OPPO F15 REVIEW: LOOKS GOOD (ON PAPER), HAS GREAT BATTERY, BUT IT'S NO POWERHOUSE

OPPO F15 REVIEW: LOOKS GOOD (ON PAPER), HAS GREAT BATTERY, BUT IT'S NO POWERHOUSE

Oppo F15 is that the Chinese company’s latest offering and its first launch of 2020. The device is placed within the perilous sub-20k price segment, where competition is with a number of the very successful smartphones like the Redmi Note 8 Pro (Review), Poco F1 (Review), Nokia 7.2 (Review) and Realme X2.

Having said that, Oppo F15 doesn’t seem to be taking this competition lightly either. The smartphone’s highlights include 8 GB RAM, an in-display fingerprint sensor, VOOC 3.0 fast charging support and a 48 MP quad-camera setup. Price: Rs 19,990.

On paper, that’s the recipe for creating a victorious smartphone. However, like many reviews and tests within the past have shown, all that glitters isn't gold.

So I began to seek out answers to some questions I had about the phone while writing my first impressions about it:

Is the camera app buggy or chipset-RAM partnership isn't working for the smartphone?

Does the 4,000 mAh battery works as impressively with the AMOLED display on top, as Oppo claims?

Is the phone’s glossy back susceptible to scratches?

Is Oppo F15 better than its competitors?

The Camera May Be a Delight – Mostly

I used the Oppo F15 for about 10 days and therefore the camera is certainly one among its best features. Overall, the Oppo F15’s camera does over-saturate images, with special boosts to reds and greens during a picture, however, the Instagram generation would mostly appreciate the colors. Let’s check out the phone’s front and back camera one by one.

The Oppo F15 features a 16 MP selfie camera sensor at the front along side an f/2.0 lens. Oppo F15’s selfie camera may be a delight – on most occasions. Daylight images clicked from the front camera of the Oppo F15 are bright, they're a touch saturated but have acceptable colours, and that they retain tons of details.

The front camera of the smartphone also comes with a portrait mode, which is great, has good edge detection, but it works best with one subject ahead of the selfie camera. Two subjects during selfie portraits confuse AI face detection software sometimes.

Night-Time Selfies Are Just Okay From The Smartphone.

Moving to the rear camera, the Oppo F15 comes with a quad rear camera setup, which incorporates a 48 MP primary sensor with an f/1.79 lens, alongside an 8 MP secondary sensor with an f/2.25 ultra-wide-angle lens that features a field-of-view (FoV) of 119 degrees. There also are two 2 MP sensors for capturing portrait and monochrome shots, with f/2.4 lenses.

The Oppo F15 again has good overall image quality and hues when it involves daytime photography. Images retain details quite well. Although, in some images in bright light, the background looked over-exposed. At night, however, Oppo F15 gets noisy outputs. Images clicked in the dark also look a touch waxy sometimes.

Decent Daily Driver But Won’t Call It a Power-Packed Phone

Oppo f15 is powered by an octa-core MediaTek Helio P70 chipset, paired with Mali G72 MP3 GPU and eight GB of RAM.

As a daily driver, for using the quality list of apps for millennials like WhatsApp, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, the Oppo F15 does an honest job. Multi-tasking is additionally easy most of the time. And there weren’t any heating issues.

However, when it involves more performance-hungry tasks, you'll tell that the Oppo F15 is struggling. Games like Call of Duty: Mobile, Asphalt 8: Airborne and PUBG Mobile run on medium graphics on the phone. There have been also a couple of instances where the phone lagged while switching apps, or when one too many notifications came through directly.

Having said that, the smartphone’s Game Assistant, which is automatically triggered once you open a gaming app is convenient since it blocks all notifications and calls during gameplay.

There is also a lag within the camera app, which I discussed within the section above.

Besides that, I thoroughly enjoyed the phone’s in-display fingerprint sensor, which is super responsive. The face recognition is pretty quick also.

Overall, supported the performance, I might recommend Oppo F15 to people that aren't watching getting out extensive work from the phone. If you stick with a basic few apps and streaming videos and films at max, it’ll work for you. However, I’d strictly say no for the device if you're a gamer.

Oppo F15 Is All About It's Design

Design is a crucial aspect of the smartphone. And if I even have to rate it, I might give the Oppo F15 8/10 for its looks. The phone features a tall-ish design, it's extremely sleek, and features a comfortable grip. It’s one among the few phones, which features a great looking black colour variant. This color variant has gradients of blue at the rear, which provides it a gorgeous 3D effect.

The phone features a glossy back, which may be a problem for the clumsies, but if you employ the silicone case that comes bundled with the phone that should not be a drag.

In the initial few days, once I just started reviewing the device I used to be wondering if this phone would get too many scratches, but it got a hell lot of smudges and mud but not one scratch. It resisted scratches for an honest 10 days within the extremely-scratch-prone-area that my handbag is.

But if you noticed, I did deduct two points from design despite liking it such a lot and that’s due to the 2 things I assumed were ergonomic flaws of the Oppo F15. One, once you grip the phone from rock bottom, which is that the natural grip, reaching the facility button and volume rocker isn’t easy. I needed to reposition my hand whenever to try to so.

Two, the camera setup at the rear is housed on a vertical platform at one corner, and while it's good, placing the phone on its back makes it wobble. That camera setup is protruding out a touch an excessive amount of for my liking.

A Bright, Colourful Display

Oppo F15 features a 6.2-inch AMOLED FHD+ display, which has good colours and is bright enough to be legible even in sunlight. The dimensions of the display is additionally quite good for watching videos and playing games.

The bezels round the display are really thin. And although there's a waterdrop notch on top, which houses the selfie camera, it’s quite tiny and you'll soon stop noticing it also.

ColorOS 6.1 Is Bloated With Pre-Installed Apps

Unless you've got been an Oppo user, ColorOS isn't something you'll quickly get wont to, or maybe like. Personally, the overly colourful icons within the UI don’t appeal to me.

The Oppo F15 runs Android 9-based ColorOS 6.1. Oppo says that the smartphone are going to be upgraded to ColorOS 7 in February 2020.

The smartphone’s UI comes plagued with a bunch of pre-installed apps. Besides the bloatware, you furthermore may keep getting tons of notifications from random apps, which you'll need to disable from Settings.

There was no visible stuttering within the UI while scrolling or switching apps.

Its long-lasting battery with fast charging support may be a great combination

Oppo F15 is powered by a 4,500 mAh battery with support for VOOC 3.0 Flash Charge. Out of habit, I frequently switch between Instagram, Twitter, Slack, Gmail, Outlook and Spotify through the day, and with this social media-obsessed behaviour, the phone easily lasted me each day and a half. The day i used to be testing tons of games on the phone, it lasted a touch over each day. However, on the times of really light usage, the phone’s battery life also went up for 2 days.

Charging the phone is such a fast job, it especially feels so to an iPhone user. I recorded that the Oppo F15 charged up from 6 percent to 85 percent in 50 minutes.

Verdict: Looks good, feels good, clicks good, but lacks substance

The Oppo F15 is for you if you primarily search for design, camera and good battery on a smartphone. However, if you're trying to find a power-packed smartphone which is fast and handles graphic-demanding games well, then look, this one’s not for you.

While Redmi Note 8 Pro (Review) probably has worse UI than the ColorOS, if you're ready to ignore that or if you're already wont to it, i might recommend it over the Oppo F15 for overall-performance.

There is also Redmi K20, which offers great design, camera and performance. Another alternative to Oppo F15 is that the Realme X2, which also offers a way neater UI too.

You could also await the Poco X2, which is launching on 4 February, which can likely be priced within the same price segment.

Camera Rating: 8/10 

Performance Rating: 7/10 

Design Rating: 9/10 

Display Rating: 8/10 

Software Rating: 6/10 

Battery Rating: 9/10