Oppo A7 Review: Sleek Design And Impressive Battery Life

According to analyst reports, the majority of Indian consumers have purchased phones in the price segment below Rs 20,000. But the smartphone model or producers are not really the most important factors, but the retail channel is the one matter the most. Buying smartphones via online channels tends to cost less than offline channels, at least several thousand rupees, as offline stores have to pay for the cost of setting up distribution channels and maintaining inventory.

While Xiaomi is currently leading the Indian smartphone market and also the online channels, other Chinese phone makers such as Vivo and Oppo that have strong brand values in the offline segment. And the Indian phone market just welcomed a new player called Realme. It is a former Oppo’s subsidiary, and it is trying to follow the same footstep of Xiaomi and replicate the market leader’s success one product at a time.

While Realme still only offers its products in online channels, it seems like Oppo is already planning to provide its smartphones to the offline segment. The company will start with the Oppa A7, which seems like a similar version of the Realme 2. Priced at Rs. 16,990, it is the device that many people are planning to grab one this year. But why?

Battery Life and Performance

The A7 comes with a 4,230 mAh battery, and it can power the phone for days, not hours. I could use it for two whole days on just one charge, which really surprised me as I get used to smartphone only last for only a day or even less. Its high battery capacity is well-supported by the ColorOS of Oppo, which aggressively works to limit apps to intensively drain battery power in the background. So if you are looking for a phone that you can carry around for two days without having to charge, you should put this one on your shortlist.

But along with the excellent battery life, the Oppo A7 doesn’t have a solid performance. It sports a Snapdragon 450 14nm SoC with Adreno 506 GPU, 4GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage. While the SoC is better than the one on its predecessor, it still doesn’t have the performance for a phone that has a Snapdragon 600-series SoC. Considering the Oppo A7’s price, Oppo should have gone for the Snapdragon 636 SoC instead, which other devices are using at the moment.

Design and Display

At first glance, you can already know that the Oppo A7 is undoubtedly not a cheap smartphone. Even its back is made of plastic but it still feels like a glass finish, and it is textured for a more comfortable grip. Even though it doesn’t have a gradient finish, the uses of a different material and the texture allows for a change in its colors. The gold device we were testing tended to change from gold color to green color depending on which angle the light was reflected from its surface. The design is impressive for a smartphone in its segment, but unfortunately, you are suggested to put on a case to avoid slippage from your hands or drops.

The Oppo A1 comes with a standard horizontally dual rear camera system with a fingerprint scanner and a LED Flash. Under the fingerprint scanner is the logo of Oppo.

The phone is built with aluminum chassis, and it looks very clean, but it still lacks inconsistencies. There are two speaker grille, a micro-USB port, and a headphone jack at the bottom end. While it’s good that Oppo still keeps the headphone jack, the CNC drilled holes of the dual speaker grille are different and look pretty odd to me. I would say that it would be better for Oppo to move the headphone jack to the top, which is bare, and use proper CNC drilling for the dual speaker grille.

While the Oppo A7’s design is good, the display is still the one that you mostly spend your time looking at. The device comes with a 6.2-inch HD+ display. This is surely not the most pixel-dense and sharpest display in the Oppo A7’s segment, but it is still good to have a Full-HD+ display. I have watched some YouTube videos, and I felt that I would have been much nicer if I could watch videos in FullHD resolution. However, its display is still just as good as other phones in the same segment.

Oppo is going with a waterdrop-style notch on the Oppo A7. Even though I find that having the notch in the display somewhat uncomfortable, it’s hard to find a smartphone that doesn’t have one. So I would say the current notch style of the Oppo A7 is still the most suitable.

Camera

The Oppo A7 features a dual rear camera system covered by a metal enclosure, which protrudes to circle to the LED flash. The camera system looks quite similar to that of a SIM ejector, and it’s pretty appealing. The camera setup includes a 13MP primary sensor and a 2MP secondary sensor which helps with both 2X zoom and depth effect.

If you quickly look at the photos taken by the Oppo A7, you may think they are good. But if you take a closer look and analyze deeply, you can see that the photos lack details and have inaccurate colour reproduction as well. However, it still can understand the composition very well and with HDR, it retains a lot of detail. In several images, it is easy to see the detail is retained in the photos’ background, and the foreground as well as the software processes shadow pretty well also. Most phones in the same segment can’t retain shadows and highlights which is not the case with the Oppo A7. However, when it comes to depth, the Oppo device struggles to differentiate the foreground from the background. And it’s also not really good at edge detection.

Software

The Oppo device runs ColorOS 5.2, based on Android 8.1 Oreo. In the software aspect, Oppo is still following iOS of Apple in terms of overall appearance. For example, Oppo software doesn’t have app draw, so you still have to scroll horizontally to see all the apps on your devices.

The operating system is still acceptable, but some of the elements are just disappointing. And then the default browser, which is supposed to be Chrome in every Android operating system, has been changed to Oppo’s own browser, UC browser. I don’t understand why I would need three browsers installed by default when I only need one to work with. Not just that, the UC browser sometimes send push notifications that sometimes really annoys me. Oppo also pre-installs some apps like Amazon Shopping, Paytm, Daily hunt or Paytm, but you are still able to delete them, so it is still fine.

Besides Play Store, Oppo also added its own app store with a similar set of key apps like what you can find on Play Store. There are two sections called Hot Games and Hot Apps where you can find trending apps, and you can directly install the app in one click. You may find it convenient, but I really don’t. It would be better if I can know the permissions the apps I am about to install have.

Other than these issues, I found that the Oppo’s skin is more usable than it used to be two years back. Its UI is now more fluid even after I installed some apps as I still easily navigated through app windows swiftly.

Final thoughts

While the Oppo A7 is currently priced at Rs. 16,990 which may be fair in the offline retail segment, the pricing seems a bit off in the online retail segment. At a lower price, you can buy Xiaomi Redmi Note 6 Pro with 6GB of RAM and a FullHD+ display and even save Rs 1,000 for yourself. There are other choices like the Vivo V9 with a Snapdragon 660 SoC which is priced at 15,990.

To conclude, the Oppo A7 really shines on aspects like battery life and design, but somethings go quite wrong with its performance, camera and software loaded with bloatware that drag its value down quite a bit.