The OPPO A7 is a selfie-centric with large battery capacity phone.

It gets most of the fashionable DNA design from the OPPO F9, “Waterdrop” notch design display, 3D glossy glass-like with grating pattern back cover and trustable rear-mounted fingerprint scanner.

It comes with two colour options; Glaring Gold and Glaze Blue. These colours are very subtle and chic.

Here’s what you get inside the box;

Design

The overall design is pretty identical with the OPPO F9 which we find it a good thing. It looks premium and light to hold.

The front is a 6.26-inch LTPS IPS display with resolutions of 1,520 x 720 that translated to 19:9 display-ratio and have only 271ppi. The colours output are vivid and bright, it’s decent enough for watching videos and playing games. The “Waterdrop” notch houses a 16-megapixels camera, sensors and earpiece speaker – more on the selfie camera later

On the bottom, you will find 3.5mm audio jack, microphone, microUSB port and single down-firing speaker.

The volume rocker buttons are placed on the left with SIM tray that accommodates two nanoSIM and a dedicated microSD card (up to 256GB). The power button is located on the right side.

Around the back is dual rear camera setup, LED flash and fingerprint sensor.

ColorOS 5.2

The A7 runs on ColorOS 5.2 based on Android 8.1 Oreo with November security patch. It doesn’t have an app drawer and needs to scroll horizontally to see all the apps.

It comes with a standard three-way navigation button and can switch to gesture-based to utilized the full view display. Swiping up from the right or left lets you go back or recent and middle bring you to the home screen.

There are a few new handy features built-in, Smart Sidebar – accessible anywhere on the screen with a swipe and allows you to launch pre-set apps in a floating window.

Cameras

The dual rear camera can shot quite decent photos under good lighting conditions and HDR helps in exposure control. However, the experience was totally different when it comes to poor light condition. It struggled to focus and photo colours tend to wash out.

The front 16-megapixels selfie camera performs very well regardless in good or low lighting conditions.

Here are some photo samples were taken with the OPPO A7

Performance & Battery Life

Under the hood is Qualcomm Snapdragon 450 coupled with 4GB of RAM and 64GB onboard storage.

In AnTuTu & Geekbench 4 benchmark tests, it gets scores of;

• AnTuTu – 71,371
• Geekbench 4 (Single-core) – 781
• Geekbench 4 (Multi-core) – 2,654

The OPPO A7 performs average and I did find a bit of lag when switching between apps and even facial unlock delay a second or two.

Heavy title mobile games like PUBG and NFS are playable but only at lowest settings. OPPO’s spokesperson did mention a software update very soon that brings “HyperBoost” will improve gaming performance and experience similar to HUAWEI/HONOR GPU Turbo Technology.

Entertainment experience is pretty good thanks to the huge bright display and huge 4,230 mAh battery.

The battery life is good as it can last me easily 2 days with just a single charge. It takes about 3 hours to complete a flat battery thanks to the provide 10W power brick.