Oppo F3 Review- Dual Camera Selfie Expert?

Selfies are the latest trend among the Chinese OEMs and a lot of them have been focusing on selfie smartphones. The top of the list are Oppo, Vivo and Gionee. Oppo has announced their premium selfie smartphone, the Oppo F3 Plus last month and now the company has launched an affordable variant of the F3 Plus, the Oppo F3 with downgraded specs.

The Oppo F3 comes with 5.5 inch Full HD display and is powered by Mediatek Octa Core MT6750T chipset with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. The main USP of the phone is the dual selfie camera (16MP + 8MP). So how does the phone perform in this segment? Let’s find out in this detailed review.

Design and Build:

Design wise, the Oppo F3 is quite similar to any other Oppo smartphone released in India. It feels similar to the Oppo F1S and also the Oppo A57 released in India. But this time, Oppo has gone for a metal construction on the rear panel and feels a bit more premium in terms of build quality. The device feels good in hand especially with slim profile. The device we tested was gold color and this looks similar to other Oppo phones and hard to distingush it from other devices from the company.

On the hardware side, you have the volume keys on the left side while the power button is on the right side. The 3.5 mm jack and micro USB charging slot are located at the bottom along with the speaker unit. The front panel houses the 5.5 inch HD display, a physical home button which doubles as a fingerprint scanner and two capacity back buttons which are backlit. There is a dual camera set up above the display which is a 16MP primary camera + an 8MP secondary front camera. The rear panel has a 13MP camera, LED flash and the Oppo branding.

Overall, while the phone does not offer anything new in terms of design, the build quality is definitely good.

Display:

The Oppo F3 comes with an upgraded display when compared to the F1S and it now sports a 5.5 inch Full HD panel with Corning Gorilla Glass support. The display is quite good to use and offers decent colors and sharpness levels. The brightness levels are adequate and the touch response also feels quite good. The company is shipping the device with a screen guard pre-installed on it. The viewing angles are also good, but having said that the display is not as vibrant as the Vivo V5S or the Gionee A1, two other competitive devices in this segment.

Software:

Oppo F3 comes with custom UI from the company called the Color OS. The Color OS is on top of Android 6.0 Marshmallow. IT is quite disappointing from Oppo to release a phone in 2017 with Marshmallow and the update cycles for Oppo are not great. Similar to other Chinese OEMs, the Color OS also comes with multiple home screens devoid of an app drawer and has custom notifications and quick toggles area. The settings panel on the phone is also a customized one. There is no resemblance to stock UI on the Color OS.

The phone also comes with support for gestures which can be activated from the settings. There is also Themes app where you can download additional themes to customize the device. So, if you are the person who loves customizing the device with themes, icons and wallpapers, you won’t be disappointed. The security app allows you to clean up and accelerate the phone performance along with providing privacy and virus scan.

Another useful option is the eye protection display which provides strain free experience when using the device in the night.

The phone also comes with the new feature called App Clone where in you can run two instances of the same app. This means you can run two instance of WhatsApp with dual SIM cards on this device.

Performance:

Oppo F3 is powered by the Mediatek MT6750T Octa Core processor coupled with 4GB of RAM. The MT6750T is a small upgrade over the MT6750 with support for Full HD display and slightly better GPU. The Performance of the device in day to day activities was quite good and we did not notice any issues here.

But the real issue was with gaming. We tested the gaming performance of the device with heavy graphic rich games and the performance was just sub par with lot of lags and frame drops. The heating was also slightly on the higher side at 44 degrees. So if you are looking for a gaming device, the Oppo F3 is not suggested.

The phone comes with fingerprint scanner located on the front panel and integrated with the home button. The fingerprint scanner performance was quite good in unlocking the phone. The call quality and the speaker performance was good on the device.

The phone also comes with 64GB of Storage which is expandable and the good aspect of the phone is that it also comes with dedicated SD card slot along with dual SIM which supports 4G LTE and VoLTE.

Looking at the benchmark score of the device, you can see that it is not a really powerful chipset for a 20k pricing.

Camera:

Similar to other Oppo phones, the F3 is also a selfie centric smartphone with a 16MP front camera and  an 8MP secondary camera making it the only dual front camera smartphone at this price segment. But unlike the Gionee A1 or the Vivo V5S, there is no LED flash for the selfie camera, instead it uses the screen flash. The rear camera is at 13MP with LED flash. The camera interface of the Oppo A57 packs most of the features including Panorama, beauty mode and other filters. It is a fairly good interface and works pretty well.

Now coming to the camera samples taken in daylight condition with the rear camera, the color quality was quite decent for a phone priced 20k. The sharpness levels could have been better. But when it comes to low light, F3 struggles and you can clearly see noise creeping in. Even with adequate artificial lighting, the clarity of the photos were just average.

Now coming to the front selfie camera, the USP of the phone. The selfies taken with the dual camera came out really well with good color quality and detailing. If you are looking for a selfie focused smartphone, then the Oppo F3 makes perfect sense. The lack of selfie flash is definitely a downside as low light selfies have considerable noise and this is one area where Gionee A1 and Vivo V5S scores over the F3. Here are some of the samples taken with Oppo F3.

Battery Life:

Oppo F3 features a non-removable 3200mAh battery and the battery performance of the device is quite decent overall. We tested the battery performance with social networking apps, gaming, using the camera for selfies and also a bit streaming on YouTube and it could last through a day without any issues. The phone also comes with power saver mode which can be enabled from the settings.

Verdict:

Oppo F3 is priced Rs 19,999 and how good is the device for this price. If you are looking for a selfie focused smartphone, then the Oppo F3 is a great choice especially with dual front camera which produces great selfies. But if you are looking for an all-round device in the sub 20k price segment, it is tough to recommend the Oppo F3 since the hardware is just average for the pricing it is offered. Also the lack of Android 7.0 and poor gaming experience with an average camera adds up to the woes of the phone. There are much better alternatives available in this segment with the likes of Moto G5 Plus, Lenovo P2 or even the slightly higher priced Xiaomi Mi5.