The competition in the mid-range smartphone segment is fierce. There are plenty of low-budget phones out there, sporting high-end hardware, including octa-core processors, 4GB of RAM, full HD screen and bigger batteries. To top it all, many of them have attractive designs as well. However, most companies don’t focus much on the software side of things. As a result, their mid-range offerings fall short of capturing the true essence of a premium smartphone. Well, that’s not the case with the new Oppo F1 Plus. Priced competitively under Rs. 27,000*, the phone features both, an elegant design and the latest hardware, all of which is complimented by Oppo’s very own ColourOS UI. For us, it completes the premium smartphone experience. Now let’s find out if it also performs like a premium smartphone.
Design and Build
The design of Oppo F1 Plus features the same elements you’d usually find on most high-end flagship phones today. For starters, it has an all-metal build, which is available in two elegant colours, Gold and Rose Gold. The unit we used was the Gold variant. The finish on the back panel is not very reflective, but under the influence of indoor lighting, it gives a subtle impression of its Rose Gold counterpart. Adding to that, the metal frame features chamfered edges that shine differently under all kinds of lighting. At the front, you have the Corning Gorilla Glass 4, which is pretty tough, but also a major finger print magnet.
Oppo certainly gets more points for making the F1 Plus portable, considering the screen size. We’re astounded by the phone’s 6.6mm slimness. Adding to that, it weighs just 145g and the non-existent bezels make the Oppo F1 Plus quite handy. We found it easy to reach far corners when using the phone in one hand. The only issue is with the back panel, which slips if you’re not careful.
Overall, the design is very subtle. At the back, you have the Oppo logo in the centre and the strips at the top and bottom. The camera lens protrudes a little. Underneath the screen, you have the home button / finger print scanner. Placed around it are the two capacitive buttons.
The Volume and Power / Standby buttons are all easy to reach when holding the phone in one hand. The volume buttons are placed too close to each other and you might find yourself pressing the wrong button once in a while. The speaker grill, headphone jack and the USB port are all placed at the bottom. You will also see the two screws that hold the entire construction together.
Features
The Oppo F1 Plus comes with a MediaTek P10 (MT6735) processor equipped with eight cores and clocked at 2.0 GHz. It falls under the mid-range category, but carries some high-end features. For starters, it comes with a Mali-T860 GPU, which is known to deliver smooth performance with high-end games. The added advantage here it that the device also ships with 4GB of RAM. It’s plenty of performance, for anybody who likes to push their phone to the limit. The F1 Plus carries two SIM card slots, both of which support 4G. If you think the internal storage is not enough, then you can use the second SIM card slot as a microSD card slot and expand storage to 128GB. We think it’s a little disappointing that the F1 Plus doesn’t support Wi-Fi 802.11ac. It’s found on most high-end smartphones today. Other wireless connectivity options include Bluetooth 4.0, but NFC is not present. Out-of-the-box, the F1 Plus comes with the Android 5.1 (Lollipop) operating system. We’re not very happy about the older Android OS, as most of its competition is running Marshmallow (6.0), or will be getting the update soon. Oppo hasn’t confirmed anything about an update either, but we hope it is coming. That said, we really like Oppo’s proprietary ColorOS UI. Even though it is heavily customized, it manages to offer a smooth experience. Every single aspect of the UI looks consistently refreshing and intuitive. You might notice a few comparisons to iOS, but that doesn’t necessarily mean a bad thing. To our benefit, Oppo has also kept the bloatware to bare minimum, only including tools like Security centre, Compass, Music and Video player, all of which are handy.
The ColorOS also comes with some unique features. One of which we really liked is the Lockscreen Magazine. You can subscribe to a variety of magazine genres of your preference and the software will set up related wallpapers from those genres. For example, if you select Sports, the app presents you with photos of popular sportsmen around the world. It’s a nice feature because you get to see a different lockscreen every time. The UI also offers a set of gesture and motion controls that make life a little easy. Some of these include simple features like waking up the screen with a double tap or a Swiping a ‘V’ on the lockscreen to switch on the Flashlight. There are other gestures included as well and you can even customize some to your preference. Oppo has also included single-handed operation. You can use it by swiping the screen upwards from any of the bottom corners and the OS visually shrinks in size, for better one hand operation.
The fingerprint sensor at the front also gets a few tricks. Apart from just unlocking your device, you can also encrypt your apps and files, so no one else has access to them. You can also record up to five fingerprints to the device.
Oppo is claiming the F1 Plus to be the ultimate selfie smartphone and with a 16MP front-facing camera, they aren’t wrong about it. It’s one of the best in its class. The rear camera is a 13MP one. Both cameras support full HD video recording. The camera app has a striking resemblance to some other devices, and it’s very easy to use. You can simply switch through the different video and photo modes by swiping left and right on the screen. Oppo has included about six of them that consist of, Photo, Video, Timelapse and others.
There are other photo modes included as well. The rear camera gets an Expert mode, which allows you to adjust intricate details such as Shutter speed, ISO, Focus and Exposure compensation. The front camera doesn’t have this. Here, more emphasis is put on the Beauty mode, to help you click perfect selfies. There is no flash available at the front, but Oppo has included a screen flash feature to compensate for it.
The 5.5-inch AMOLED screen offers full HD resolution (1920 x 1080). It has a very good pixel density of 480ppi. So be it pictures or text, imagery looks sharp. One interesting feature is the Eye Protection mode, which adjusts the screen tone and whites shades to present a subtle screen at night. It also works pretty well while reading articles and we quite liked it. Underneath the hood, the F1 Plus comes with a 2,850 mAh battery, which doesn’t seem like a lot. Depending on the usage, we doubt it will last an entire day on a single charge. And the fact that you cannot remove the battery means that you cannot carry a spare battery as well. People who travel a lot might not really find the battery sufficient.
On the flipside, the F1 Plus supports Oppo’s proprietary fast charging technology (VOOC Flash Charge), which promises to charge up to 75 per cent of the battery, in just 30 minutes. That means you can charge the phone completely in one hour, which sounds pretty impressive. There’s also a Battery Saver mode included for urgent situations.
Performance
The Oppo F1 Plus offers a smooth performance with almost everything you’d run on a daily basis. The interface, even though heavy, is very smooth. The fingerprint scanner is exceptionally quick and hardly takes half a second to unlock the device. Opening multiple apps at the same time wasn’t a very big problem either. The interface shows the amount of free RAM you have at all times, so you can optimise the performance accordingly. Most times, we had at least 1GB of RAM free and the performance was pretty good. Only when we went a little below that number, did we face slight lag when switching between apps. The problem was an occasional one though.
With mediocre games like Sniper 3D and Real Boxing, the F1 Plus delivered a good performance. The phone didn’t heat up, even after 30 minutes of gaming. We experienced similar temperatures, when playing full HD and 4K videos. Unfortunately it wasn’t the same when we decided to play heavy games like Asphalt 8: Airborne and Real Racing 3. The temperature went up by quite a bit, but it was still good to see games running smoothly. We didn’t have any problems with Real Racing 3, but Asphalt 8: Airborne displayed noticeable stutter. We ran a couple of benchmarks on the device and got the following results. Both AnTuTu and Androbench scores are comparable to a smartphone running a higher-end MediaTek X10 processor with the same amount of RAM to spare. Surprisingly in AnTuTu, the scores were better. The phone didn’t heat up even while running game benchmarks. In fact, 3D Mark claimed the device to be one of the best for gaming. We agree with the benchmark scores too.
The 16MP front camera is one of the best in its category. It manages to the click sharp photos everywhere. Auto-White balance also copes very well with tricky lighting situations. The results are vibrant selfies with natural looking skin tones. Setting the Beauty mode to mid-levels, makes a significant difference that you’d appreciate, but bumping it all the way up, just makes the photos look unnatural. Images are presented with extreme detail, all thanks to the quick and accurate focusing. The only area where the F1 Plus doesn’t perform, is with scenarios where there’s a bright light in the background. Here, the images look under exposed. The problem though, could be tackled with manual focusing that’s present on the front camera.
The rear camera takes great images too. It captures colours in their natural tone, while making them look clear and vibrant. The images are gorgeously detailed. With macro and portrait images, the camera manages to blur the background really well. The focusing is quick, but it was a little difficult to get it right with macro photography. With landscape and portrait images, we didn’t really face any problems. The full HD screen offers a decent movie watching experience. It’s bright and vibrant, but isn’t accurate with some colours, making them look gaudy. Viewing angles suffer from a slight greenish tinge when you tilt the screen in any angle. It’s more obvious when you have a white blank screen. It’s difficult to spot other times. So it doesn’t really hamper the media experience. The speakers are reasonably loud for playing games and music indoors. We suggest headphones for a much immersive experience though.
Verdict
The Oppo F1 Plus lives up to almost all our expectations. It feels like a premium smartphone and we think the ColorOS UI has a lot to do with it. The front camera delivers astounding results and the camera app makes it a lot easier to use. We would also recommend the phone, purely for its gaming experience. However, low battery is an issue. It’s small and doesn’t last very long if you plan on exploiting the processor and the 4GB of RAM. If you don’t mind charging your phone every now and then or carrying an extra power bank, then the Oppo F1 Plus is a great option for Rs. 27,000*.
