Oppo F15 Review: Why should you buy this smartphone in 2020?
As the mid-range smartphone market is dominated by companies like Xiaomi, Realme, and Vivo, Oppo is successful in competing with these giants by primarily focusing on imaging and premium design. With the start of 2020, Oppo launched Oppo F15 (successor to Oppo F11).
This phone doesn’t seem to be taking the packed competition lightly. It offers some necessary updates to the mid-range section like an in-display fingerprint sensor, 8 GB RAM, VOOC 3.0 fast charging support, a quad rear camera, a slim body, and a very new gradient finish on its back- all of this at a very suitable price. Oppo F15 goes straight up against other mid-range smartphones like Realme X2 and Redmi K20.
Design and Display
The Oppo F15 looks sleek and gives a premium flagship-like design. The phone has a lighter build with a marginally trimmed profile. The back and side have a glossy finish. With a thickness of 7.9 mm and a weight of 172g, it is quite comfortable to use. Given the aspect ratio of 20:9 and display of 6.4 inches, this is a tall phone.
There is a visible chin at the bottom and prominent teardrop notch on the top for the front camera, which will not even be noticeable after you use it for a while. There is a power button on its right and the split volume buttons on its left side. The USB-C port is placed centrally at the bottom edge along with the headphone jack on the bottom left and speaker grille on its bottom right.
There is an AMOLED panel with a Full-HD+ (2400X1080) screen resolution and protected by a strong Corning’s Gorilla Glass 5. The 6.4 inches display looks awesome in a really thin bezel. It provides good color and brightness even in broad daylight. There’s no doubt that this screen gives a fantastic viewing experience while watching youtube videos, playing games, watching movies, and so on. The text is sharp and you can also change the color variance in the setting, as per your convenience making it comfortable for your eyes while reading books, messages or watching any video contents.
Camera
Oppo F15 features a quad camera setup in the rear and has a brilliant single selfie camera. The camera is a much-needed upgrade and it is more than you get in any other device in its price range. There is a 48MP wide-angle camera with an f/1.8 aperture lens, an 8MP Ultrawide camera with f/2.25 aperture, a 2MP Depth camera with f/2.4 aperture, and finally a 2MP monochrome camera with f/2.4 aperture lens.
The rear camera performs with an excellency when it comes to day time shooting. The images are sharp, the colors are great and there are plenty of details. With the ultra-wide camera, you can capture landscape images without even worrying about missing any details and you can adjust more people to the frame.
The wide camera does a good job in ordinary as well as close-ups shots with decent sharpness and plenty of details, thanks to the Autofocus feature. The portrait mode is quite smooth, as it can easily capture human subjects and you can adjust the amount of blur in the picture you take. The night mode works fine but it is little slag in comparison to other high-end phones. There is a lack of details and the images are a bit noisy too.
The front camera is also a charm to this device. It holds a 16MP wide-angle camera with an f/2.0 aperture lens. The front camera will spread magic in your social media accounts. The images you click with this selfie shooter are sharp, supersaturated, and hold a lot of details all thanks to HDR. It also has a portrait mode with a smooth edge detection. The only flaw here is that it does not work with two or more than two subjects as the AI face detection gets confused.
The video recording is also a delight in this smartphone. The rear camera can shoot 1080p video recording at 30fps and 720p video recording at 30fps. There is no 4K video recording apart from its competitors, but the 1080p recording is smooth and stabilized. For a cool cinematic video experience, it features slow-motion and time-lapse too. The overall camera performance is excellent in this price range.
Chipset
The Oppo F15 is powered by an octa-core Mediatek Helio P70 Chipset. It has Mali G72 MP3 GPU and a large 8GB RAM. Though this chipset could have been better, it is not that bad. Being not that old in the smartphone industry, the Media Tek’s Octa-core chipset does a fine job. There’s no struggle in running any apps or just doing any task. With the 8 GB RAM, the multi-tasking is smoother. Anything like scrolling the menu or social media feed, opening apps and playing games among others are smooth.
The only flaw is the chipset is not updated. However, heavy games like PUBG, Asphalt, and Call of Duty can be played smoothly. Though you have to reduce the graphics frame rate, that’s only for the lag less experience. This device is available in only one configuration i.e internal storage of 128GB (which uses UFS 2.1 standard) combined with 8GB RAM.
Battery
The Oppo F15 is equipped with a large 4025 mAh Li-Po non-removable battery that supports VOOC 3.0 Flash Charge. This battery is pretty much what you need with all these powerful specs. It is more than enough to run the phone all day long even after playing games, watching videos, or scrolling social media feed. The performance rating of the battery is solid. And even if you run out of battery then you can charge the phone up to 50% in just 30 minutes and full charge in a little over an hour.
Oppo F15 Full Specifications:
DIMENSION
Type: AMOLED capacitive touchscreen, 16M colors
Size: 6.4 inches, 100.4 cm2 (85.5% screen-to-body ratio)
Resolution: 1080 x 2400 pixels, 20:9 ratio (408 ppi density)
Brightness: 430 nits max brightness
Protection: Corning Gorilla Glass 5
BODY
Dimensions: 160.2 x 73.3 x 7.9 mm (6.31 x 2.89 x 0.31 in)
Weight: 172 gram
Build: Glass front (Gorilla Glass 5), plastic frame, plastic back
SIM: Dual SIM (Nano-SIM, dual stand-by)
PLATFORM
Chipset: Mediatek MT6771V Helio P70 (12nm)
OS: Android 9.0 (Pie), ColorOS 6.1
CPU: Octa-core (4×2.1 GHz Cortex-A73 & 4×2.0 GHz Cortex-A53)
GPU: Mali-G72 MP3
STORAGE
microSDXC (dedicated slot)
Internal: 128GB internal storage with 4GB / 8GB RAM
CAMERA
MAIN CAMERA (Quad-camera)
48MP wide-angle camera, f/1.8 aperture, 0.8µm, PDAF
8MP Ultrawide camera, f/2.25 aperture, 13mm, 1.12µm, AF
2MP Depth camera, f/2.4 aperture
2MP, f/2.4 aperture, 1.75µm
Features: Dual-LED dual-tone flash, panorama, HDR
Video: 1080p video recording at 30fps, 720p video recording at 30fps
Features: slo-mo, time-lapse
Front Camera
16MP wide-angle camera, f/2.0 aperture, 26mm
Features: HDR
Video: 1080p video recording at 30fps
NETWORK
Technology: GSM/ HSPA/ LTE
2G bands: GSM 850/ 900/ 1800/ 1900
3G bands: HSDPA 850/ 900/ 2100
4G bands: 1, 3, 5, 8, 38, 40, 41
Speed: HSPA 42.2/ 11.5 Mbps, LTE-A
SOUND
3.5 mm audio jack
loudspeaker with a Stereo speaker
COMMUNICATION
WLAN: Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac dual-band, hotspot, wi-fi direct
GPS: Yes, with A-GPS, GLONASS, GALILEO, BDS
Bluetooth: 4.2, A2DP, LE
USB: 2.0, Type-C reversible connecter, USB On-The-Go
SENSORS
Acceleration, Gyro sensor, Proximity sensor, compass, fingerprint sensor (under display, optical)
BATTERY
Li-Po 4025 mAh, non-removable
Fast charging 20W
COLORS
Lightning Black
Unicorn White
Blazing Blue
LAUNCH
January 2020
Oppo F15 Price in Nepal:
NPR 39,990 (8GB + 128GB)
Price in India: INR 19,990 (8GB + 128GB)