Oppo makes room for genius

New from Chinese manufacturer Oppo, the R7 Plus is a powerful 4G smartphone with a great build, good performance and top-quality cameras.

Moulded from a single piece of magnesium-aluminium alloy – the same material used for aircraft fuselages – the phone goes through “48 polishing processes”, Oppo says, so you’re holding one tough, shiny machine in your hands.

Add to that the hard Corning Gorilla 3 glass protecting the six-inch, Super Amoled display – 1080x1920-pixel resolution on a curved-edge 2.5D Arc Edge Screen – and you’re basically ready for the battle zone.

Several improvements over the previous R5 make the R7 Plus considerably thicker – 4.9mm for the R5, 7.75mm for this one. |That adds room for more memory and a 3.5mm stereo jack, whereas the R5 required a USB micro-adapter when you wanted to listen to music, which was far less convenient.

The R7 Plus has three gigabytes of working memory (RAM) and 32GB of internal memory, expandable to 128GB, compared to 2GB of RAM and 16GB internally on the R5, not expandable. You also have two nano-SIM slots, one of which will take a microSD card.

Another nice new feature is the touch-type fingerprint scanner for unlocking the screen and encrypting applications. While you can set up a “guest mode” so friends can use your phone, you can hide any apps from them that they shouldn’t see or might screw up, as even the best of friends sometimes do.

In testing the phone, I first had to draw a “password pattern” in case the fingerprint scan ever malfunctions, but that’s not a problem I encountered. The scanning worked fine every time, and you can scan up to five different fingertips for more secure reference.

Like the R5, the R7 Plus is powered by a Qualcomm MSM8939 1.5GHz eight-core 64-bit processor, but now the extra RAM gives you faster performance.

You have the Android 5.1.1 operating system with the “ColorOS 2.1” user-interface, very colourful indeed. The screen themes are fully customisable themes. You can draw a chosen pattern on the screen to activate the phone, open specific apps and launch the camera.

I found the touch screen and menus very responsive and the applications speedy and smooth. The display is quite vibrant, great for viewing videos and photos.

Video clips and high-resolution music files played without a hitch, including full hi-res FLAC 24bit/192kHz tracks that I sampled through Sony’s MDR-1ABT headphones. Every detail came through crisp and the bass was intense.

As for 4G LTE connections, my hook-up with TrueMove H’s LTE was super-fast. I could back up photos to Microsoft OneDrive and upload them to Facebook and download applications, all in a snap. The Ookla speedtest app measured downloads at 60.92Mbps and uploads at 21.37.

In terms of shot-making capability, the 13-megapixel rear camera uses an image sensor from Sony and a Schneider-Kreuznach lens to ensure sharp detail. Once launched, the main camera is ready to shoot in just seven-tenths of a second and focuses in 0.3 second. That rapid focus is due to a dual-drive hybrid system combining the standard Contrast Detection Autofocus (AF) and the new Phase Detection Auto Focus (PDAF). 

The eight-megapixel camera up front uses Golden Angle technology and has a “Beautify” mode to hide those wrinkles and pimples in selfies.

The ColorOS 2.1 covers the camera functions as well. The camera-control software is called Pure Image 2.0, now also improved. 

The scene modes are Normal, Ultra-HD, Colourful Night, Slow Shutter, Expert Mode, Beautify, HDR, Panorama, Audio Photo, GIF, Double Exposure, Raw, Super Macro and After Focus. Choose Smart Scene to automatically select the mode appropriate for the current lighting environment. Ultra-HD mode increases the number of pixels using a complex algorithm covering 52 megapixels.

In my test the main camera captured impressive-quality photos in most lighting environments, including low light at night.

Battery life is good thanks to a 4,100mAh battery with VOOC flash-charging technology, so you can recharge for five minutes and get two hours of “talk time”.

The Oppo R7 Plus has a suggested retail price of Bt16,990, but there is also the Oppo R7 Lite available from Oppo Thailand for Bt10,990. It has all the same features, but the screen is five inches, the memory is just 2GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage, and the battery is 2,320mAh.