PROS
- Slim, part-metal frame
- Decent camera
- Very good for selfies
- Good CPU/RAM combo
CONS
- ColorOS interface looks dated
- Screen quality isn't great
KEY FEATURES
- 13-megapixel rear camera with flash
- 16GB storage
- 3GB RAM
- Snapdragon 616 CPU
- 5-inch 720p LCD screen
- Manufacturer: OPPO Digital
- Review Price: £169.00
WHAT IS THE OPPO F1?
The Oppo F1 is an affordable phone that does its best to keep its low cost under wraps. It’s not all-plastic, and doesn’t have the chunk factor of the Moto G 3rd gen.
It costs £169, making it a similar price to the 2GB RAM version of that phone at the time of writing.
Aside from a few little quibbles about the screen and the rear camera, it’s a good value phone if you don’t want to stretch to the price and buying inconvenience of the OnePlus X.
OPPO F1 – DESIGN
The Oppo F1 is a phone with quite a lot of metal on its body. You’ll see this sort of construction in cheaper Huawei phones, but not unusually those from companies like Samsung or Sony. Take the Samsung Galaxy J3 as an example: it’s almost all-plastic.
Here much of the rear is real metal, aluminium. It has a golden colour to it (pink also available), but not the sort of bling-soaked shade that’ll make some of you embarrassed to take the Oppo F1 out of your pocket.
Particularly from the back, the phone looks like it might sell for £200-300, rather than £170. The cool-to-the-touch metal tries to convince your fingers of the same thing too.
Look a little closer and you’ll see how Oppo has pulled off this feat. Only a plain rectangle is aluminium. The sides and the curvy bottom bits on the rear are plastic. This makes the more fiddly parts of the phone easier to produce, and also means Oppo doesn’t have to engineer the phone super-carefully just to ensure it can get a good signal. Wireless transmitters don’t work well through a metal shell.
You can tell the edges are plastic from the feel, but after a few weeks of use, it’s not actually the plastic that I’ve managed to damage, but the screen. This is down to some typical misjudgement of which pocket to put the phone in, as the Oppo F1 has about as good screen protection as you could hope for, using a sheet of Gorilla Glass 4 with ‘2.5D’ edges that curve around at the sides.
In-hand the Oppo F1 is a bit of a budget delight. It may look like a rectangular brick, similar to a Sony Xperia phone, but the metal, plastic and glass layers in each side are all carefully curved or bevelled. The edges aren’t 100 per cent smooth thanks to all those seams, but they are rounded off in a manner that feels good.
At 7.3mm thick the Oppo F1 is very slim too. It’s a generally very successful design. The one bit I might change if given the chance would be to add light-up soft keys. As-is, you get subtle silver icons showing where each key sits, but you won’t see them in a pitch black room. It’s no major issue: I find all three buttons easy to reach.
The phone has 16GB storage, and you can add to it with a microSD card. Another Oppo F1 feature you don’t often see in such affordable phones is how the tray works. This is a unibody-style phone, one with a metal tray that holds the SIM and SD cards. If you don’t need extra storage you can even use the memory card slot as a second nano SIM socket.
You don’t get much more ‘Oppo’ than offering unusual features like this.
OPPO F1 – SCREEN
The Oppo F1 display is much more conventional. Like the Moto G 3rd gen, it is a 5-inch 720p LCD screen. This size and resolution has become the classic entry-level standard.
It’s sharp enough to keep most people happy, and colours look reasonably natural. Using the phone for a few weeks at a time, I was mostly perfectly happy with the experience.
The one niggle is that the auto brightness setting isn’t as good as the one of some rivals. It can leave the Oppo F1 looking that bit too dim or bright, acting as if every little change was costing it some of its pocket money.
The display can go bright out to deal with sunny days reasonably well, though.
Comparing the Oppo F1 to other recent phones, it appears to have an ever-so-slightly dated screen architecture. The display looks a tiny bit recessed, something that also results in brightness loss at an angle. Aside from the auto brightness issues, which, bizarrely, seem to get better the more the phone is used, this is a screen few will take issue with.
– Software and Performance:
OPPO F1 – SOFTWARE
The Oppo F1 software is a little more contentious than its design. It runs Android 5.1.1 and ColorOS 2.1.0. This is Oppo’s own stab at an Android interface, and not the latest version. Oppo has already released version 3.0.
Its major change is that you don’t get a separate apps menu. Instead, everything ends up on your homescreens. It’s a bit like iOS in that respect.
This makes it a bit less easy to take a super-lazy approach to your phone without ruining it. To keep it in tip-top shape you’ll want to make folders for your apps, unless you’re not really a big apps user.
This isn’t about slowing the Oppo F1 down, it’s about knowing where your stuff is.
This is one of the custom themes in action
Some of you may be fine with this, but I find I miss Android’s apps menu, especially now the default Android look features a super-quick vertical-scrolling apps view. ColourOS 2.1.0’s default look is a bit dated too. The standard icons are very sharp, more like that Google used to used back in the old Android 4.4 days.
There are fewer flat-out weird-looking bits than in some of Huawei’s EmotionUI versions, which otherwise use a similar layout. But switching to the Google Now Launcher interface feels like a big improvement. Anyone can do this, of course. You just download the Now launcher app.
Neat features of ColorOS include being able to give the Oppo F1 a facelift using themes. Most of these make it look like a cartoon has exploded on your phone, but there are a few that just soften out the stiff look of ColorOS 2.1.0’s icons a bit too.
My top suggestion would be to revert to the Now Launcher. With it this is one of the most pleasant affordable phones I’ve used in some time.
OPPO F1 – PERFORMANCE
Good general performance is at the root of this. The Oppo F1 has an excellent spec for a phone of its price and screen size.
It uses the Snapdragon 616 CPU, a recent and capable mid-range (or upper-budget) processor from Qualcomm that offers almost double the performance of the Snapdragon 410 used in the Moto G 3rd gen, judging by some benchmarks.
A Geekbench score of 3170 is excellent at the price. This is a chipset designed to cope with the strain of a 1080p display phone, not a 720p one. It scores 31071 points in AnTuTu, a lot more than the Moto G 3rd gen, which scores around 23000-24000.
The Oppo F1 also has 3GB RAM, which is 1GB more than you normally get at this price. It’s the equivalent of buying insurance for future performance, although whether the phone will get an update to Android 6.0 and ColorOS 3 remains to be seen.
Right now, though, performance is very good. Whether you use ColorOS or Google Now, the
OS feels quick and there’s much less of the app load time tax you’ll see in the similarly-
priced Samsung Galaxy J3.
3D games run very well too, even though the GPU part is less impressive than the CPU side
here. The price of using a fairly powerful CPU is that it can get a little warm under pressure. I’ve
not felt it getting hot, but when playing Minecraft the upper part of the F1’s back gets a little warm where the Galaxy J3 stays cooler.
A little bit of heating-up is common to most 6-series Snapdragon CPUs. This is more an observation than highlighting a significant problem.
– Camera, Battery Life and Verdict:
OPPO F1 – CAMERA
The Oppo F1 has a 13-megapixel rear camera with a flash. As with the screen, it roughly matches the best around on specs. However, where the Moto G uses a Sony sensor, this camera has a Samsung ISOCELL one and an f/2.2 lens.
It’s less of a known entity.
The results are pretty good, while not blowing the best at the price out of the water. It’s fairly fast to shoot, there’s plenty of detail on show, colour is fairly good, and only desaturates slightly with indoors lighting. Greens can look slightly overbaked, but not to the extent they’re flat-out unnatural.
What the Oppo F1 misses is slightly smarter processing to bring out the native dynamic range of the sensor. There’s no Auto HDR mode here, and fiddling with the results in Photoshop post-shoot, I found that in some shots with dark looking foregrounds have loads of very low-noise detail just waiting to be unlocked in their shadowy bits. It's a pity the F1 doesn't do it for you.
While the Oppo F1 doesn’t make any ridiculous moves with metering, you do sometimes end up with overexposed areas where a lesser exposure and some dynamic range processing could come up with better results. Of course, we’re talking about a £170 phone, not a £500 one, and I’m very happy with what the phone produces at the price.
There is an HDR mode too, but it slows the camera down to a pace of roughly a photo every two seconds. Night shots are much better than those of the rival Samsung Galaxy J3, but as the camera is non-stabilised you’re simply not going to be beautiful shots without using a tripod, or something to rest the phone against.
The Oppo F1 does give you the chops for this more advanced kind of photography, though, because it features the sort of mode selection you normally only see in a much more expensive phone. There’s a ‘slow shutter’ mode for long exposures, an Ultra HD mode that produces massive files (this can improve noise a bit), an Expert mode with manual focusing and even a RAW mode.
When was the last time you saw a sub-£200 phone with RAW capture?
These modes also let you capture time lapse and slo-mo video, and shoot panoramas. There’s plenty to fiddle about with.
Here are some photos I took with the Oppo F1:
See what I mean about the greens? They're a little lively. A nice shot in general, though
This is a 13MP camera gets you 13MP of detail in the right conditions
The clouds have flopped over into overexposure, which is a shame
A 5-second Photoshop edit shows how much extra shadow detail you can bring out of shots (left side processed)
Again, here's a pre-post (left) edit comparison
The selfie camera is actually more notable among its peers than the rear one. It has an 8-megapixel sensor, unusually high-res for this sort of price. The lens FOV isn’t super-wide-angle, but it’s just about perfect for taking selfies with just you rather than a whole gang of your friends. Despite having a fairly small 1/4-inch sensor, the results are rather good, and look pretty natural even indoors.
There are better selfie cams out there, but I’ve not used any better at this price.
The Oppo F1 has a 13-megapixel rear camera with a flash. As with the screen, it roughly matches the best around on specs. However, where the Moto G uses a Sony sensor, this camera has a Samsung ISOCELL one and an f/2.2 lens.
It’s less of a known entity.
The results are pretty good, while not blowing the best at the price out of the water. It’s fairly fast to shoot, there’s plenty of detail on show, colour is fairly good, and only desaturates slightly with indoors lighting. Greens can look slightly overbaked, but not to the extent they’re flat-out unnatural.
What the Oppo F1 misses is slightly smarter processing to bring out the native dynamic range of the sensor. There’s no Auto HDR mode here, and fiddling with the results in Photoshop post-shoot, I found that in some shots with dark looking foregrounds have loads of very low-noise detail just waiting to be unlocked in their shadowy bits. It's a pity the F1 doesn't do it for you.
While the Oppo F1 doesn’t make any ridiculous moves with metering, you do sometimes end up with overexposed areas where a lesser exposure and some dynamic range processing could come up with better results. Of course, we’re talking about a £170 phone, not a £500 one, and I’m very happy with what the phone produces at the price.
There is an HDR mode too, but it slows the camera down to a pace of roughly a photo every two seconds. Night shots are much better than those of the rival Samsung Galaxy J3, but as the camera is non-stabilised you’re simply not going to be beautiful shots without using a tripod, or something to rest the phone against.
The Oppo F1 does give you the chops for this more advanced kind of photography, though, because it features the sort of mode selection you normally only see in a much more expensive phone. There’s a ‘slow shutter’ mode for long exposures, an Ultra HD mode that produces massive files (this can improve noise a bit), an Expert mode with manual focusing and even a RAW mode.
When was the last time you saw a sub-£200 phone with RAW capture?
These modes also let you capture time lapse and slo-mo video, and shoot panoramas. There’s plenty to fiddle about with.
Here are some photos I took with the Oppo F1:
See what I mean about the greens? They're a little lively. A nice shot in general, though
This is a 13MP camera gets you 13MP of detail in the right conditions
The clouds have flopped over into overexposure, which is a shame
A 5-second Photoshop edit shows how much extra shadow detail you can bring out of shots (left side processed)
Again, here's a pre-post (left) edit comparison
The selfie camera is actually more notable among its peers than the rear one. It has an 8-megapixel sensor, unusually high-res for this sort of price. The lens FOV isn’t super-wide-angle, but it’s just about perfect for taking selfies with just you rather than a whole gang of your friends. Despite having a fairly small 1/4-inch sensor, the results are rather good, and look pretty natural even indoors.
There are better selfie cams out there, but I’ve not used any better at this price.
OPPO F1 — SPEAKER
The Oppo F1 gets you periphery features of higher-quality than you might initially expect. Its speaker is not too bad either.
It sits on the back of the phone, and at its price is among the louder phone speakers. It’s not reed-thin either. This is the sort of phone speaker I’m after, one that lets me (just about) hear a podcast while the kettle is boiling.
Actual sound quality is not all that remarkable, though. It gets a bit hard-sounding at top volume. This isn’t a beautiful speaker, but it is a useful one.
The Oppo F1 gets you periphery features of higher-quality than you might initially expect. Its speaker is not too bad either.
It sits on the back of the phone, and at its price is among the louder phone speakers. It’s not reed-thin either. This is the sort of phone speaker I’m after, one that lets me (just about) hear a podcast while the kettle is boiling.
Actual sound quality is not all that remarkable, though. It gets a bit hard-sounding at top volume. This isn’t a beautiful speaker, but it is a useful one.
OPPO F1 – BATTERY LIFE
Stamina sits among the better phones at the price too, although as you might expect of a slim device, it’s not remarkable. The Oppo F1 has a 2500mAh battery, just 30mAh more capacious than the Moto G 3rd gen.
An hour of Minecraft takes 20 per cent of the battery off, suggesting you’ll get five hours of reasonably demanding gaming between charges. And it lasts for just under 10 hours of looped MP4 720P-quality video. That’s slightly better than, but ultimately pretty similar to, the Moto G.
The comparison holds in real life too. The Oppo F1 is a phone I’ve found easy to make last a full day. It’s not going to last for two days of active use, but neither will any of the mainstream phones in this class.
Stamina sits among the better phones at the price too, although as you might expect of a slim device, it’s not remarkable. The Oppo F1 has a 2500mAh battery, just 30mAh more capacious than the Moto G 3rd gen.
An hour of Minecraft takes 20 per cent of the battery off, suggesting you’ll get five hours of reasonably demanding gaming between charges. And it lasts for just under 10 hours of looped MP4 720P-quality video. That’s slightly better than, but ultimately pretty similar to, the Moto G.
The comparison holds in real life too. The Oppo F1 is a phone I’ve found easy to make last a full day. It’s not going to last for two days of active use, but neither will any of the mainstream phones in this class.
Should you buy the Oppo F1?
What is the Oppo F1’s competition? It’s phones like the Moto G 3rd gen, the Samsung Galaxy J3, HTC Desire 530 and Sony M4 Aqua.
It’s easy to recommend over the Samsung and HTC. It’s much faster and has a better camera. Only the budget big-hitters offer serious competition. The Moto G has a slightly better screen and the camera is perhaps a bit more consistent.
However, isn’t a slim, metal body worth something? The part of the Oppo F1 you might not like is the ColorOS software. It’s easy to paste over, though, making this an easy phone to recommend if you’re looking for a way to opt out of signing up for a long, expensive contract.
Should you buy the Oppo F1?
What is the Oppo F1’s competition? It’s phones like the Moto G 3rd gen, the Samsung Galaxy J3, HTC Desire 530 and Sony M4 Aqua.
It’s easy to recommend over the Samsung and HTC. It’s much faster and has a better camera. Only the budget big-hitters offer serious competition. The Moto G has a slightly better screen and the camera is perhaps a bit more consistent.
However, isn’t a slim, metal body worth something? The part of the Oppo F1 you might not like is the ColorOS software. It’s easy to paste over, though, making this an easy phone to recommend if you’re looking for a way to opt out of signing up for a long, expensive contract.
VERDICT
A great SIM-free buy affordable phone that could pass for something pricier at a glance.
A great SIM-free buy affordable phone that could pass for something pricier at a glance.
OVERALL SCORE
SCORES IN DETAIL
- Battery Life8
- Calls & Sound8
- Camera8
- Design8
- Performance9
- Screen Quality7
- Software7
- Value8
- Battery Life8
- Calls & Sound8
- Camera8
- Design8
- Performance9
- Screen Quality7
- Software7
- Value8
Thanks for reading.
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