Oppo A37 Review- Decent Mid-Range Phone

Oppo of China is known for making good phones with focus on cameras. This is the primary reason that their F1 and F1 Plus which are selfie-focussed phones have been receiving good traction in the Indian market. Oppo has now introduced A37 mid-range phone with decent features, pleasing design and is targetted for those customers who are looking for a 5 inch device with good cameras but cannot afford expensive phones. Let us see whether Oppo’s latest offering justifies the price of Rs. 11,990.

What are its cool features : Oppo A37 is good looking phone drapped in very refined plastic. The back panel has metallic finish which gives very elegant and expensive look.The A37’s inside magnesium-aluminium alloy chassis undergoes a gauntlet of polishing procedures, leaving a flawlessly smooth rear surface that’s expertly calibrated for a comfortable, stable grip. The rear camera is fixed on the left hand side and their is logo of the brand almost on the top.

Power button and sim slot is provided on the right hand side. The SIM slot has three trays – two for SIMs and one for microSD card for extension of internal storage. On the left hand side, their is volume rocker and earphone jack is on the top of the device. At the bottom of the phone is slot for charging and two grills for speaker for uniformity but their is only one speaker fitted in the device.

This phone is those who want to take maximum advantage of its camera capabilites. Like Oppo F1 and F1 Plus, Oppo A37 also incorporates various embellishment features to enhance the quality of images and videos taken with it – be it selfies or normal snaps in the daylight or in fading or negligible light.

It is equipped with 5 MP front camera with a 1/4-inch sensor and OmniBSI+ (backside illumination). Its large 1.4um pixels is the biggest available in this price segment and is really capable of increasing light sensitivity and reduce noise for taking good selfies in low-light also. This phone sports an 8 MP rear camera with LED flash, BSI sensor, f/2.2 aperture. The camera comes with various filters, patterns and Beauty, Panorama modes etc. to click pefect and high-quality images as per your taste. The Beauty mode has 7 different levels of intelligent beautification and this will be quite useful for snapping beautiful selfies.

We have clicked few images with the rear camera in daylight and in the night with negligble light and lo and behold, the end results are quite convincing. You can see for yourself the below images, whihc have good details and color reproduction is on spot:

Images taken in the night:

This phone is capable of full-HD (1080p) video recording with time lapse feature.

This phone supports 4G LTE Indian bands and also provide speeds of up to 150 Mbps for downloads. The call quality of this phone is good even in those areas where signal quality is an issue. It also offers other standard connectivity options of Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPS/ A-GPS, and Micro-USB etc.

This phone gets its energy from 2630mAh non-removable battery which keeps the phone alive for approximately 8 hours depending upon your usage. However, their is no provision for fast charging on the battery.

What is not cool about this phone

This phone comes with 5-inch HD display with resolution of 720×1280 pixels with Corning Gorilla Glass 4 protection to save the screen from scratches. The display is of medicore quality and its sunlight visibilty is not upto the mark. Still, it is very good for indoor reading, watching media content and for gaming.

This phone runs on 1.2GHz quad-core Snapdragon 410 (MSM8916) processsor combined with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of storage, which can be further extended upto 128GB. Nowadays the phones in this segment come with higher rating processor and 3GB RAM. This is let down in this pone and still the phone performs well with its processor and RAM capacity. We did not see any lag while using different apps and switching betwee the apps was fine. The only problem occurs when you watch the highly intensive games continuously on this handset. The phone gets heated a little bit and their are occasional stutters also. But these are minor nagging issues which will not mar your experience of using this phone.

This phone runs on Color OS 3.0 of Oppo based on Android 5.1 Lollipop OS which is again let down as most of the phones in this segment are now running Marshmallow OS. This phone also does not have Fingerprint sensor which again has now become a standard feature of Chinese phones in mid-range segment.

To sum up, if you are looking for a 5 inch device with light weight, good and sleek design, having good camera capabilites then you can certainly have a serious look at this phone. Its other hardware features are good at this price-point. No device in the world is perfect and same is the case with Oppo A37. The company has to compromise on various features to keep it below Rs. 12,000 segment.

This phone will face tough competiton from Honor 5C (Rs. 10,999), LeEco Le 2 (Rs. 11,999). The saving grace for the A37 is that it is easily available via offline channels whereas the competitive models listed by me, are available via e-commerce platforms only and the majoirty of buyers in this segment are still not comfortable with online purchase.