In the last few years, Oppo has grown to be a formidable force in the smartphone industry, especially in their home country China where it, according to some market research agencies, even tops the list of the biggest phone companies.
The F3 Plus is the latest entrant in the company's Selfie 'Expert' series of smartphones and is Oppo's first smartphone to feature dual cameras at the front -- a 16MP primary camera with an aperture of F2.0 and an 8MP secondary camera with a 120-degree wide angle lens that allows for 105-degree field of view group selfies. Lots of jargons. But the sum of it all is that the F3 Plus is a phone that puts a lot of focus on performance of the front camera and will appeal to selfie enthusiasts.
So, does the Oppo F3 Plus have what it takes to give phones like the OnePlus 3T and Huawei Honor 8 a run for their money? Or is it just a one-trick pony? Let's find out!
Design
The Oppo F3 Plus features a premium metal unibody design which looks quite a lot like a certain smartphone made by a company named after a fruit. Yes, that is the iPhone we are talking about. The F3 Plus has an all metal back with chamfered edges and three slim antenna lines on the two ends of the rear panel.
The front is an all-glass affair with a capacitive home button surrounded by capacitive keys for back and multi-tasking. The fingerprint reader is embedded in the home button. It is extremely fast and accurate and is one of the highlights of the device.
If you have not set up the fingerprint reader, the home button/fingerprint sensor cannot be used to unlock the smartphone (you need to press the lock button), which is a bit un-ergonomic as your finger always goes to the home button by reflex.
'Inspired' design aside, the build quality is par for the course and the smartphone feels solid and sturdy in the hand and inspires confidence against errant drops.
While the side bezels are minimal, the top and bottom bezels are substantial. The smartphone is extremely hard to use with one hand thanks to its sheer size
The bottom-mounted single speaker is loud but tinny and distorts at high volumes. In a smartphone that has a huge 6-inch display perfect for Netflix binge sessions, stereo speakers are sorely missed.
While the side bezels are minimal, the top and bottom bezels are substantial. The smartphone is extremely hard to use with one hand thanks to its sheer size. The huge top and bottom bezels accentuate this issue by further increasing the footprint of the device.
A major source of frustration I had during my time with the Oppo F3 Plus is the the fact that the light for the capacitive keys cannot be turned off and the brightness of the buttons cannot be adjusted in any way which is very annoying in the dark.
This left me rather confused. Oppo has provided an 'Eye Protect Mode' -- only for the screen -- in order to alleviate strain from your eyes, which is completely undone by the fact that the light for the capacitive keys pierces into your eyes at night.
Display
The Oppo F3 Plus comes with a 6-inch fullHD IPS LCD display. While a 1080p resolution panel sounds disappointing on paper in the day and age of big QuadHD displays, it has crisp and sharp colors, good viewing angles and adequate brightness levels.
A 1080p panel strikes a great compromise between battery life and usability and is more than adequate for day to day use. There is a reason that the largest selling smartphone in the world (read iPhone) still has an 'outdated' 1080p display.
As with most IPS displays, the blacks are not as deep as I would have liked and the colors are not as vivid as what you see on an AMOLED screen. The Oppo F3 Plus also comes with an 'eye protect mode', which basically acts as a blue light filter for the display and helps alleviate eye strain at night. But as noted earlier, the light for the capacitive keys bleeds into the bottom of the display which is annoying when you are using the phone in a dark room.
Performance
The Oppo F3 Plus comes with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 652 SoC clocked at 1.96 GHz paired with the Adreno 510 GPU, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of internal storage which can be expanded via a microSD card (of up to 256GB) and a 4,000mAh battery.
The Snapdragon 652 consists of 4 high-performance Cortex-A72 cores clocked at 1.96 GHz and four Cortex A-53 cores clocked at 1.40GHz for less intensive tasks. Such a setup allows for better thermal management as well as contributes to better battery life as the high-performance cores can remain switched off during mundane day-to-day tasks.
On the connectivity front, the device supports 4G LTE, VoLTE, GPRS, 3G, 2G, GPS/A-GPS, Glonass, Bluetooth 4.1 and microUSB for data transfer and charging. The lack of USB C in today's day and age is a downer.
The smartphone's primary competitor - the OnePlus 3T comes with Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 821 processor (as compared to the 820 in the OP3) clocked at 2.35GHz, the Adreno 530 GPU, 6GB of RAM and a 3,400mAh battery.
The Snapdragon 652 + Adreno 510 combination in the Oppo F3 Plus handles day-to-day tasks like web browsing, using social media apps, and scrolling through photos with aplomb. RAM management on the other hand is a bit iffy, with the smartphone having to reload tabs in Chrome and applications like YouTube and Facebook occasionally.
On the gaming front, the device runs casual games like Subway surfers and Temple Run 2 with ease, although heavy titles like Modern Combat 2 and Call Of Duty: Heroes did suffer from a few dropped frames at the highest quality setting.
On a positive note, the Oppo F3 Plus performs very well when it comes to thermal management, with the device not getting too hot even during heavy gaming and intensive use.
Software
The F3 Plus runs on Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow with Oppo's Color OS custom UI skin on top. Color OS is just not as refined or optimised as stock Android and other well made skins such as OnePlus's Oxygen OS and Sony's Xperia UI.
While certain aspects of the UI like navigating through the home screen and opening up the notification shade are fluid and snappy, opening basic applications like the dialer, messages and contacts take an extra millisecond or two which becomes a bit infuriating in the long run.
The Snapdragon 652 + Adreno 510 combination in the Oppo F3 Plus handles day-to-day tasks like web browsing, using social media apps, and scrolling through photos with aplomb
The lack of an app drawer and the fact that the UI feels like a badly-made iOS theme for Android do not help matters in any way.
On the positive side, settings are well organised, core applications like contacts and dialer are easy to use and the smartphone also supports certain gestures such as drawing an O to start the camera, double tapping the screen to unlock it and so on which surprisingly work rather well.
The notification shade is split into two separate screens, with one listing your notifications and the other housing quick toggles for Wi-Fi, 4G, Bluetooth and so on.
A major irritant is the fact that whenever you pull down the notification shade, the quick toggles are always displayed first and you have to swipe left to access the notification screen every single time you want to see a notification. This is not very intuitive and makes the everyday task of seeing your notifications a tedious two step process.
The amount of redundant applications on board is also a letdown. The device comes with two different applications for Music, Photos, Browser and so on. ( Google's own applications and Oppo's versions of the same.)
Cameras
The F3 Plus is Oppo's first smartphone to feature dual cameras at the front -- a 16MP primary camera with an aperture of F2.0 and an 8MP secondary camera with a 120-degree wide angle lens that allows for 105-degree field of view group selfies. On the rear, there is a 16MP camera with an aperture of F1.7.
The camera comes with several software features such as Selfie Panoroma, Screen flash, Smart Facial Recognition and Palm Shutter. Smart Facial Recognition automatically chooses between the two lenses depending on the subject(s) being shot.
The dual camera array at the front is very impressive. You can easily switch between the portrait and wide-angle sensors. Images produced in well-lit situations are crisp and vivid and clearly a step above the front cameras of other smartphones at this price range.
Low-light performance is also surprisingly good. While the shots contain a fair bit of noise, they are extremely usable and well-exposed.
What is rather disappointing is the fact that there is a perceptible drop in quality when switching from the main sensor to the wide-angle sensor. Additionally, the lack of a front LED flash is surprising considering the device is aimed at selfie enthusiasts.
The rear camera produces sharp, crisp shots though it struggles quite a bit with low light images. Images shot in less than ideal lighting conditions lack detailing and have quite a bit of noise, jagged edges and pixelation.
Color rendition is also an issue with the rear camera. Colors are not true to life and have a cold, blue-ish tone to them. The camera performance is extremely snappy, with little or no lag in focusing and processing. While the UI of the camera app looks uncannily like the camera app in iOS, it is easy and intuitive to use.
All in all, while the front cameras(s) of the Oppo F3 Plus sets segment benchmarks, the rear camera is average at best.
Battery
The Oppo F3 Plus well and truly shines when it comes to battery life. The device is powered by a mammoth 4,000mAh battery which paired with Oppo's VOOC flash charge technology makes the F3 Plus a great choice for road warriors. Oppo claims that the F3 Plus can deliver up to 2 hours of talk time in just 5 minutes of charging.
In the 9 days I used the F3 Plus as my primary device, the smartphone lasted a day easily with more than 50 per cent of charge left by the end of the day. I use my device quite intensively and with a lighter workload, the device will easily last you more than two days with a single charge.
In a day and age where smartphones struggle to last even a single day (*cough*iPhone*cough), the battery life of the Oppo F3 Plus is a breath of fresh air and might be reason enough to buy the smartphone.
Verdict
The Oppo F3 Plus makes a great buy for those looking for a multimedia focused smartphone with its stellar battery life, mammoth 6-inch fullHD display and segment leading front cameras.
At Rs 30,990, the F3 Plus is an extremely solid offering from Oppo and features great battery life and one of the best front cameras around. However, the unpolished UI, average rear camera, lack of stereo speakers and commonplace design hold it back from being truly exemplary.
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