Since its debut in India two years ago, Oppo has got good traction in the Indian markets with its various smartphones. The latest phone launched by Oppo in India are R7 Plus and R7 Lite. We are analysing here R7 Lite which is a mid-segment phone and competes directly with Moto X Play and OnePlus X smartphones which are almost in the same price league.
Design
The Oppo R7 Lite will impress you with its look and feel. As is the trend today, this phone has metal uni-body and is constructed of metal and glass. Metal used on this phone is very refined and of aviation quality which give it elegant looks. The reverse of the phone has premium look and despite the metal, it is not slippery surface and chances of scratches and fingerprints are ruled out.
Power button is on the left side and volume rockers are on the right side. The SIM and MicroSD card slot is also on the right side. All the buttons and SIM Tray are also made of metal and look pleasing and premium. These buttons offer good tactile feedback. This phone is not bulky at all and has weight of jsut 143 grams and is 6.3mm thin. Because of its light form factor, it is easy to carry in your pocket and can be operated with single hand without any problem at all.
The headphone slot has been provided on the top and Micro-USB port is given at the bottom. The front camera as usual is on the top and rear camera has been placed at the left side on the reverse with LED flash behind the camera. The rear camera has slight bulge but that is not big issue as we have seen more significant bulge in the main camera of Samsung Galaxy S6 camera. The speaker grille has been placed on the bottom right hand corner of reverse side.
From the design point of view, this phone stays ahead of competition and can compete even with high-end phones.
Display
The R7 Lite features a 5-inch AMOLED HD display (1280×720 pixels) with 294ppi. It also boast of 2.5D Curved Screen with Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection. Despite the fact that nowadays full HD displays are in vogue with high resolution still this phone does not disappoint you as you can’t make out much difference about the displayed text and images on this phone. Text appear quite crisp on the screen. This display being AMOLED, it reproduces good color and playing games, watching movies and other media content is quite enjoyable on it. Reading in sunlight is struggle and this problem is faced by even flagship phones and hence this minor irritant can be ignored.
Neat And Easy To Navigate OS
I am not fan of customised skin on top of Android OS but my concern has been negated by this phone. The OPPO R7 Lite runs on Color OS 2.1 based on Android Lollipop 5.1 OS. The Color OS 2.1 is easy to navigate and icons are neat and gives pleasing look. This phone comes with its own set of proprietary and useful apps such as Lock Now for switching off the phone, Security Center for memory clean up and blocking calls etc, Theme Store for downloading themes of your choice from good collections, O-Cloud for backing up your contacts and SMS to cloud drive and Music app. This phone also comes with a folder called Tools in which you will find another set of very useful apps such as Sound Recorder, Flashlight, Compass, Download Manager, Kingsoft Office, System Update and Clear Memory. When you open the flashlight app, you will find on and off button on the torch plus SOS button and when you press it, the flashlight starts blinking. This could be quite useful in emergency situations.
The Colorful OS is very easy to operate and unlike other customised UI’s, the first time users will have no difficulty in operating them.
When you open the folder, all the apps are shown with blurrred screen on the background probably to look more prominent.
The other plus point observed is that all the apps open quite fast and we did not notice any lag in opening and navigation is like a breeze on this OS.
Performance
It is powered by a Snapdragon 615 1.3GHz Octa-core processor coupled with 2GB RAM and 16GB of internal storage extendable to 128GB. This phone performs quite smoothly for all tasks and does not disappoint even while playing highly resourceful games. Switching between the apps is perfectly fine and we did not notice any slow-down or lag while playing games or streaming high media content on the phone. Surprisingly, the phone did not get heated much even after continuous use for gaming, watching movies and clicking images.
Oppo phones are known for good quality calls and this tradition has been followed in this phone also. Reception of calls received is perfect and call quality is also good. This phone supports Indian 4G networks and we did not face any problem with its compatiblity with 4G network of Airtel in Delhi.
Camera
Oppo phones are known for superb camera quality and this optics supermacy still continues. The OPPO R7 Lite is equipped with a 13-megapixel rear camera based on Sony IMX278 sensor with RGBW technology with an f/2.2 aperture. It also house an 8-megapixel Golden Angle front camera with 80 degree angle. The lens of the camera are of Schneider-Kreuznach of Germany.
The R7 Lite also incorporates Flash Shot Technology, standard Contrast Detection Autofocus (AF) and Laser Focus. Its laser autofocus system targets and focuses precisely on a subject in less than 0.3 seconds. The camera comes with many functions and by simply pressing the icon given besides the imaging clicking button, it shows you many functions icons such as UltraHD mode for shotting an ultra high resolution images; Beautify mode for selfie clicks; Panorama mode; GIF mode; HDR and Slow shutter mode and one can use different filters by pressing various filter icon.
The images clicked in daylight come out bright with detailed contrast and depth. We have clicked some images in full light which look appealing and some of them are reproduced below. Surprisingly, the images taken in the dark does not look good which we can’t reason out why it is so as Oppo phones do not disappoint on this front. Probably, it is software issue and can be resolved with some update.The selfie camera also performs very well and you can use it for group selfies quite easily for sharp results.
Images taken in daylight:
Images taken in street light in the night:
Battery
The R7 Lite is packed with a 2,320 mAh battery. It comes with Qualcomm QuickCharge feature and also incorporates Oppo’s VOOC charging technology for faster charging. This phone also has Super Power Saving mode which can be accessed from Security Center by pressing the icon of Energy saving. This mode enables the phone to keep only Clock, Contacts, Calls and messages functions available while disabling network connection. It is your choice to activate this mode or disable it. The battery can last upto 8 hours for moderate usage in 4G network of gaming, video streaming and watching them, few camera clicks and calling.
Verdict
The Oppo R7 Lite is a decent phone and one of its USP is its premium looking design. This slim device performs on all fronts quite impressively excep that its camera is not upto the mark in low-light conditions but this is solvable problem. Despite the fact that its battery is of low capacity as nowadays it is quite common to fit battery of 3000mAh even in mid-segment phones, but still its performance is very impressive and its feature has been enhanced with fast charging capabilites of Oppo technology.
On the downside, this phone comes with a hybrid Dual-SIM slot. You can either use two SIMs in the phone or a microSD card and one SIM. Personally speaking, I do not consider this an issue as I am votary of singel SIM device but those desirous of having two SIMs and microSD card for extension of internal storage, this will be an obstacle.
This phone finds direct competition with Moto X Play which has better camera capabilites and comes with massive battery of 3630 mAh and provides pure Android experience but lags in design as this phone is not made of metal. One of the other competitors is OnePlus X which comes with Snapdragon 801 processor but the drawback is that it is available in very complicated manner of invite system.
Like all its phones, Oppo R7 Lite is also little bit expensive at Rs. 17,900 and it should be in the range of Rs. 15,000 to give above two phones great fight. But still, if you are looking for slim metal phone for decent performance then you can certainly consider it.
