Oppo is a part of the Chinese BBK Electronics firm who also own the Vivo, OnePlus, Realme and iQOO brands. Until recently, we in the west didn't routinely see many of these phones but we're beginning to now more widely. Not being on the Oppo loan-circuit for reviewers we at Phones Show Chat often have to 'bide our time this end - and end up having to buy our phones to review. This time, acquired from one of our MeWe Group members. They're a great crowd and if you're not already a member, do come and join us. Links to all our Groups in MeWe and audio Podcasts can be found on my website at tedsalmon.com.
The back is Gorilla Glass 5, so you really need that TPU on, as it'll drop and break. However, for those brave enough, the glass really is quite 'grippy' and not like a slippery bar of soap when in use - obviously depending on the amount of natural moisture in your skin. The back curves round slightly on all four edges to meet the aluminium frame and the front-side edges do similar, to a lesser degree. The power button is on the right (with a neat green accent) and volume buttons, left. They all feel like they're well made and not 'floppy' in any way.
The front of the phone is all-but flat and has the look and feel of a Samsung phone these days, having moved away from outrageous-looking slopes and edges. Up the top there's the second speaker between the frame and Gorilla Glass 5, doubling up as the phone's earpiece speaker in the usual way these days. The bezels around the front panel are very small, slightly more on the chin than forehead - but there's not much in it - and what there is around the sides is hardly visible.
I did think that the phone could well be too big for my liking, but even though it's a shade taller than my Motorola Edge+ (2020) and a tad wider, it doesn't feel as big somehow. I think it's because it's thinner and lighter at 8.3mm and 193g. The whole package in the hand just seems more manageable. Time will tell how I find it for one-handed use, but it seems deceptive anyway. It almost feels strangely rugged too though, supported by the psychology of knowing that it has IP6/8 certification no doubt. Don't get me wrong, this is glass and not a Nokia XR20 you can play football with - all these observations are just look'n'feel ones.
The refresh rate can be switched between 120Hz and 60Hz - then confusingly claims that it's 'dynamic' so even if you choose one or the other it does what it thinks is best anyway! I can't tell the difference - no, really. I'd save battery every time. If you want to tinker with the colours, there's a choice between Vivid (enhanced), Natural (soft) and Pro (cinematic or brilliant). Then there's a warm/cool slider for white balance. There's even a bunch of filter-settings for people who have colour-blindness - and a testing routine for everyone to do if they want to, ending up with a 'personalised' colour setting system-wide. I went through this, then compared the resulting colours with default and there is a difference, though I actually preferred the default - so not sure what use this is really! Maybe more so for people who do have eyesight issues. Then there's an auto-adjustment which will tweak things based on ambient lighting and the Ultra Vision Engine which enhances video and brightens HDR. Finally, there's a switch between 1440p, 1080p and Auto for the user to select. Again, I can't tell the difference, so I put it on Auto and let the AI decide!
Continuing with the screen, it is also supplied with Samsung-style Edge Lighting, but it's much more basic with a slim choice of colours and one pulsing array - so take it or leave it! You can hide the Status Bar under a black band on a per-app basis, but not, it seems, globally. There's also an Always on Display, which is great, but like the Edge Lighting, not a patch on what Samsung offer. There are a few choices, animations, clocks, text-input for message and so on, but nothing like the same rich control from Sammy! The AoD is also not controllable for brightness so sometimes I'm sat in a room with subdued lighting and I can't see it. Move it under a lamp and it brightens up. Algorithms need fixing I guess - as well as possibly the auto-brightness which many phones outside of Pixel and AndroidOne with Android 12 onboard just now seem to be struggling with.
Finding out where to go to check which version you have leads me into the right fiddle of ColorOS Settings again however! The phone has v12 and I await v12.1 as it has some improvements to the PC Connect experience, which I'll come to. For now, it's safe to say that Settings is just a jumbled mess compared to, for example, the Vanilla experience of AndroidOne phones. What makes it worse is that the search engine supplied, is often caught out on simple strings of text to find anything. So the user is up against an illogical folder-structure to begin with, then no quick way to get where they need to be! As always with these complaints, they will be squashed by users, not reviewers, keeping phones and learning where stuff is over time, of course. They are not alone. There are some manufacturers of phones who stick to the baseline (Sony, Motorola, Nokia spring to mind) but many others seem to want to rearrange everything to (presumably) stamp their mark on the way they do it! Confusing for me, but others might argue that this is because there is so much stuff added to the baseline for a much richer experience. The good news for Samsung users is that Oppo have emulated OneUI to some degree here with pull-down headers in Settings, revealing the search engine (for what it is worth) and hints as to what other places you might have been looking for at the foot.
Before I do that, I will first counter my previous argument about ColorOS not being very Vanilla by pointing out some of the ways that, actually, it is! The Google Feed is off to the left of the main homescreen (good) but for those looking for a choice, it's not removable (bad). Gesture Navigation, although it's Oppo's own (with fancy animations) it works pretty much like Google's own with similar options and methods. The screen timeout is the 'standard' up-to 30mins, unlike many others capping it at 10. The Widgets picker is vertical scroll, though getting there is different and more like iOS as you put the homescreen into suspension and work with 'plus' and 'done' buttons. The App Drawer is vertical-scroll but users also have the choice to 'do an iOS' and splatter everything directly onto homescreens. There are settings to pull-up from anywhere to get the App Drawer and pull-down from anywhere for Notifications area.
The Notification drop-down gives us clock and date with a brightness slider (and auto-switch) then meandering away from Vanilla, round buttons instead of the larger ones introduced with Android 12 by Google. They're great though and in many ways better. You can certainly get more on the screen, with oodles of options as to which ones you want on display on initial pull-down. All sorts of controls, modes and switches - very Samsung. The whole colour-theming thing has made it across with Android 12 and icons and graphics can be influenced if you wish by settings for the display in the same way as a Pixel, with a growing number of options. I noticed that this morning there was an update to the palette.
There's a Personalisation area in Settings which groups together (Moto style) various tweaks (which you can get to via other routes too, making it even more confusing), double-tap to wake/lock, lift to wake, various animation controls for navigation, controls for the Recents panel including a snapshot display of icons below the carousel, split-screen options and even a RAM readout at the foot so you know how much of it is being used, then how much you save by closing everything down!
There are battery controls, power saving utilities, clean-up options, useful analysis of power consumption and projection, floating windows to resize and move around p-in-p style, a quick-launch function which gives you a choice of long-press, quick-launch assignable apps via the fingerprint scanner, and even a hide-apps area where a PIN is chosen, app hidden from the drawer, then only appears when the PIN is typed into the phone-pad dialler with a # at each end of it! You get the idea! You'd need a good long time to get stuck into all these features and learn how to use them productively (after you have located them of course)! It's stuffed full of features, loads to play with!
I'm not much of a gamer, but I did run a couple of car-racing games and it all looks silky smooth to me, not a jutter. There is a Games app from Oppo pre-installed which collects all your installed games into one shortcut location and provides a Gaming Tools side-panel pull-in to control Notifications, performance settings, power, temperature (for which the unit has vapour-chamber cooling) and time spent on session etc. for heavy gamers who want to focus on their important titles!
Then there's this thing called O Relax! This is a bunch of audio tools to play all sorts of soothing sounds as background, like rain or waves on a seashore, or thunder or wind - and 'profiles' can be built up and overlaid on each other, so you can have heavy rain at the beach or a crackling campfire with the sound of bats flapping around. It all sounds pretty trivial and a bit of a novelty but actually, I've used it a few times and it's really quite addictive to have going in the background. There was a really sunny hot day last week and I put on the sounds of rain on a roof which made me feel not so hot of course! Jolly psychology at work, but it's all good fun. So, as usual, some stuff that some would call bloat, others might find useful.
There's an always-on (with speakers) Dolby Atmos with 4 basic switches in the usual way, Music, Movie, Gaming, ‘Smart’. There are no claims for 24/32-bit audio output here. Stereo is balanced well between the speakers from (up to about) 18” away and separation is actually quite good at that distance (testing with YouTube Dolby-test videos), but you are up against the output quality (as above) so OK for casual listening but this is no audiophile’s phone.
This brings us to the whole charging issue and SuperVOOC Oppo charging. If you use the 65W charger that comes in the box and the supplied matching cable, you can indeed get blazingly fast charging. I sat and watched it flying up for half an hour from completely flat to full (and 40% in 10mins). Very impressive - and opinion is still divided as to whether or not that's particularly good for the battery. I usually, for the record, trickle-charge overnight. If you don't use the Oppo-supplied gear, it seems to default right back down to 10W, though I have has some middle-ground results using a 100W charger and better quality cable. So your mileage may vary.
I was delighted to find that the USB-C socket, armed with an HDMI adapter can send out data to my TV and a connected monitor, as well as having a 'PC Connect' application for Windows PCs which appears to be a work-in-progress. HDMI-Out means that the user can download media from whatever source they like and cable it out to a TV without relying on screen-shares or mirroring options, which often end up with latency issues. Cable is still the robust method in this house! It's no DeX or Ready For, however. You get a basic output which echoes what's on the screen and you can't turn the screen off while you're doing it. You can, however, charge it simultaneously whether by a forked, powered HDMI-USB-C adapter or by plonking it on a Qi Charger. Works perfectly well.
Testing connectivity here I am unable to do so for 5G - as we don't have any! The 4G cellular connection seems solid with good signal pickup, strong connection and maintenance using VodafoneUK. I hear the other party well on phone calls, and they, me. Data is similar when used - it seems to hang onto that well and provides a stream as dictated by the operator and the same for various WiFi/MiFi routers I have been able to test with. NFC is working fine with connection to other equipment, GPS locks onto locations well and Bluetooth seems reliable and fairly long-reaching. I really don't have any complaints about connectivity. Seems to do a good, steady and reliable job.
Other than that, we have a pair of 50MP main cameras, one f1.8 with OIS and the other, f2.2 wide-angle without, though it does a pretty good close-focus job. The third is a 13MP f2.4 which is also a 2x optical (and 5x Hybrid) zoom and fourth, that microscope. Round the front is a 32MP f2.4 Selfie Camera. The Oppo Camera App offers all sorts of modes and functions as you'd expect, from text scanner to dual-view video, from time-lapse to panoramic and much more. Making the most of darkness it seems to do a reasonable job though I've not had to hold a phone still for that long before to get it - so long that it ends up blurry. With a tripod it'll be fine. Portrait seems to do a decent job with levels of blur too - but I'm going to hand over to those nice people at GSMArena now for their deep-dive into the photography capabilities of this phone as they can test it more clinically than I - and conclude that it has outstanding photo and video quality. Do support them by clicking through.
There are great charging options, more than adequate battery and what seems like a more than capable camera setup with that unique-to-phone microscope option for plenty of fun. The speakers are full stereo and even though not up there with the leaders, are not far off pleasing all-but the very picky with sound via Bluetooth excellent, depending on connected equipment.
This year's replacement does away with that microscope camera so if you want one of these, grab it while you can - in the sure knowledge that Oppo have promised to update the phone for three OS versions and four years of security. A sound investment until 2025, even for second-hand buying, now. I started my thoughts here with the software and the size. As I said above, the size is surprisingly manageable and as for the software, of course, if this was my primary phone I could get used to it and find my way around the settings in time. Highly recommended for those prepared to do some stuff the Oppo way!
