Oppo A7 Quick Review & Top Features

OPPO has been on a spree of releasing its smartphones catered to all categories this year. Be it the revolutionary Find X, which featured a motorized panel on the top to hide all the cameras by tucking away into the phone, which resulted in the beautiful no bezel-less display. Or the F9 Pro that released not long ago, which featured OPPO’s VOOC flash charge that gave the phone 2-hour talk for a 5-minute charge, the phone catered to the above mid-range segment.

Despite its several releases this year, the company has unveiled yet another smartphone targeted for the mid-range segment called – the OPPO A7. We have used the new A7 for quite a while now, here are our initial impressions of the new mid-range device –

Design and Display

There is no denial that dewdrop design is the standard criterion for most of the notched display phones released this year. Shared by the same parent company, OPPO, Vivo, and OnePlus have all implemented the dewdrop display design language in one or more of their popular smartphones this year. And, the OPPO A7 is no exception, it features a 6.2-inch HD+ display with a water drop notch design that beholds the front-facing camera and the speaker grille on top. The front of the screen is pretty much to what we have seen in the previous OPPO phones line-up, OPPO F9 Pro, for instance. It features a small chin at the bottom, despite that it comprises a 88.4% screen-to-body-ratio that is protected by Corning Gorilla Glass.

The back of the OPPO A7 gets quite interesting, we had the Glaring Gold color variant during our testing, and the design pattern is indeed different from what we have seen before from the typical OPPO design language. It features a mirrored texture pattern, which the company is says is achieved by a 3D heating of a curved sheet. On the whole, the design looks good and adds grip to make the device feel sturdy in hand.

Regarding specifications, the OPPO A7 is powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 450 SoC paired with Adreno 506 GPU. As for the storage, the phone comes in 4GB of RAM and 64GB of onboard storage. There is micro SD expansion up to 256GB. As for the chipset, it appears OPPO has implemented a poor choice especially for this price segment; the chipset doesn’t fit. While the contraries already offer better and powerful chipsets in this category.

On the software front, The A7 offers Android 8.1.0 based Color OS 5.2 out-of-the-box, it is not yet to be known whether it can be upgradeable to the newly announced Color OS 6. With the 5.2, you can find a bunch of apps loaded and a few Gesture & Motion based navigation features and also a whole set of OPPO Apps as well. On the whole, the OS is highly aggressive, but it makes the phone run smoothly and lastly, it also offers a smart side feature on the home screen, that can be pulled on to the main screen required. You can customize the sidebar with the desired apps that can help you get into the app faster rather than searching in the pile of apps.

Cameras

The Oppo A7 hosts dual camera setup on the back of which, the primary sensor is of 13MP, and the secondary sensor is of 2MP. On the front, the A7 hosts a 16MP sensor. As for the rear cameras, the photos appear good addressing details. However, the colors look a tad bit washed out and aren’t vibrant enough. The rear cameras offer several cameras features that include time-lapse, portrait and stickers mode as well. Photos taken with HDR enabled appear more dynamic than the regular images captured. Here are few samples captured at our initial testing –

That said, the front camera does a fair job on taking selfies, the portrait mode works decently as well. However, image smoothening can be seen on the selfie, which is usual on the OPPO phones. Stickers are also available for selfies as well, which should be an advantage for all the social media enthusiasts out there, who prefer sharing several selfie shots.

Battery

The OPPO A7 is kept alive by massive 4230mAh battery; it is undoubtedly hard to kill. Since, this isn’t a powerful chipset that takes advantage of this enormous battery, hence the longer battery life is achieved easily on the A7. The standby times on the phone is surprisingly good; it can last you through a day and a half easily for an average user. OPPO has also implemented AI based management that should prolong your battery more with its inactive apps freeze and reducing excess cache features.

Conclusion

So, for whom does this OPPO A7 cater to? While its definitely a tough one to answer, since we have to consider the competition as well. For instance, the Honor 8X comes with a much powerful chipset and also the Realme 2 Pro, which offers a better Snapdragon 660 chipset and is also considerably a few bucks cheaper than the OPPO A7. If you are a fan of OPPO already and are accoustomed to the ColorOS on the device, it would be a decent device to upgrade to the OPPO A7 specifically in this price segment.

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