Oppo F1s Selfie Expert: say cheese after you’ve bought some
This Chinese iPhone knock-off has a tricked-up 16MP camera and sells for $349 at Woolworths. We give it 7/10.
Somewhere between the Tim Tams and Homebrand frozen peas, you might find room for an Oppo F1s Selfie Expert smartphone on your shopping list. That’s because buying a highly specced smartphone is now as easy as choosing a can of baked beans.
While supermarkets have sold cheapies for years, you can now buy a $349 phone that flies with an 8-core processor, is juiced-up with a 3075 milliampere hour battery, and has a 16 megapixel front facing selfie camera from Woolies. Welcome to cheap high specced China branded phones at your supermarket. But just what do you get for your money?
Like the more expensive Oppo R9 Plus, the F1s is an iPhone 6s Plus knock-off in design. The front glass facade is iPhone-eque as is the rear aluminium build. But it’s rearranged enough to be a bit different. The power button is above rather than below the SIM card tray for example.
It is an Android phone so you have a microUSB v2 connector instead of a Lightning one, and the SIM tray has a spot for a 128 Gigabyte microSD card for additional storage. The back facing 13 megapixel camera doesn’t jut out as much as Apple’s. You pay $1000 more for Apple’s device.
Selfie heaven
The F1s has a rich feature set. Take the 16MP selfie camera that’s higher resolution than the back snapper.
I could take voice activated selfies by saying the word “cheese” or when the camera recognised my palm in shot. There’s a short countdown before the photo. There’s also a feature called selfie panorama which takes three front facing photos. You twist your wrist both ways from the centre. It then stitches these photos together. It’s for selfie group shots. It did take a little time to master.
The camera app too is an iPhone knock-off. Even touching the screen to adjust brightness brings up the same yellow adjustment line although you miss features such as 4K video, face/smile detection and touch focus.
Out in the bright sunlight F1s camera detail is good but you miss the stronger depth of colour and much richer texture of high end cameras. An iPhone photo of my leather coat showed details of the creases and shadows better than the F1s. The black coat too had a bluish tinge. In general the F1s colours were somewhat washed.
In low light conditions without flash there’s a bigger difference in photo quality. But generally photos are OK and offer good resolution considering the price and with expert mode, you have granular control over settings.
Fun features include an ability to instantly create GIFs and an “ultra-HD” mode where it shoots four frames and combines into one. Double exposure lets you create ghostlike images with items in one shot but not the next.
Despite its modest price the F1s has in-built fingerprint recognition that gets you quickly past the lock screen. But there’s more. You can assign five different fingerprints to different applications and contacts. I could unlock the phone and open the mail app in a single action with my right index finger, or unlock it with my middle finger and instantly call a friend. It was like playing the piano with the home button.
It’s a growing feature of smartphones to offer you a second level of secure access beyond the lock screen. You can hand your phone to friends unlocked but with some data and apps protected. Samsung offers this through Knox.
On the F1s, you can share your phone but still keep some apps and data under lock and key. The app encryption feature lets you nominate apps that require extra authentication before they open. You can make this easy for yourself by nominating your fingerprint to open an encrypted app. Similarly you can select files to store in encrypted form in the “file safe”.
On the minus side the screen, although bright, clear and easily readable outdoors, is 720p rather than 1080p. We’re spoiled on higher resolution displays.
Stuck on Lollipop
Like many manufacturers Oppo overlays standard Google Android with its own operating system layer, ColorOS 3.0. Oppo says this extra OS layer offers fast operation through better management of background apps. Getting through menus into apps is really quick. And there’s an eye protection feature that filters blue light. Then there’s the long screen shot. It lets you save several screens full of text and images as one long image.
But manufacturers that use non standard Android are slower to update their OS, and this phone is stuck on Android 5.1, Lollipop. The current Android is 6.0 Marshmallow with Android 7.0 Nougat coming now.
ColorOS bucks stock Android by not having an apps draw. So again you are in the iPhone situation of having all your apps on successive home screens.
The 8-core Cortex-A53 processor delivers reasonable performance given the cycle speed is only 1.5GHz. Graphics is where the problem lies. Motion was jittery during AnTuTu’s benchmark test which rated the phone overall at 41222. That’s oodles behind market leaders like the Samsung S7 edge (134559) and even the Galaxy S6 (76912).
In the end, this phone isn’t for playing games. But when navigating menus, opening apps, and for general business use, it feels quick. Battery life was pretty reasonable. The F1s would last all day with average usage. In our test the 3075 mAh battery gave us 9 hours of battery life playing video at 50pc brightness. The phone however is slow to charge. If you want Oppo’s fast charging, you need to buy the R9 or R9 Plus.
The phone supports Bluetooth 4.0 but there’s no Near Field Communications for payments systems, nor Wi-Fi 802.11 ac support.
Despite its lack of graphics power, slower charging and 720p screen, you get great features in this $349 phone, it’s remarkable for its price. Woolworths is selling it on a $35 per month plan with a Woolies SIM card in selected stores and online. If you want to buy it outright, head to JB Hi-Fi stores or online or Oppo online.
Price: $349 or on a Woolworths SIM card
Rating: 7/10
TikTok to rock in Circular Quay
In one of the most significant signings, social networking operator TikTok is looking at a major chunk of space in Sydney’s soon-to-be tallest office tower.
Sony ups the ante with brilliant headphones
Now that headphones offer us brilliant sound, what new frontiers can there possibly be?