Better late than never. OPPO, one of the fastest growing Chinese smartphone makers in India, joined the bezel-less frenzy with the long-overdue launch of the OPPO F5 smartphone on Thursday, November 2. With this, the company will be joining the growing list of brands, including Apple, Vivo, Samsung, LG, Xiaomi, and others.
OPPO is promoting its F5 smartphone as the latest selfie-smartphone with a reliable 20MP front-facing snapper, but the 6-inch 18:9 ratio Full HD+ (20160x1080 pixels) display is an eye candy. The single unibody design is inspired by OPPO F-series smartphones, giving a polished and a refined look.
But due to the shredding of the bezels, OPPO is forced to move the fingerprint scanner to the back. If users find the rear-mounted fingerprint scanner inconvenient, OPPO has a desirable solution. The F5 comes with facial recognition technology, which helps users unlock the phone as quickly as the fingerprint scanner, but the technology's reliability is questionable when compared to the fingerprint ID.
The display houses the Home, Back and app toggle menu at the bottom. The overall design of the handset is built to flaunt, and it has a sleek 7.5mm width, which makes the phone handy and light.
Instead of simply slapping the selfie-expert label, OPPO is making a significant improvement to the front camera, which houses a 20MP sensor with f/2.0 aperture, AI integration and Bokeh mode to blur the background.
According to the company, the selfie camera uses 200 positioning spots that "reference the image against a global database of human faces to learn facial features, shapes and structures, F5 can distinguish each person's face features from skin tone and type, gender, age and more."
In simple words, the camera includes the Beauty mode for you to enhance your selfies and further users can make necessary adjustments using built-in photo editor. There's a new Expert mode to allow you to test the 16MP rear camera's full potential by adjusting shutter speed, focus, ISO and white balance.
Besides the display and the camera, OPPO F5 brings more to the table that makes it an upgrade-worthy choice.
OPPO F5 is powered by an octa-core chipset, paired with 4GB RAM and 32GB storage. The phone has a 3,200mAh battery and a microUSB slot at the bottom charges it. There are two SIM card slots and a dedicated microSD card slot. It appears OPPO is one of the few companies left that still values expandable storage without compromising the secondary SIM slot. Like other OPPO phones, the F5 runs Android Nougat-based ColorOS 3.2.
OPPO F5 comes in 3 colours. The Gold and Black versions with 4GB RAM will be available from November 9 in offline and online stores. Finally, the price of the handset is Rs. 20,990, which quite really makes a dent in the race for premium looking smartphones at a reasonable price. If you are a power-user, OPPO has a 6GB RAM model, which comes in Black and Red hues, and it will be available in December. The premium variant is priced at Rs. 24,990.
In addition to these features, OPPO F5 comes with a special Game Acceleration feature useful for gamers, by bringing a smoother game experience and optimizing the game display configuration to fully utilize hardware resource. The handset also has an O-share file transfer technology, which is about 100 times faster than Bluetooth.
"Our focus has always been on bringing the best photography and Selfie experience to the Indian consumers. We have been leading the Selfie industry in the Indian market with our Selfie Expert F series for which we have received immense response, especially from the youth. With the launch of F5 that offers the first A.I. Beauty technology in India, we are confident of going further ahead in this journey. Thus, the new brand slogan, The Selfie Expert and Leader, truly represents our ambition to continue being the leaders in the market," Sky Li, global VP and president of OPPO India, said in a statement.
Wait, there's more
Thursday's event wasn't all about OPPO F5. The company announced its second brand ambassador, and the recent TVCs and ad campaigns have already revealed it to be Bollywood actor Sidharth Malhotra, who'll be joining the popular actress Deepika Padukone in the brand's future journey in India.
