Oppo R7 Review

Oppo recently celebrated their 10th anniversary and to celebrate that launched two new devices, the Oppo R7 and the Oppo R7 Plus. The Oppo R7 is currently up for pre-order and will hit the markets in early July yet we already got a sample for review thanks to Oppo and international reseller OppoStyle.com.

The Oppo R7 is the successor of the Oppo R5 that made headlines earlier this year being the worlds thinnest phone for a short while until Vivo kicked it off its thrown. But Oppo learned something from the R5: Making extremely thin phones isn’t necessarily the best idea in the world. While you absolutely can not deny the fact that such devices look awesome, they come with lots of limitations which in case of the R5 made the phone quite unusable.

Now with the Oppo R7 they take everything they learned from the Oppo R5 and pack it into a new device that’s supposed to be very thin again, yet without the previous flaws. Increasing the thickness to 6.3mm (which still is extremely thin) allowed them to gain more room for cooling and the battery. So lets have a closer look at this device to see if Oppo did right this time.

Unboxing

Due to the fact that we didn’t get the final product this time, unboxing the R7 was rather boring this time. We didn’t get the retail packaging and also it came without the accessories you usually get with Oppo phones. Our package only contained the phone, a VOOC charging cable and the 4A VOOC wall charger. If you buy the phone once it is available or pre-order it now you will of course get the usual documentation and Oppo in-ear headphones. Pre-orders also qualify for a free bluetooth headset at the moment, so head over to www.oppostyle.com and check it out.

Design

The Oppo R7 simply looks stunning, there is no way for us to deny that. It is almost entirely made from metal, which doesn’t only look nice but also feels nice. Thanks to the curved edges and the 2.5D curved glass on the front, it feels very cuddly in the hands and not as “sharp” as some other full metal devices out there. What’s more, despite the extremely thin body (6.3mm) the handset remains extremely sturdy. There is no way to bend it, even if force. We have no idea how they did that, but they did it! So build quality is simply outstanding. Oh and by the way, they also improved the layout of the phone compared to the Oppo R5. This time you get a 3.5mm headphone jack and the camera doesn’t stand out of the body that much anymore.

So no complaints this time? Well, we have a few, but nothing significant. First of all we would’ve liked the power button to offer a stronger pressure point. It happened frequently that we pressed it accidentally. Another part we dislike a bit is that Oppo does not back illuminate the touch buttons which should be the case at a price-tag of $399. Also for some the status LED might be disappointing since it is white and doesn’t support different colors. Lastly, some might also have issues with the phones grip. If you have very dry hands the phone can slip out of your hands easily. Anyway, all of this is complaining at a very high level considering the build quality and everything else, so you might easily overlook those tiny issues.

Screen

The Oppo R7 still comes with a full HD Super AMOLED screen like its predecessor, but this time with a size of 5-inches. If you every enjoyed the pleasure of using a device with an OLED display you’ll know that those screens are just amazing. Every sub-pixel of the screen is one tiny LED. This means that the screen doesn’t need any backlight, which makes it thinner, energy efficient and extremely bright. The most amazing part about OLED displays are color and black levels. Black really is black and colors just pop. Outdoor readability is very nice as well, leaving any LCD panel way behind. All in all the screen is very good and a pleasure to use, and that applies to the touch panel as well, which offers one of the smoothest surfaces we’ve met on phone to date plus is very precise and snappy. Love at the very first touch is what we call this!

Hardware

The Oppo R7 still shares the same SoC with its predecessor and this is the Snapdragon 615. This time they combined this chipset with 3GB of RAM and 16GB of internal memory, which actually is expandable thanks to the combo SIM Slot which either takes one micro SIM and one nano SIM card or one micro SIM and one micro SD card. Now if you remember back the review of the Oppo R5 you’ll know that the performance was just awful. The main reason for this was that the chipset clocked down very fast because the cooling sucked inside the extremely thin body. Well, that issue certainly got fixed, but not entirely. The chipset unfortunately still doesn’t perform that well and in the end is far behind the Mediatek MT6752 which it competes with.

But why is that? Well, we believe the reason is a combination of several flaws. First of all, the Snapdragon 615 features a slightly different architecture than the MT6752. It is based on 8 ARM Cortex A53 cores, but they don’t run at the same frequency. Four of them are clocked at 1GHz and the other four at 1.5GHz. Now in the end that doesn’t make much sense if you use the same architecture for a big.LITTLE setup, even though Qualcomm claims this solution increases energy efficiency. But in the end this claim doesn’t reflect reality for one simple reason: Qualcomm sucks when it comes to processor management with their current 64-bit chipsets.

That becomes quite obvious while comparing the Snapdragon 615 to the MT6752 under similar conditions. One example: Check out the processor state of the Snapdragon 615 using CPU-Z in idle mode and compare it to the state of the MT6752 in idle mode. You’ll notice that even in idle mode the Snapdragon 615 almost constantly has all of its cores active, while the Mediatek chipset only runs a maximum of 2 cores. Now this alone significantly increases energy consumption and not only that, it also makes the SoC run hotter. But it doesn’t stop there. Throw some load at the SoCs, for example a 3D game like Dead Trigger 2, and you’ll notice another big difference. While the Snapdragon 615 keeps running all cores, the MT6752 will only run about 5 cores with very variable frequencies. Now if one core runs hot, the MT6752 will simply disable that specific core and move the tasks to a core that was disabled before and thus is very cool. This significantly reduces heat and energy consumption while maintaining a high performance. With the Snapdragon 615 things look totally different. The SoC simply handles tasks with all its cores and if you play a game they run at their maximum frequency. Temperature is going upwards of course, and due to the limited space for cooling available within the thin body it will quickly come to the point where it starts to clock down the CPU cores as well as the GPU to prevent itself from overheating.

It doesn’t take much to figure out what this means. Obviously the Snapdragon 615 performs great for a while, but once it got hot, performance will drop and we end up with the same issues like with the Oppo R5. While it is unlikely that you will notice any performance flaws in apps, games will quickly become unplayable and become more of a slideshow than a smooth gaming experience. So if you plan to use the Oppo R7 for gaming: Forget about that! In the end we have to say that the Snapdragon 615 might not’ve been the best choice for such a thin device and Oppo should’ve chosen a MTK SoC instead. So why they didn’t do it? Marketing probably. As a matter of fact, phones with Qualcomm chipsets sell better. In the past Mediatek SoCs haven’t been good. Obviously that changed, but this knowledge didn’t arrive in the minds of most people yet – unfortunately. And this is why most still prefer Qualcomm over Mediatek even though Mediatek outperformed Qualcomm this time.

Software

Every Oppo phone runs ColorOS, Oppo’s very own Android flavor, and thus the Oppo R7 isn’t an exception. Anyway, ColorOS never was an Android ROM we personally liked very much and many people out there share that opinion with us. The reason simply is that ColorOS used to look ugly for too long. It also wasn’t quite the most efficient ROM and the UI was a bit complicated to keep track off. But that changed, and how it did! With the most recent version of ColorOS, Oppo revamped almost the entire UI. It got flat, structured, full of contrast and colorful. We have to admit that we start to like ColorOS. The performance has been improved as well, mostly by a huge cut-down on animations.

So all in all we really like what’s going on there with ColorOS, but it wouldn’t be us if we wouldn’t have found any flaw. Fist of all, the Oppo R7 does run ColorOS 2.1 based on Android 4.4.4 KitKat instead of Android 5 Lollipop. We don’t get why and hope that Oppo will deliver a Lollipop update ASAP, since nowadays a 64-bit phone without Lollipop is kind of a huge let-down. Another flaw we found, but nothing significant, is a small bug with the volume settings of the phone. If you listen to music and get a notification, the music playback will suddenly turn to 100%. One press at the volume rocker will change it back to the initial volume. This is strange and especially annoying if you listen with headphones.

Audio Quality

Anyone who knows Oppo also knows that audio quality is a very important aspect with pretty much all of their devices. Now we’ve been very impressed with the audio quality of the Oppo R7’s speaker. Now don’t get us wrong, it doesn’t sound as amazing as on the Oppo Find 7, but that’s pretty much impossible we guess. But in fact for such a thin device the volume and amount of bass is simply insane, and believe it or not, you can actually use it to listen to music without getting sick. That’s very nice and definitely not the case with all Chinese phones. We also liked the performance of the headphone jack which is working absolutely flawless. Phone call quality also managed to impress us. The noise cancellation works very well thanks to a dedicated microphone and the voice quality was very clear on both ends.

Reception Quality

And again we’ve been positively impressed by the Oppo R7. Initially we had some doubts because of all the metal but Oppo did a really good job to ensure it doesn’t have any impact on reception quality. The signal strength doesn’t have to hide behind any high-end device but that really can be expected at this price-level. The same applied to Wi-Fi. The only real flaw of the Oppo R7, and that especially applies to European users, is that it does not support FDD-LTE band 20 at 800MHz which often is used country-side across Europe. GPS performance has been as good as we are used to from Qualcomm chipsets with blazing fast fix times and lots of satellites.

Camera

Unfortunately the Oppo R7 let us down with its camera. Now once again, don’t get this wrong, the camera is far away from being bad, but it really isn’t what Oppo advertised it to be nor is it anything one would expect at a price-tag of $399. We aren’t sure if its the Samsung ISOCELL 13 mega pixel sensor or the software part, but we are not satisfied with the low-light performance, sharpness and contrast at all. White objects (white roses for example) almost don’t show any details and look somehow overexposed. If you zoom into pictures you won’t find any fine details but more of a blurred mess. Also, it’s pretty much impossible to take sharp pictures in low light or with the LED flash. Video recordings look ok and offer a good audio quality but aren’t perfect as well. We noticed fractals every once in a while. The front camera is quite ok but far from being outstanding as well. So all in all, quite a disappointment.

Battery

One of the biggest flaws of the Oppo R5 was its battery life which didn’t even last us half a day from time to time. Now with the Oppo R7 this has greatly improved and probably isn’t entirely caused by the larger cell (3,320mAh) but also due to a much better optimization of the hardware and software energy efficiency. This doesn’t means however that the battery life is flawless, it isn’t. Power using the phone some of you might have serious issues getting throughout one day and have to limit themselves a bit (not much, just a bit). With some more optimization, especially on the processor management side, Oppo would be able to get a lot more juice out of the battery and we hope that they’ll do exactly that with future updates.

Something we worry about much more is the fast charging that is being used on this phone. As amazing as VOOC is, delivering a full battery within 1 hour and 15 minutes or a 2-hour phone call after 5 minutes of charging, it kills the battery. We notice that with our Oppo Find 7 we once reviewed. After about one year the battery is about to die and that obviously is caused by VOOC. Anyway, in case of the Oppo Find 7 it really doesn’t matter since you can get a new battery for $12. But with the Oppo R7 that is not the case since the battery is non-replaceable. Since the battery doesn’t last as long as it does with the Oppo Find 7, it means you will use up more cycles during the same amount of time which eventually means that the battery will die even faster. Now that is a big problem for a device that you can’t change the battery of and paid $399 for.

Oppo R7 Review: Verdict

All in all the Oppo R7 is an extremely beautiful and by no means bad phone. But there is a but: In our opinion it isn’t suitable for everyone and mainly targets people who are after design or Oppo fanboys/girls. Why? Well, it doesn’t offer anything that’d make us say “wow, we need to have that phone!” To be honest, it might even be distracting to some due to the extremely high price-tag of $399 since there are some significant flaws like the performance and the camera quality that both do not live up the price you pay for the phone. Also, we are not sure if VOOC is something you wanna have inside such thin devices with a non-replaceable battery. As a matter of fact it kills those cells fast and this is what we believe is a very problematic thing. Anyway, in the end you have to decide about that, our job is done, once again!

A big thanks goes to Oppo and OppoStyle who enabled us to be one of the first to get our hands on their new creation. If there are any questions left that’ve not been covered in this review, make sure to ask.

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