Our last encounter with an all-metal 'big' phone was when we tried and tested the Samsung Galaxy A8. Our fresh encounter with an all-metal 'big' phone involves a relatively lesser known company from China of the name Oppo. The phone in question here is the R7 Plus that was launched in India on Wednesday at a price of Rs.29,990 and will go on sale starting September 25.
Both the Samsung Galaxy A8 (5.7-inch) and the Oppo R7 Plus (6-inch) aspire to do something similar, which is offering a mid-range phablet with a mid-range processor and promising camera capabilities to buyers. If you dig inside a little, you'll find that both these phones have more or less similar specifications set as well. And on the outside, well, there is of course the fingerprint scanner (in addition to metal and everything), that's becoming quite the norm these days.
There was a time when Oppo phones were slim, heck they were 'super' slim if you may. The R5 was the slimmest phone in town - for a brief period though - but all that slimness also came at a price, read compromise. With time, the company has grown only wiser, it seems. The result, well, the R7 Plus isn't the slimmest in town anymore. The R7 Plus (along with the R7) is the supposed successor to the R5, and was supposed to be super slim too had Oppo gone that way. But, it hasn't. Not that we are complaining.
At 7.8mm and 192 grams, the R7 Plus now figures in the list of 'chunkier' phones, our comparison being with the Galaxy A8 and the Apple iPhone 6 Plus. That said, it's still a pretty well manageable handset, particularly when you consider it's a 6-incher. For a 6-inch phone, it still looks (and feels) quite well put out and easy to operate. But then of course, this is not a phone for people with small hands, or those that loathe 'big' phablets.
The R7 Plus boasts of an all-metal uni-body design - 91 per cent metal, says Oppo - with the power button on the right while the volume rockers on the left. The front panel is a slightly raised platform with rounded glass edges - Oppo calls it the 2.5D arc-edge screen - making it look as if it's an entirely different piece. The front comes with Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection.
The design of the Oppo R7 is decent: keeps things simple and doesn't go overboard. We still prefer Samsung's design (and weight) of the Galaxy A8 more than this one though.
The fingerprint scanner module on the R7 Plus is located on the back under the camera sensor, something that can be a hit or miss placement depending on how you hold your phone.
The Oppo R7 Plus comes with a 6-inch FullHD IPS Super AMOLED display with a 1080x1920 pixels resolution and 367 ppi pixel density. This is more or less the same deal you get on the Galaxy A8 (5.7-inch FullHD and 386 ppi). While we did test the R7 Plus under low light conditions, we were pretty satisfied with its display output: it was bright and colour saturation was mostly spot-on. We liked that it had better viewing angles than the A8 and wasn't prone to the gradual tinting of the screen when viewing it at an angle.
The screen is however prone to fingerprint and smudge.
The Oppo R7 Plus is powered by a 1.5GHz octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 processor with 3GB RAM and 32GB internal storage. The phone is expandable by up to 128GB via microSD card. The Snapdragon 615 could be a deal breaker for many since it's a mid-range processor and the R7 Plus costs a good odd Rs.30,000. You're getting cheaper phones with better processors these days. We found the Galaxy A8's Exynos 5430 a major deal breaker in our review since that one felt underpowered when compared with rivals. The Snapdragon 615 is more or less equivalent to the Exynos 5430 (on paper) and we foresee more or less similar results in usage as well.
In our brief usage, we found the R7 Plus to be fairly nippy and responsive (with some heating). But more on that in our detailed review.
The R7 Plus runs Android 5.1-based ColorOS 2.1 out-of-the-box which like most Chinese UIs is heavily inspired from Apple's iOS with few Oppo nuggets dropped in here and there.
On the camera front, it sports a 13-megapixel rear camera with laser autofocus and dualLED flash. There's also an 8-megapixel camera up-front.
We clicked some photos at the launch event, and the result (in low light) was average at best.
Although the phone was fairly quick to focus (owing to laser focus tech), images clicked had noise and loss of detail was quite evident.
The R7 Plus supports 4G LTE on both SIMs and features one hybrid card slot that you can use either to put SIM or microSD.
It is backed by a 4,100 mAh battery which is obviously huge to look at on paper. The phone also supports Oppo's proprietary VOOC fast charging technology.
There you go. While our first impressions of the Oppo R7 Plus have been largely positive, we still need more time with the phone to give out a final verdict. The R7 Plus is a plus-sized phablet with a well to-do spec sheet. But, it's expensive. The question is would you as a buyer prefer Samsung - a well known company - and buy its Galaxy A8 (Rs.32,500) or try out a relatively lesser known brand, Oppo and go for its R7 Plus (Rs.29,900).
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