REVIEW: Oppo F9

Oppo has finally found a way onto our pages - andwith a pretty neat device, no less! The Oppo F9 is the latest in a long line of affordable smartphones from the Chinese manufacturer. Their price points have endeared it to many - they're big in the Philippines and India - and their features are more than able to hold up to their peers. Since this is the first time we're handling an Oppo phone up close, I'm a bit intrigued by what it can actually do.

For our review, we got our hands on the Starry Purple colour option which, as you may have guessed, comes with a glittery finish. The other two hues - Twilight Blue and Sunrise Red - come with their own unique hologram-ish look.

The F9's 6.3-inch IPS LCD screen is surrounded by the usual suspects: the power button on the right; volume rocker and card tray to the left; and 3.5mm audio jack, micro-USB and speaker below. This is an almost all-display device, save for that thicker chin below and a teardrop bezel above where the front camera sits pretty. Add its 19.5:9 build and that gives it a whopping 90.8 per cent screen-to-body ratio.
Useful point to note: the card tray has three slots, two for nano-SIMs and one for a microSD card.
The fingerprint scanner, which unlocks the phone in a snap, sits behind, at the centre. You can pair this with another biometric identification feature, face unlock, which is pleasantly fast in recognising your likeness, even in zero lighting conditions. I tried to fool it with a photo of myself, and it has, so far, resisted recognising my doppelganger of sorts.

The interface is pretty straightforward; it runs on Oppo's own ColorOS 5.2 based on Android 8.1 Oreo. It lacks an app tray so you'll just have to swipe left from the home screen to access apps. Swiping to the right, meanwhile, reveals Smart Assistant, which, as defined, is a 'one-tap' access to common functions and a 'one-step' quick view of important information. By default, you'll have quick functions (basically app shortcuts), weather, steps tracker and favourite contacts; you can add other shortcuts, such as photos and events.

Operating it is smooth; only once did I experience a crash so far, though there are some occasional lags, especially with the next topic we're jumping into: the camera.

The F9 retains a dual-lens camera. It does take nice shots in good lighting conditions, but you can expect some noise when the light wanes. The 16MP-plus-2MP setup also has portrait mode, and provides decent depth of field effects with five modes - natural, film, mono-tone, rim and bi-colour light. You won't be able to get this feature in its 25MP single-lens snapper, though it does a good job of smoothening out your face when you click those selfies.

The F9 has a rather large 3,500mAh battery in it, and it claims to be able to provide two hours of talk time with just five minutes of charging - a claim that actually holds up: I did just that, and in five minutes, the phone's power level shot up by 10 per cent, a very good number on any day. This is thanks to Oppo's VOOC technology - and you can only achieve this using a charger with this feature. To prove the point, I mixed it up a bit to see how it performs without - or partially without - the VOOC stuff: using only the VOOC plug or cable, or a non-VOOC set, shoved its power up by only 4 per cent.

As for battery life itself, the F9 was able to stay with me for a day-and-a-half, though this was drastically cut when I started with the videos and games, in which case I had to plug it in before I called it a night.
AND SO.
As a well-rounded machine, the Oppo F9 ticks a lot of boxes when it comes to functionality and features. The only concern here is that, though expandable, it only has 64GB storage capacity. It definitely poses a challenge to the likes of Huawei's Honor line. In fact, with a number of features trickling down from flagships, the budget-friendly phone game just got a lot hotter.
alvin@khaleejtimes.com