Oppo’s R9 smartphone one to watch

Chinese smartphone maker OPPO is taking on the iPhone with its new flashy handsets.

Chinese smartphone maker OPPO is looking to up the ante on mid-range smartphones with the release of the new R9 and R9 Plus.

Australia will be receiving both handsets in May with the R9 coming in at $599 while its bigger brother, the R9 Plus, bumps up the price to $699.

The R9 offers top shelf specs for the price with a 5.5-inch 1080p AMOLED display, eight-core processor, 13 MP rear shooter, 4GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage in addition to a dual-SIM card slot that can accept either a second sim or a microSD card for expanded storage.

OPPO is hoping to capitalise on the selfie craze with a whopping 16MP front facing camera built by Samsung in addition to OPPO’s proprietary VOOC flash charge technology, which the company claims can reach 70 per cent battery life after just 30 minutes of charging.

The larger R9 Plus bumps up the screen size to 6-inches and also sports a slightly sharper 16MP rear camera.

Both handsets come with a fingerprint scanner that OPPO claims can unlock the phone in only 0.2 seconds. We put the fingerprint scanner through its paces in a brief hands-on and we found it to be noticeably quicker than both the iPhone 6s and Samsung’s Galaxy S7. Palm sweaters will be relived to hear that the fingerprint scanner will also work with wet hands, which is a first for a smartphone.

The R9 and R9 Plus share a lot of similarities with the iPhone from the eye catching rose gold metallic design to the iOS inspired Android software. Despite housing a larger 5.5-inch display, the R9 is noticeably lighter and thinner than the iPhone 6s while the double anodisation process ensures a grippier hand holding experience.

The demo units we were playing with did have a few scratches on the display but the company assured us that they are using Gorilla Glass 4 so, in theory, it should be just as resistant to scratching as other flagship smartphones.

We briefly tested out the rear camera and noticed that it produced slightly brighter shots than the iPhone but they weren’t quite as detailed with signs of over sharpening. The f/2.0 aperture means that it isn’t going to challenge the likes of the Galaxy S7 but it should give other sub-$600 handsets a run for their money.

OPPO made a lot of noise about its 16MP front facing camera and it looked impressive, producing bright and colourful images. There’s also a selfie panorama feature that, with a few turns of the wrist, allow you to get more people in the shot than before.

What was strangely absent was the company’s new ‘Super VOOC’ flash charging technology which OPPO first unveiled at MWC earlier this month. The proprietary charging tech can completely charge a dead flat smartphone in under 15 minutes but its absence in the R9 suggests that OPPO might be saving the feature for their flagship N series which is due for an update later this year. That said, the R9 is still faster to charge than most handsets on the market with the older VOOC standard on-board.

The new handsets also comes loaded with OPPO’s custom Android software, Color OS 3.0, which is based on Android 5.1. The new flat design shares a striking resemblance to iOS 9 with the company going as far as comparing speeds of both mobile operating systems side-by-side. In its keynote, OPPO demonstrated how launching apps like the Calendar or the web browser was a hair quicker on the R9 versus the iPhone. OPPO claims that app start-up times are now 25 per cent faster compared to Color OS 2.1.

While still a relative newcomer to the Australian market, OPPO smartphones have been very popular in its home country, outselling Korean giant Samsung.

OPPO recently shook up the budget end of the smartphone market with the release of the $199 F1 which boasts a metallic build and a decent 13MP camera. The Chinese smartphone maker now looks to be hitting the right notes in the mid-tier with the R9 and R9 Plus but we’ll reserve final judgment until we get our hands on a review unit.