Oppo F1 Plus Review: Decent performer with looks to kill

Oppo F1 Plus 8

Oppo has done relatively well in India despite being a new entrant. The company off-late has been churning out camera focussed phones with it’s F series. The Chinese manufacturer recently announced the Oppo F1, the first selfie-focused smartphone.
The Oppo F1 Plus becomes the second selfie-focused smartphone in the F-series that comes with a bigger screen size and a whopping 16MP front-facing cam. The phone is being marketed as a selfie-focussed phone, let’s find out if the device lives up to its promise of being the ‘Selfie Expert.’

Box Contents:

  • OPPO F1 Plus
  • In-ear earphones
  • Micro USB cable
  • Flash Charger
  • SIM ejector tool
  • Documentation
  • Transparent case

Design

The first thing you notice is its striking similarity with the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6S Plus. The phone’s design aesthetics are heavily inspired by Apple’s iconic flagship with similar curves and metallic finish. Moreover, its rear camera has the same awkward protrusion of the iPhone’s rear camera making it prone to scratches and damages. Even the fingerprint scanner is housed on the front that doubles as a home button – just like the iPhone.

[ps_prices] Despite being what you’d call an iPhone rip-off, it’s super light at 145 grams and relatively thin at 6.6mm. It’s easy to carry around, feels good in the hand and certainly better in terms of ergonomics compared to other plus-sized phones out there. The metal frame running along the sides lends the phone a premium look and feel.

Regardless of being heavily inspired by the iPhone, it’s a great phone when it comes to ergonomics. It offers a good grip, is super-light and exudes a premium appeal.

Display

The smartphone’s 5.5-inch Full HD AMOLED display is vivid and sharp with good viewing angles. The Corning Gorilla Glass 4 protects the screen from scratches and it doesn’t struggle even under brightly lit conditions. It even has an ‘Eye protection display feature’ that makes it easy to the eye for night reading.

Overall, the phone’s display won’t leave you complaining. Colours are pretty accurate, as the AMOLED panel does enhance contrast, saturation and color accuracy. Black levels are excellent, which you would expect with AMOLED panels and the Oppo F1 Plus did not disappoint. The sheer size of the screen makes it good for reading, editing documents and excel sheets or watching multimedia content.

Performance

With a MediaTek MT6755 octa-core processor with 4GB of RAM, the phone can pretty much handle everything at ease. There are no heating issues while multitasking or gaming, and the phone works smoothly for the most part barring the odd glitch while playing some multimedia files. The phone also fared well in our benchmark tests. In Antutu, it bagged a score of 52116 points. While in GeekBench 3, the Oppo F1 Plus got a single-core score of 869 and a multi-core score of 3303.

The smartphone isn’t really a beast when it comes to performance, but nonetheless a pretty reliable performer when it comes to everyday usage.

The phone comes with a 2,800 mAh battery, quite impressive given that how slim the phone is. It can easily belt out a day and a half battery life depending upon the usage. The Oppo F1 Plus also supports something called VOOC Flash Charge. Oppo claims that five minutes of charge is enough for 2 hours of talk time. Using the bundled charger, I was able to fully charge the F1 Plus in about 50 minutes.

Even the phone’s fingerprint scanner in blazingly fast and responsive. It unlocks the device in about 0.5 seconds and seems insanely fast.

The other thing worth mentioning is the phone’s internal storage. The F1 Plus has a microSD card slot, which is good. But the fact that it comes with 64GB of on-board storage is just outstanding.

Signal strength and LTE performance is pretty good, as the phone easily latches onto 4G networks. The OPPO F1 features a hybrid SIM slot, which means you can have two SIMs or a SIM and microSD expansion, but not both.

Software

The phone runs Android 5.1 layered with the company’s Color OS 3.0. And is the case with most Chinese phones, the first thing you notice is the lack of an app drawer. The UI is pretty smooth and offers a bunch of customisation options, though its still not as slick and polished as stock Android. The notification drawer still gives you access to shortcuts such as brightness, Wi-Fi, and others, but they are accessed with a left swipe that seems rather unnecessary.  You can always download a brand new launcher to fix these issues if you prefer a stock Android experience.

The notification drawer still gives you access to shortcuts such as brightness, Wi-Fi, and others, but they are accessed with a left swipe that seems rather unnecessary.  You can always download a brand new launcher to fix these issues if you prefer a stock Android experience.

Thankfully, it doesn’t come loaded with much bloatware and there won’t be useless apps lying around consuming the phone’s resources in the background.

The UI works well for the most part, though its just the lack of finer details and polish of a stock Android experience. Also the fact that it doesn’t run the latest Android 6.0 Marshmallow makes you feel like you’re going back in time.

Camera

Despite being marketed as a selfie-focussed phone with its massive 16MP sensor, the images taken with the front camera are nothing that would make you go ‘Wow’. No doubt it belts out clear and nice pictures, but nothing that sets it apart from the competition. Images are fine, but edges have a tendency to appear grainy and blurry.

Being touted as a ‘selfie focussed’ phone, I wanted a little more, and it clearly fell short of my expectations. Though, the camera lens is wide enough to accommodate natural landscapes and large groups of people.

There’s also a 13MP primary camera on the back which takes fairly good shots. Images come out clean and detailed, though nothing outstanding. It does struggle in low-light conditions as colours appear a tad washed out.

Pros:

  • Great build quality
  • 64GB onboard storage
  • Solid overall performance
  • Super-responsive fingerprint scanner

Cons:

  • No Android Marshmallow
  • Unoriginal design
  • No NFC
  • Price

Wrap-Up

Despite its demeanor being heavily inspired by the iPhone, the Oppo F1 is a good smartphone across the board. It comes with a vibrant full-HD 5.5-inch AMOLED screen, extremely responsive fingerprint scanner, awesome battery life, decent camera performance along with a whopping 64GB of onboard storage.

[ps_prices] Though it still lacks the right mix of performance and value. Priced at Rs. 26,900, it’s going to be a tough sell for the Indian market. And considering the plethora of solid mid-range performers such as the OnePlus 3 or the Moto X Style and other budget offerings packed with almost the same hardware, it’ll be hard for the Oppo F1 Plus to attract Indian buyers.

About the author

Abhinav Mishra

Abhinav is technology enthusiast who loves gaming and collecting old-school gadgets. He is awestruck by the amazing impact technology has on our daily lives. At PCT, he is the go-to man for anything gaming or related to smartphones. You can usually find him on PSN blabbering about his MKX skills.

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