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A Quick and Dirty Review of the Oppo R7 Lite

Oppo R7 Lite


Introduction:
The Oppo R7 Lite is Oppo's midrange (~300USD) offering. This unit was given as a cumulative 7-year Christmas present + cumulative 7-year birthday present + pre-grad present + 'salary' for me by a relative. It comes in gold and silver. For some reason Oppo has decided to sell their units through authorized resellers or through their first-party kiosks here which may impact their image negatively as they put themselves visually on the same level the cheaper brands here such as SKK Mobile and Torque (if you haven't heard of them, you're not missing on anything since they're mostly selling low-end to low-mid range products).

As pictured below, I obtained the silver version of the unit.
3WonQaZ.jpg
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Specifications:
Dimensions:
Height: 143mm
Width: 71mm
Thickness: 6.3mm (wow!)
Weight: 147g
Color: Silver (also available in rose gold)
OS: ColorOS 2.1, Android 5.1 (with available update to 5.1.1)
SoC: Qualcomm Snapdragon 615
GPU: Adreno 405
RAM: 2GB
Storage: 16GB internal, expandable with microSD up to 128GB at the cost of not being able to use the 2nd sim card slot.
Camera: 13MP rear camera, 8MP front camera
Sensors: Accelerometer, proximity, compass, luminosity (for auto-brightness)
Features: Fast Charge, Active Noise Cancellation, USB OTG
Battery: Non-removable LiPo 2320 mAh

For full specs, go here and here.

Build Quality:
The unibody construction gives off a very premium feel. The edge of the screen is not exactly flat, rather it is slightly curved. The stepping of the edges gives much needed grip for a phone such as this.
OPPO-VD-R7-Part01-Recovered_05.jpg
Source: Oppo's product page

However, it still feels very fragile in my hands with how thin it is... I am not confident about throwing it around in the same way as I do with the A536 or the LG E400R.

Oppo also had the courtesy of including their first-party clear jelly case which fits nicely around the unit and (I'm not sure if this is good or not) doubles as a flash diffuser.

Performance:
I was unable to run the unit through Antutu and Geekbench fresh from the box because of my excitement on getting a proper smartphone for once.
After I got all my stuff on it the benchmarks are as follows:

Score: 30360
3D: 1363
Garden: 444
Marooned: 919
UX: 13805
UX Data Secure: 4270
UX Data Process: 2166
UX Strategy Games: 2410
UX Image Process: 1976
UX I/O Performance: 2983
CPU: 12231
CPU Mathematics: 2579
CPU Common Use: 4466
CPU Multi-Core: 5006
RAM: 2961


Single-Core: 616
Multi-Core: 2287
(not gonna detail it here... for more details go here: http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/4840771)

The scores above may be relatively lower than other devices with the Snapdragon 615, but I'll attribute that to the apps that I've already loaded on the device prior to installing.

Software-wise, the phone has very little bloatware installed. Other than what comes with ColorOS, there's only an office suite and nothing else. This is something to appreciate since I've only ever gotten phones filled to the brim with preinstalled apps that I can't remove (looking at you Lenovo and LG).

I don't really care about multitasking on phones right now due to the functional lack of screen real estate.

Camera:
The camera is your standard 13MP affair which features the current standard set of features. Low light performance, however is impressive. The image below is shot in a low-light area where the streetlights nor the storefront lights properly illuminate.

SFjkRQu.jpg


In addition to this, Oppo offers expansions to the camera's feature set including a full manual mode if you're into that.
As for me I've downloaded the manual mode, HDR, and the UltraHD mode for the rear camera.

The camera can supposedly do 1080p 30fps, but I haven't tested it yet. Same with its audio recording functions.

The front camera is also your standard 8MP affair, yet again with good low-light performance. Something that surprised me when I took a photo of the interior of our car earlier whilst stuck in the Saturday night traffic in our area. (Can't show the pic for privacy reasons.)

Screen:
The screen is a 720p AMOLED display in a 5" form factor. This gives us 294ppi.
The screen on its own is very nice with an auto-brightness setting and safe for "I'm checking my phone in the dark right after I wake up" at its minimum brightness setting.
Color, however, looks over-saturated compared to my monitors (HP LE1902x and Samsung S19C150) and my previous phone, the Lenovo A536.

Sw64dhI.jpg


The touch screen is capable of ten-point multi-touch. The screen can keep up with my heavy rhythm gaming in Cytus and Dynamix, however I do not recommend playing these games on a screen smaller than 7".

It comes with the Corning Gorilla Glass Class 3 which I haven't felt much because of the factory-installed screen protector which already got scratched in my pocket... I'm not planning on taking it off until it comes off naturally (possibly 6-8 months from now)...

Audio:
The loudspeaker is what you would expect from a rear-facing smartphone speaker. Lots of highs and mids and very diminished lows. This one however has some bass to it and is relatively clear. Much like an iPhone 5's speaker. It can also get very loud.

The standard 3.5mm port can drive my Superlux HD300 well enough.
As a bonus, the included earbuds also sound surprisingly well. It sounds close to the Sony MDR-E9LP.


Phone Funcitonality:
The one thing we usually forget about smartphones is how they function as phones.
This one can send and receive text messages and calls just fine. Signal on 3G is consistent same with the data connection (if the telco decides not to drop your connection).
Call quality is good and the dedicated noise-canceling microphones at the back helps with being to understand the person you're talking to whilst in a noisy area.

GPS is as you would expect. I have only been able to test this using Waze which for some reason can't find me when I'm driving along the bottom level of the multilevel highway in the capital.

It's just a shame that I can't use both sim card slots if I have an SD card installed.

Conclusion:
The phone is a good buy at 13k PhP (or approx 275USD). There may be comparable phones out there such as the Xiaomi Mi 4i which retails at 9799 PhP on Lazada.com.ph at time of writing. I really appreciate the build and audio quality of the phone and am very impressed with its performance.

The only drawback is not being able to use the second SIM slot when you have a microSD card installed.

I can confidently recommend this to someone looking for a smartphone.
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very good review  :)  its always interesting to see tech from different regions 

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Nice review

Error: 451                             

I'm not copying helping, really :P

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Nice

Judge a product on its own merits AND the company that made it.

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