[REVIEW] OPPO F9 – The Best Midrange Phone ever Made by OPPO

OPPO Malaysia today unveiled its latest F-series smartphone, OPPO F9. Although the OPPO F7 was only 4 months old, the company decided to launch a new model to compete with others mid-range smartphone in the market.

The OPPO F9 received a lot improvement over its predecessor, introduced the first dual-rear camera system in the F-series, tiny notch “Waterdrop” design display and VOOC Flash Charge that only available on their flagship device.

Here I’ll be doing a comprehensive review of the OPPO F9 and begin with an unboxing video;

Design

The first thing that caught my eye is the gradient’s colors on the rear glass. The unit that I have is the “Twilight Blue” which goes from electric blue to black. Apart from that, it has a sweeping diamond cut-out pattern that only visible on certain angles and lighting.

Although this isn’t a flagship phone in term of specs, the built and quality are as good as a flagship. It has a sturdy built but it’s a bit slippery if you don’t use the given clear TPU case. That’s happened to most of glass sandwiched smartphone.

It supports dual 4G VoLTE sim and dedicated microSD card slot for storage expansion without sacrificing the second sim slot.

Below of the device is a single down firing speaker which I find it surprising loud, microphone, microUSB – yes! microUSB in 2018 (more to that later) and a 3.5mm audio jack.

Display

The OPPO F9 sports an almost edge-to-edge 6.3-inch LTPS IPS display with a resolution of 2,280 x 1,080 that translated to 19.5:9 display ratio. It has a tiny notch that accommodates an A.I. powered 25-megapixels camera sensor alongside with other sensors and an earpiece.

OPPO F9 is also the first smartphone protected with the latest Corning Gorilla Glass 6 which twice tough and durable than the Gorilla Glass 5.

The color reproduction, brightness and viewing angles are pretty good although it’s not color vivid AMOLED panel. With IPS panel, we don’t have to worry about display burn-in issue.

Camera

Finally, OPPO has decided to have a dual-rear camera system on their F-series. It equipped with a 16-megapixel sensor plus a 2-megapixels depth-sensing camera to allows better portrait photo taking. 4K video recording is not available and there are no OIS or EIS thus shaky videos are much noticeable.

The selfie camera uses a 25-megapixel Sony sensor that boasts of A.I. beauty and HDR capability. The A.I. algorithms are capable to recognize genders and judge how much beautification is needed.

It may not be the best camera sensors, with the A.I. capability enabled the photo taken was enhanced and automatically tuned to ideal scenery settings. This makes the camera fun to point-and-shoot while giving impressive output.

I was lucky enough to bring along this phone for my holiday in Phuket, Thailand. These are the photo taken by the OPPO F9. Uploaded directly from OPPO F9 to Flickr without any editing or touch-up.

The photos taken are surprisingly good, good details and well-saturated colors especially in the bright light environment. The front camera’s HDR is impressively good. It does struggle a bit in low light but it still able to capture decent photos with slightly washed out photos.

Performance

Under the hood is MediaTek latest Helio P60 SoC, an octa-core processor based on 12nm FinFET process and also the company first chipset that has dual APU (Artificial Intelligent Processing Unit). It has a generous 6GB of RAM and 64GB onboard storage.

The Helio P60 may only a midrange processor, the performance test result are surprisingly good and even beat Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 with similar configuration.

It scored impressively 5,728 (multi-core) and 1,498 (single-core) on GeekBench 4. On AnTuTu Benchmark test, the OPPO F9 scored 143,825 points.

OPPO F9 able to handle major of the new mobile game titles like PUBG Mobile, Asphalt 8, Mobile Legends and NFS without any issue like lags or heat.

The speaker of the OPPO F9 is very loud for a single down-firing but it tends to get a little distorted when set to maximum level. 60% – 70% are just perfect.

ColorOS 

OPPO F9 runs on ColorOS 5.2 UI on top of the Android 8.1 out-of-the-box. iOS inspired UI is still present in the skin but added a lot more useful features such as Face Unlock, Swipe Gesture navigation, Twin Apps, Raise to Wake and much more


Authentication can be it with the traditional fingerprint scanning unlock or Face Unlock that surprise me to work even in the total dark although it’s doesn’t have an infrared camera.

Battery Life & VOOC Flash Charging

The 3,500 mAh battery is more than for a full day usage thanks to the power efficient 12nm Helio P60. Beside that OPPO F9 feature VOOC Flash Charge that supports up to 20W power input. The company claimed a 5 minutes charge will able to give 2 hours of talk time. With the VOOC charger, I able to fully charge the device from 10% to 80% in less than 50 minutes but the charging time take longer to reach from 80% to 100% for safety reason. OPPO has 5 layers of protection and OPPO claimed the World’s fastest and safest charging technology.

After a week using it as my daily driver, the battery life is quite good and still left 30-40% battery in the end of the day. Thus I normally only charge the device early in the morning while I’m preparing myself for work.

The OPPO F9 comes in two colors; Twilight Blue and Sunrise Red. It will be available for pre-order starting today till 29th August at the price of RM 1,399. First sales will be on 30th August 2018.

Verdict

OPPO F9 is a beautiful smartphone that gotten the DNA from the OPPO Find X. This is the best midrange phone ever made by OPPO that fit “Cheap phone is getting good and good phone is getting cheap”

Pros:
• Huge and bright display
• Dual 4G VoLTE
• Fast VOOC Flash Charge
• Dedicated microSD card slot

Cons:
• Outdated microUSB
• Limited camera app features (refocus & bokeh adjustment)
• No LED to show notification/charging status

• Design – 9/10
• Built – 9/10
• Display – 9/10
• Performance – 8.5/10
• Camera – 8.5/10
• Battery – 9/10
• Price – 8.5/10

Overall – 8.8

Pre-order

Participating e-commerce
• OPPO Official Store
• Lazada Malaysia
• Shopee
• 11street

Offline
• OPPO Official Concept Stores & Authorised Dealers
• Senheng
• senQ
• Celcom Blue Cube
• Courts

Facebook Comments