Oppo F3: Good Selfies, Better Wefies

Oppo, one of the leading global mobile brands, set foot in Nepali market no more than a year ago. Yet it has become a popular name among smartphone enthusiasts, and especially selfie lovers owing to its high-end selfie cameras. Telecell Pvt Ltd, the authorised distributors of Oppo mobile phones for Nepal has recently launched its new handset Oppo F3 in the market as a successor to F3 Plus.

Design

The design of Oppo F3is really admirable, it feels good in hand is also ergonomic. F3 is one of the few 5.5 inch screen phones that you can easily manoeuvre in one hand. Numerous handsets, like the Oneplus 3, Galaxy J7, Redmi Note 3 and many of their likes, feel bulky but F3’s design is friendlier for one-hand use and feels really compact. The fingerprint sensor is on the home button, and is fast and responsive, no complaints from it. The 1080p display with 401 ppi is nice and crispand is fun to watch videos and play games. The brightness is adequate indoors but could get a bit dim under direct sunlight. The sound from the bottom-firing single speaker is satisfactory, it isn’t too loud and clear, just an average speaker.

Camera

The handset, like many other Oppo phones, is marketed as a ‘selfie expert’. The cameras are indeed one of the best features of the phone. It comes with dual front camera, a 16 megapixel selfie camera for individual selfies and a wide-angle lens for group selfies.The wide angle lens offers wider field of view and is perfect for group selfies. The selfies taken from both the front cameras are well exposed, with good saturation and contrast. The rear camera is a 13 MP snapper with 1/3 inch sensor captures bright images even in dimly lit conditions. The HDR mode functions well, and the pictures taken in this mode come out very balanced in all aspects. If you want to buy Oppo F3 for its camera capabilities, have no second thoughts. The pictures are comparable to those taken from a flagship device.

Performance

Oppo F3 is powered by a 1.5 GHz octa-core Mediatek MT6750T processor with Mali-T860MP2 GPU. It has 4 GB RAM and an internal storage of 64 GB which is further expandable up to 256 GB through SD card. The general performance of the phone is really good. There is no lag during web browsing, multitasking and everyday tasks. The 4 GB RAM makes the phone feel snappy, and is responsive at most of the times. The gaming performance is good too, and the phone can handle demanding titles like Asphalt 8, Asphalt Extreme and Modern Combat 5 on medium to high settings. The speaker is fairly loud, but is positioned in such a way that it gets muffled with your hands while playing games in landscape mode which is really annoying.

Battery

OppoF3 runs on a non-removable 3200 mAh battery. The battery charges from 0 to 60 per cent in an hour, and it takes another hour to charge it completely. Battery life is decent, will last you a day with moderate to heavy use, but don’t expect anything exceptional from the battery. Priced at Rs 35,490, Oppo F3 is a descent phone with good overall performance. The biggest issue we found on Oppo F3 is with its software. The phone runs on Oppo’s Color OS 3.0 based on Android 6.0. The Color OS performs well on most parts and is not necessarily laggy, but it is not convenient and doesn’t feel light too. The notification panel, the toggle buttons, the settings menu, all lack the user-friendly approach of stock Android. The settings menu feels inadequate, there could have been more functions accommodated. The software needs to be mature and more user friendly. On the better side, Oppo F3 support two nano-SIM cards and there is a dedicated SD card slot which is rare in phones these days. This is one area where Oppo F3 beats the competition.