Chinese handsets maker, Oppo, which is quite famous with its good quality cameras on its smartphones has expanded its portfolio of smartphones with the introduction of Oppo F1 in India at a mega event in Mumbai two days ago. Of late, Oppo is getting good traction in Indian and other global markets and want to take their success story to another level by bringing in F series in their arsenal, which is claimed to be photographoc centric phones.
Oppo has been paying lot of attention to mobile photography. To capture amazing selfies, Oppo invented world’s first rotating camera on its N series, namely the N1 and the N3. Oppo also created the first Ultra HD feature capable of shooting 50 MP photos in 2014,and later the first Screen Flash feature in early 2015, which have been incorporated in F1 also
The USP of Oppo F1 is its camera capabilites and this phone is being touted as Selfie Expert. Whether this phone can really fulfill all of yours selfie needs and beat the competition with this feature alone? We shall focuss the discusion much on the camera features and tried to find out the reasons for its claim during our short time spent with this phone at the launch event in Mumbai.
Design
The Oppo F1 is encased in metal and on the back it has brushed metal design, which looks quite impressive. The phone will not slip from your hand. The front of the phone has different feel and look. The front of this phone is in white color and looks more glassy type. The slim slot and power rocker is on the top of the right side. Volume rockers have been given on the left at the top.
This phone features a 5-inch display with 2.5D Gorilla Glass 4 protection and this is quite impressive move by Oppo to put Gorrilla Glass 4 for protection at this price range. This phone has rounded edges on the corner and has slim profile. It is quite light to carry and looks quite decent in your hand.
Camera
The USP of F1 is its front camera for clicking beautiful selfies even in low light conditions. Touted as the “Selfie Expert”, the F1 comes with an 8 MP front-facing camera with wide f/2.0 aperture lens for generating brighter photos and a 1/4-inch sensor. This camera comes with many modes such as beauty mode, voice-controlled selfie etc. But what we liked the most was palm capture feature. You can click an image by opening your palm in front of the camera and this feature has been demonstrated in the video appended below.
The other feature of front camera is that it incorporates Oppo’s Pure Image 2.0+ photography platform, Beautify 3.0 feature and Screen Flash, which converts the whole display into a camera flash for snapping selfies in low-light conditions.
Oppo has claimed in the presentation that their F1 can capture images 30 percent clearer because of its 1/4 inch sensor than a standard 5 MP camera and 44 per cent brighter because of its f/2.0 lens. We tested the front camera in the demo zone at the launch event and found that the selfie clicked appeared to be quite bright and came with good details and sharpness. However, we could not click the selfies in low-light conditions and shall have to reserver our judgement of its touted features. For this, we shall have to test the camera in details. But, going by the record of Oppo, the front camera appears to be quite impressive.
The rear camera of F1 also features a 13 MP rear camera with an ISOCELL sensor from Samsung. This camera has features of phase detection autofocus (PDAF) with a focus time of just 0.1s, and very useful anti-shake optimization feature. Infact, the camera of this phone is same which was provided on Oppo R7, which was very good and Oppo has further tweaked its software and hardware to make it more impressive. This camera comes with many filters such as Ultra Hd, Double Exposure Super Gif etc. We clicked some images in normal mode and by using Ultra HD filter, which were looking good in the phone.
Display & Other Hardware Details
The F1 has a reasonably well 5-inch HD display with resolution of 720×1280 pixels, which produces bright colours and also offers great viewing angles. This phone is packed with powerful hardware for mid-segmented device. This phone is powered by an octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 616 SoC, Adreno 405 GPU paires with 3GB LPDDR3 RAM. It has internals storage of 16GB, which can be expanded upto 128GB via microSD card. This phone gets its juice from 2500mAh battery, which we think should have been 3000mAh onwards as per the currrent trend.
This is Dual-SIM phone and runs on Color OS 2.1 of Oppo based on Android 5.1. The Color OS of Oppo is very simple and quite easy to operate unlike other Users Interface of other Chinese companies, which are quite complicated and take hell of a time to understand. This phone also supports 4G VoLTE and is available in golden/rose gold colors at Rs. 15,990. The high speced F1 Plus with 5.5 Full HD Display, 4GB RAM and more camera enhancements will be introduced by the company in the month of April at a price of Rs. 26,990.
Our View
During the brief time spent with Oppo F1, we have observed that it has sturdy and good build quality. This light weight device promises to deliver both on front and rear camera to the touted features and that can be a big factor in driving its sales. But the final verdict can be given when we review the phone in depth. The Oppo F1 will face stiff competition from Honor 5X which was also launched on same day at Rs. 12,999. Honor 5X comes with 5.5 inch full HD display and also incorporates Fingerprint scanner.
