Kicking off the new year with an update is the brand Oppo, with its newest update to the Oppo F11 revealed last year. The Oppo F15 competes in a highly competitive sub 20K price bracket which makes it a head-on competitor with the likes of successful smartphones such as Redmi Note 8 Pro, Poco F1, Realme X2 and Nokia 7.2. To battle this off, Oppo does offer some remarkable specs such as 8 gigs of RAM, an in-display fingerprint sensor, VOOC 3.0 and a 48MP camera. But, Is it enough to ward off the revered rivals in its category? Well, we have to find out!
Design:
Starting with the design which comes off as rather tall looking, with a sleek profile and comfy grip. The gradient blue and black convoluted texture give it a beautiful looking 3D effect that makes it all the more interesting. The glass body is resistant to scratches for the most part but is more prone to smudges and dust to the point of making a user attentive to wiping it too often. Another aspect that precludes from placing the smartphone on its back is the protruding camera hump which makes it wobbly and unstable. The power button and volume rocker are too placed outside the normal reach of an average user making it extremely cumbersome at times.
To speak about the display, we feel the 6.2-inch AMOLED FHD+ panel puts out good colors and is sufficiently bright when used outdoors. The panel is great for watching movies and having some good gaming sessions. The trimmed bezels make it an extremely pleasing smartphone to hold in landscape orientation and is responsive enough to register each and every action.
Performance:
The F15 derives its performance from a MediaTek Helio P70 chipset that is paired with a Mali G72 MP3 GPU and 8GB of onboard RAM. It runs all standard apps like LinkedIn, Twitter, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram extremely well. However, when it comes to demanding titles like COD, Asphalt 8, PUBG, the device struggles to keep up the frame rate to a level that is necessary for a user. Despite this problem, we found the games playable at medium settings with no lag and jitter throughout our entire time of testing. Game Assistant was helpful too as it kicks in as soon as you open any game and turns off all notification and calls during the gameplay.
In regards to security, we would rate the F15 9 out of 10, due to the super responsive and accurate fingerprint sensor sitting below the screen and face recognition that works well. Coming to the user interface, we were not that disappointed by the ColorOS 6.1 as it has received multiple OTA`s which fixed some major issues with the older UI. Oppo also promises to release the ColorOS 7 by the end of February which is a good sign. Overall performance was nothing extraordinary and feels a lot improved from the standard earlier one, despite the preinstalled bloatware lying around the system.
Camera Performance:
After using the smartphone as our daily driver for almost 10 days, we feel the F15 has a solid camera off them all. The images from the 48MP sensor were never oversaturated or exposed, making them perfect for Instagram shots. HDR tends to overblow the colors which made the images a lot more digital and less natural. Ultrawide lens offers a larger depth of field but loses out on details once you zoom into it. Low light images were ok-ish and comparable to the ones taken from the previous Oppo devices we have tested last year.
The 16MP selfie camera with an f/2.0 lens is a delightful sensor that clicked some great looking selfies despite the depleting lighting conditions. The AI face detection worked splendidly as it made our not so good-looking images, pleasant.
The camera app tended to lag at times and took a while to fire the shutter button once we clicked it. We hope Oppo would fix these minor blemished with upcoming updates in the future.
Battery:
The battery life is also pretty solid as the F15 ran for almost 15 hours with a single charge that took about an hour or so. The device is slated to last over two days if your users don’t exceed some nominal workload. Fast charging through VOOC 3.0 also comes in fast at 50% in just under 30 minutes.
Gizmo Verdict:
The all-new Oppo F15 doesn’t blow any minds when it comes to the design, but surely has a premium display, camera quality or decent battery life, but what it does is pull everything off just right. The Oppo F15 is a solid smartphone that might appeal to a wider array of individuals looking to get their daily tasks at hand. It is not for hardcore gamers, but for those who like to have multimedia consumption.
