Oppo A15 Review: A Cheap Phone With Lots Of Compromises

Oppo A15 is by far the company’s most budget-friendly smartphone, at least in the Western world. And the reason we mention the price is for you to set your expectation accordingly.

Oppo A15 Price And Release Date

Oppo A15 was released in the United Kingdom on November 26, 2020, and is retailed for £119.

Oppo A15 price in India is Rs 9,990 and it is available on both Amazon and Flipkart.

Oppo A15 Design

The overall design of the phone is nothing to write home about and everything about it serves as a reminder that you are holding a budget phone.

On the rear, there is nothing to catch the eye except for the square camera setup with faux-metal surround. The back of the Oppo A15 is entirely plastic and is a real fingerprint magnet.

By 2020 standards, the bezels surrounding the front of the phone are pretty chunky with a large forehead and chin. The display is interrupted by a teardrop notch, exuding a feeling of a dated design when hole-punch is becoming more and more common for budget phones.

At the bottom of the phone, there is a 3.5mm headphone jack that sits alongside a micro-USB port – another reminder that Oppo A15 is a very cheap phone.

Oppo A15 Display

The front of the phone is dominated by a 6.52-inch IPS LCD display. At 480nits, the screen is quite bright with balanced colors, which, unfortunately, don’t do much to enhance the viewing experience.

Watching Full HD content natively is impossible and with the 269ppi pixel density, photos and web content don’t have any chance to pop either.

The low display specs aren’t unique to the Oppo A15 though. Nokia 3.4 and Alcatel 3L both share the same screen.

Oppo A15 Camera

Oppo A15 features a triple camera setup consisting of a 13MP main camera, a 2MP macro, and a 2MP depth sensor. This is a usual setup for such a low price phone. And again, the appearance of the macro camera is hard to justify as shots taken with it are ugly and grainy.

In good lighting, shots look acceptable given the budget-friendly price.  However, there is a color drop-off that gets more visible toward the edges of the device. Subjects with lots of details will appear over-processed. We don’t recommend zooming in as the phone doesn’t do well up-close.

Oppo A15 also struggles with portrait despite having a dedicated Portrait mode. When we tested the phone’s cameras, it couldn’t get the subject in focus properly. HDR isn’t any better as the phone overexposes the background.

The Night mode on the Oppo A15 is an odd addition since it doesn’t do much except for making shots noisy and murky.

On the other side, the 5MP selfie camera is mediocre too as it tends to smudge your skin even when you have set the Beauty slider to zero.

Oppo A15 Specs And Performance

The low price tag might be the explanation for many average features but there are still minimum standards for modern smartphones and unfortunately, the Oppo A15 can barely meet them.

The main reason for this disappointment is the MediaTek MT6765 CPU paired with 3GB of RAM. The phone scores only 930 on Geekbench 5, too low even compared to other budget phones.

While benchmark isn’t the most reliable indicator of real-life performance, it gives you an idea of what to expect. With day-to-day tasks, the phone is far from running smoothly with delays when you browse web pages or switching between apps. Even open Settings takes longer than with other budget phones.

Many games are playable on the Oppo A15, but the experience isn’t very enjoyable. PUBG Mobile can’t go higher than Medium settings and don’t expect butter-smooth gameplay.

There is 32GB of onboard storage which is expandable to 256GB via the microSD card slot.

The phone is powered by ColorOS 7.2 based on Android 10. Overall, the software is smooth and clean, with only some minor drawbacks like jumbled menus and garish icons.

The software is customizable so if there is something about it that bothers you, you can also tweak it to a certain degree.

Oppo A15 Battery Life

The Oppo A15 draws power from a 4,230mAh battery which provides plenty of juice for a phone of this price. Users can have a full day or even a second day with one single charge with medium use.

In our tests, streaming Netflix for an hour at max brightness taxed the phone from 5% to 8% of battery, which is laudable.

Charging time is another drawback of the Oppo A15. With the bundled 10W charger, it takes the phone 90 minutes to go from 17% to 91%.

>>> Moto G9 Play Review: The Best Budget Non-Chinese Android Phone To Date