Oppo R7 an Apple iPhone clone, but worth the money

The Oppo R7 may be an iPhone 6 rip-off when it comes to design. But it does have some stellar features of its own.

To say the Oppo R7 is an iPhone 6 rip-off when it comes to design would be an understatement. Everything from the rounded edges and metallic back through to the default wallpaper and the sliding camera menu reeks of Apple’s magic looks.

Given there’s no Android app drawer to store away your apps, you might find yourself with a home screen that’s Apple-esque as well. Later this month you’ll see a bigger 6-inch version with a fingerprint reader called, you guessed it, the R7 Plus.

But to simply label the R7 an iPhone clone would be misguided. It is in fact an affordable Android phone with some stellar features of its own. Oppo, along with Huawei and OnePlus, is one of a few Chinese players seriously targeting the Australian market, with their promise of premium features at a bargain price.

The R7 is not as good as the iPhone 6, but it costs $449 RRP. Slot in a 128GB microSD card and you have the storage capacity to rival Apple’s 128GB bestseller, which costs $1299 locally.

In fact the R7, with its 1080p full HD display, isn’t even Oppo’s premium model. Oppo’s Find 7 boasts a Quad HD display at $719.

The R7’s standout feature is the fast charging. During my testing over the past week, a five minute charge typically took the R7 from flat to about 11 per cent, a further 10 minutes saw it at 35 per cent and the phone was 90 per cent charged in 30 minutes.

It’s all quite impressive but you do need Oppo’s proprietary adaptor for it to work.

Given the cost of the R7, you’d expect a few features to be missing. And they are. There’s no Near Field Communication (NFC) chip that you’d use for tap-and-go payments in future years. You can’t connect to 5 Gigahertz WiFi networks available on newer domestic WiFi AC routers and you can’t shoot or play back ultra-high definition (4K) video.

Oppo says the R7 does connect to all of Australia’s 4G LTE networks, but the phone offers less LTE frequencies than some other handsets. That could affect your use of some 4G networks overseas.

While it’s not 4K, the R7’s 5.0-inch display has full HD 1080 x 1920 pixel resolution at a stunning 445 pixels per inch. By way of comparison, the iPhone 6’s 4.8-inch display is 750 x 1334 pixels or 326ppi.

AMOLED displays have a tendency to look washed out in sunlight, but I found the R7’s display readable outdoors; maybe a little less than the iPhone 6’s but adequate.

If these points don’t worry you, you’ll be surprised about what the R7 offers.

The Oppo R7 can operate two SIM cards at once. This can be useful when travelling. You can place a local SIM in one slot and your home SIM in the second, take and receive calls and text using either, and choose which to use for data. The two slots house a micro and nano SIM.

One of these slots can also house a microSD card for extra storage. You’ll need to do that, given the phone’s meagre 16GB of internal storage, of which only around 10GB was available during testing. But it’s an either-or scenario: if you use 2 SIM cards, you’ll have to sacrifice storage.

The R7 has an 8-core Snapdragon 615 processor. It’s not the latest by any means, and while it’s snappy, the 615 falls behind in graphics performance, as measured by AnTuTu’s 5.7.1 benchmark.

Power-wise, we could play 720p video for more than 10 hours at 75 per cent screen brightness, which is a great result. But with heavy everyday usage I found the battery drained quite quickly, an issue remedied somewhat by the flash charge capability.

The high-resolution 13 megapixel back-facing camera provides great detail but the colour accuracy and contrast functions aren’t the best.

However, there are plenty of shooting options. There’s a feature called “camera shop” with a myriad of settings you can try out to get the best results.

You can also make animated GIFs and shoot panoramas. With video there’s slow motion at quarter speed, and you can speed things up two to 10 times. There’s also an eight megapixel front-facing camera.

The R7 uses Android Lollipop 5.1.1 overlaid with Oppo’s ColorOS 2.1.0 which mercifully doesn’t heavily change the pristine Android experience. The R7 is an attractive Android phone that provides great value for money, delivering the look and feel, if not the functions, of an iPhone 6.

The Oppo R7 is available through Dick Smith and Optus.

Rating: 7/10
Price: $449 rrp.