Oppo R7: The Showstopper

The name Oppo is catching up in Bangladesh – slowly but steadily. By producing high quality stylish smartphones, Oppo has already found a place among android aficionados. After coming up with several revolutionary products, Oppo is now back with a sleek new android smartphone – R7. R7 is a polished iteration of the paper-thin R5 from last year. Unlike the R5, it comes in two other variants. R7 Lite and R7 Plus. Yet another variant was recently announced: R7s. It has a slightly bigger screen and an even bigger battery.

Starting with the design of Oppo R7 – it is a stunner. Well, to be honest, that was expected. Oppo's entire R series is actually developed with two key1 points in mind: style and power. And it's again clearly evident with the R7's design. The magnesium-aluminum alloy body comes in a palm-friendly shape – not too big, but not too small. Some might say that it has a slight resemblance with Samsung's metal body mid-rangers, but I don't agree. Both of the product lines are unique in their own way..

The phone's thin body is wide enough to house the 3.5mm audio port and the micro USB charging port. It has the volume rocker on the right and power button on the left. The dual SIM slot is just above the volume rocker. The speaker mesh is in the back.

The sturdy metal body of the R7 houses a 5-inch AMOLED display that has a full-HD 1920x1080 pixel resolution. It's covered by a 2.5D glass panel and has three usual android capacitive keys directly below the screen. The high pixel density of the 445ppi AMOLED panel's colour rendition and saturation were vivid. The decent viewing angles and sharper image quality were as per industry standard. The black bezel surrounding the panel was clearly visible, hence a bit undesirable. However, watching TV shows was a treat for the eyes. I spent quite a bit of time ogling Marvel's Jessica Jones; I was delighted with what I saw. The gory noir and darker portrayal of a female superhero came out quite nice on the AMOLED screen.

Next up – Processor!

Oppo R7 is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 615, which is considered a midrange processor.  Although this device's CPU comes with 8 cores, which proves that it can outperform some high-end processors. In addition to that, the phone also comes with an Adreno 405 GPU and a hefty 3GBs of RAM; that's 1GB more than its predecessor – R5. We ran some benchmark tests – the results were pleasing. It got an AnTuTu Benchmark v5.7.1 score of 29693, which places it just below the Samsung Galaxy Note 4.

If you are the kind of nut-job whose mundane life gets some sort of purpose by taking random snaps of stuff that the world is too busy to care about and posting them on social media, then Oppo R7 should be on the top of your wish list. The rear 13MP camera can take pristine photos. Snaps are amazingly noise free. Thanks to the Schneider-Kreuznach optics and fuzzy noise detection sensor. The photos came out quite bright, and with the HDR on you get a distinct dynamic range. One thing we noticed was that the colours got slightly oversaturated. But we can live with that. The 8MP front camera took amazing selfies. We saw a slight drop in the quality of pictures taken at night.  But it's clearly a solid day-to-day device. 

Oppo R7 runs Android 4.4.4 KitKat, which is sort of upsetting since most of the phones launched recently come with at least Lollipop. No announcements have been made yet about an upgrade so fingers crossed. On top of the Kitkat, Oppo has a Colour OS 2.1 User Interface. Color OS is famed for customisation so you won't be bored with this device. It comes with a built-in theme engine, which gets frequent upgrades. Plus, you also have some groovy transition effects to sweeten' up your Oppo R7. But if you are already an Android user, then you will badly miss the app drawer.

We didn't get the VOOC charger with the review unit; hence, we couldn't test Oppo's legendary fast charging technology. The phone has a 2320 mAh battery, which clearly is not sufficient. But with the battery saving mode on, this phone's here to save the day – you can actually spend an entire day on medium usage.

Specs:
Display: 5.0" IPS Display
CPU: Quad-core 1.5 GHz Cortex-A53 & Quad-core 1.0 GHz Cortex-A53
GPU: Adreno 405
OS: Android Android OS, v4.4.2 (KitKat)
ROM: 16 GB GB
RAM: 3 GB
Camera: Rear- 13MP Schneider-Kreuznach optics, Front-  8 MP
Battery:  2320 mAh
Sensors: Accelerometer, Light, Proximity etc.
Price: Tk 29,980/-

Verdict:
The Oppo R7 is a premium full metal unibody smartphone that comes with everything you would want for your everyday life. Compared to its predecessor, it offers great functionality without any hiccups. We loved the camera, the magnesium-aluminum alloy design and the futuristic glass display very much. But we were really surprised to see the phone running on a dated version of Android 4.4.4 KitKat, rather than the most recent 5.1 Lollipop.  A bigger battery was expected as well. But Oppo already fixed the battery issues by bringing several variants of R7 with more almost identical specs. All in all, R7 is definitely here to create some noise in the market.