VERDICT
PROS:
- Great value
- Stylish design
- Decent camera
CONS:
- Intrusive UI
- Plastic edges
- Iffy auto brightness
Design:
How do you make something cheap seem expensive? That's a tough one for many designers, because if you get it wrong you might end up with a phone encrusted with plastic diamonds that you couldn't even sell on eBay.
Oppo has nailed the 'cheap expensive' look here, though. It's all about putting in 20% of the effort/cost for 80% of the returns.
The prime Oppo F1 tactic is using champagne-finish gold metal for the back, but sneakily switching to plastic for the sides. You get the feel of metal, but Oppo doesn't have to go to the trouble of cutting any ports into metal, which costs a fair bit to do right.
When I first opened up the Oppo F1 and had a close look at it, I experienced a twinge of disappointment when I realised that this was how Oppo managed to make a metal phone at this price.
However, a month on I still appreciate the feel of the metal back. Just don't enter into this relationship expecting something that feels exactly like an iPhone 6S.
It's not too far off, though. It has none of the chunk factor of some other good budget Android phones, and there's a smooth curvature to the sides of the Oppo F1 that means it doesn't feel boxy. The display is even covered with 2.5D Gorilla Glass, which is toughened and has a smoothed-off edge.
The Oppo F1 is out to deliver on a whole load of s-words: skinny, smooth, sleek. It also looks great, at least from the back - I wouldn't have flinched if someone told me the phone cost £300/$400.
The Oppo F1 isn't quite as pretty from the front, though - viewed face-on the handset exhibits a slight boxiness that doesn't affect the rest of the phone. And, like the OnePlus X, it has soft keys but they don't light up. Still, this is one of the nicest-looking cheap handsets out there, only obviously upstaged by the OnePlus X, which costs roughly the same in the US and just £30 more in the UK, yet uses almost no visible/proddable plastic. Competing with OnePlus in the pricing stakes isn't easy, though.
Finishing touches that help the Oppo F1 'fake it to make it' include a non-removable back and a SIM card tray like you'd see in an iPhone; a lot of cheaper devices still use peel-off back covers that hide a less fancy SIM slot.
Key features
On the surface, then, the Oppo F1 can pass for a more expensive phone, but chip off that glossy top layer and we find something more familiar. The features of the F1 are 'just right' for this sort of cash, with Oppp not really squeezing in every extra bit of spec possible, as OnePlus manages with the OnePlus X.
In some areas this doesn't matter too much. The Oppo F1 has 16GB of memory, which might not be enough for some of you, but then there's also a microSD memory card slot in the SIM tray. There's more, actually - the second slot in the tray can be used to hold either a microSD card or a second SIM card.
The Oppo F1's display is classic mid-range fodder. It's got a 5-inch 720p IPS LCD, pretty similar to the one on the Motorola Moto G.
This is a perfectly good screen that I get on with perfectly happily. It's fairly sharp, goes quite bright and has decent image quality in general.
There are niggles to point out though, if you're that way inclined. For example, you can tell it's not the most advanced, newest generation of IPS LCD tech. You lose a bit of brightness at an angle, the display appears a teeny tiny bit recessed, and in certain lighting conditions and at certain extreme angles there's what looks like contrast shift.
Most of the time, though, you won't notice any of this. The only thing that did get on my wick at times was the auto brightness setting, which just doesn't seem to be very good - I still find myself 'going manual' with screen brightness when the Oppo F1's supposedly smart backlight mode doesn't do what I need it to.
It may be starting to sound like the Oppo F1's screen is one of its weak points. It's not, but at around £170/$250 we are getting close to the price at which you can snag a 1080p mobile phone. Granted, most are still significantly more expensive, but the OnePlus X and Honor 5X aren't.
Performance and battery life
The Oppo F1's software won't sit well with everyone, and it doesn't feel quite as speedy as using the Google Now Launcher, but that's mostly because it uses some longer screen transition animations. This phone is pretty fast.
It has more power than it strictly needs, if anything. The Oppo F1 has a Snapdragon 616 CPU, a tweaked version of the Snapdragon 615 processor seen in several phones costing up to around £300/$400 over the last 18 months.
This is an eight-core processor designed to keep 1080p phones nippy, not 720p ones like this. All eight cores are Cortex-A53s, but with a team of four clocked at 1.7GHz and the others at 1.2GHz.
1 scores 3030, which is terrific for a phone of this price.
The importance of those numbers can be overstated, though. The Snapdragon 616 still has a fairly humble Adreno 405 GPU, meaning graphics performance is actually not on the same level as some older phones that might score similarly in Geekbench.
Before you get too confused: you don't need to worry about this much. While having this chipset means some games won't let you turn on certain special graphics extras, gaming performance in general is spot on. The Oppo F1 is a surprisingly great budget games phone, matching good specs with that loud speaker.
Battery life
You might expect a dead skinny phone like the Oppo F1 to have a small battery, but the device has a perfectly decent one for the display size and resolution. It's a 2500mAh unit, very similar to the 2470mAh pack in the Motorola Moto G.
In general use I found the Oppo F1 to be lagging just a little behind its Motorola rival in terms of stamina, though not by a huge amount. It tends to last comfortably until bed time, with up to 30% charge left, but it's still a phone you'll need to charge every day. It's no two-day warrior - very few phones are.
In our usual battery test, which involves playing a Full HD film at full brightness for 90 minutes, the Oppo F1 lost 15% of its charge. That's actually better than the 19% drop shown by the Moto G, and a very good result for any phone.
Judging by my time with the handset, the slightly lesser day-to-day stamina could be down to the auto brightness setting often cranking up the backlight more than is needed. Or maybe I just have slightly rose-tinted memories of the Moto G.
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