Oppo R11 A Great Smartphone Alternative to iphone
The Oppo R11 builds on the legacy of the R9 and R9s with a 5.5" AMOLED screen wrapped into an aluminum unbody, but it makes big leaps in the performance and camera departments. For starters, the R11 is the first phone ever to come with the Snapdragon 660, Qualcomm's latest upper midrange chipset. Besides the speed boost, the S660 is said to seriously enhance the low-light and portrait imaging skills.
Oppo has been producing Android handsets with more than a passing similarity to Apple's very popular iPhone lines for some years now. How Apple's lawyers haven't become involved, I can't quite discern, but what that has largely meant for Oppo has been an increasing array of iPhone-lite style handsets with increasing value propositions.Oppo has been producing Android handsets with more than a passing similarity to Apple's very popular iPhone lines for some years now. How Apple's lawyers haven't become involved, I can't quite discern, but what that has largely meant for Oppo has been an increasing array of iPhone-lite style handsets with increasing value propositions.
The R11 is Oppo's first model to sport a 20MP+16MP rear dual camera, as well as having a 20MP front facing camera. Oppo worked with Qualcomm to customise its image processor, the 14-bit Qualcomm Spectra 160 ISP, as well as optimise the performance on the Snapdragon 660 Mobile platform for the R11.
And photography is where Oppo is trying to not only match but outclass the competition. The R11 joins a growing list of phones to feature a dual-camera setup with wide-angle and telephoto lens, while it also packs a high-res selfie camera. Portrait mode is available on both cams, and Oppo has worked hard to offer high-quality bokeh effects. Optical-like zoom, depth of field, high-res panorama, and 4K video complete the extra-solid camera specs.
The Oppo R11 is made entirely of metal, something we are already used to in the midrange class. The phone looks extra sharp at just 6.8mm slim, if you don't count a small camera hump. The highlight of the new design are the four-string antenna lines carved out of the shell by customized tungsten blades. The antennas flow with the top and bottom edge, and they don't interfere with the unibody part at all. Oppo is clearly getting up to speed with the latest trend.
As the R11 is an Android phone, you'll also find two backlit capacitive keys on either side of the home button. For some reason, Oppo has chosen to swap the positions of the keys from the standard Android layout, with the back button on the right side, and the menu button on the left - perhaps they're drawing inspiration from Samsung here, because all Samsung phones used to have this setup too before swapping to customizable on-screen keys with the S8. Unfortunately, there's no option to reconfigure this.
Measuring in at 154.5mm x 74.8mm x 6.8mm with a carrying weight of 150 grams, the Oppo R11 fits neatly in the hand and doesn't feel too bulky. Like its design inspiration, the fingerprint sensor on the front isn't a button per se, but instead a plate with a tiny motor behind it that vibrates when pressed to give the impression of a button. Volume controls run up the left hand side, while the right hand side houses the power button just below the dual SIM/microSD card tray. Like many of its sort, you've got the choice to drop two Nano SIMs into the R11, or just one and then add a microSD card, but you can't do both.
The back is also subtly curved, unlike an iPhone. It also curves at all edges. These two factors contribute to a better grip and more confidence that the phone won’t easily slip out from your hand, despite having an all metal body.
The AMOLED on the Oppo R11 is capable of 410 nits of maximum brightness - a fine score for this type of screen, and just a few nits short of the OnePlus 5's achievement. The contrast is excellent, as expected.
The color accuracy on the Oppo R11 is far from spectacular with an average deviation (DeltaE) of 6.1 and a maximum of 12.4 in the whites. Oppo chose to tone up the main RGB colors and they ended up oversaturated. Not sure if the extra punch will be universally liked, but it shouldn't be that much of an issue.
While most Android flagship phones are now sporting QHD displays, the majority of Oppo's competition, including the Xiaomi Mi 5 and OnePlus 5 are still using Full HD displays. The iPhone 7 Plus, of course, also uses a Full HD display. Personally, we're fine with a Full HD display, as we don't think the extra pixels are even noticeable on such a small screen and most online media content is still 1080p or 720p resolution anyway. Same goes for websites and other online that's currently designed for Full HD resolution screens, so you're really not missing out much. If anything, the choice of screen used and resolution actually help make the phone more frugal in power consumption.
Honestly, the Full HD display isn’t really a big thing, at least not for OPPO’s core market. Very few of the major OEMs, not even Xiaomi, has completely jumped onto the QHD train. Their customers don’t seem to mind either. These users prefer a longer battery life over extra pixels they may not even notice, especially with majority of online content mostly still averaging at 1080p. It’s a tradeoff users are willing to make for an overall better experience.
The most remarkable thing about the OPPO R11 isn’t it’s all too familiar design or its bright and bezeled display. It isn’t even its price. OK, maybe price does factor into it. But when taking the R11 for a spin, its most impressive feat is how well it performed in the field, so to speak. It it performed admirably well for a smartphone that might not exactly fit the “premium phone” mold.
A lot of that has to do with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 660. Release just last month, this, along with the Snapdragon 630, is Qualcomm’s first mid-range processor to use its own Kryo cores, putting it in the same group as its Snapdragon 821 and 835, albeit at lower clock speeds. This meant harnessing the power of Qualcomm’s Spectra ISP for dual camera support, its Adreno GPU for graphics prowess, and support for 2×2 MU-MIMO 802.11ac Wi-Fi, among other things.
The Oppo R11 is powered by a 3,000mAh battery (Li-Po) sealed inside its metal body. The phone supports the fast VOOC charging standard and is bundled with the proper charger for it, a 5V unit at 4A for a total output of 20W. In our tests, it reached a 65% charge (from flat) in half an hour, and full charge in an hour and a half.
ColorOS features a few power saving modes that are enabled by default, so you may notice how the phone often intervenes by killing background apps for you. If that causes issues, you can exempt specific apps from this behavior. We found it too aggressive to our taste and had to disable it for a few apps (a minor note: we wish we had a way to do this from the app switcher, instead of having to go into the settings).
We ran our battery tests and the 3,000mAh battery posted an overall score of 81 hours, matching the Oppo R9s and the R9 (also known as F1 Plus). The R11 did great on talk time, web browsing, and video playback test, while its standby consumption is just about average.
With average mixed used, we got around 19 hours of battery life in a day. Definitely not the 2-day life that Sony used to brag about, but still gives you enough time to postpone charging until you get to bed. You will indeed charge it almost every day, but even then OPPO tries to make it as painless as possible. The phone features the company’s own proprietary VOOC Flash Charge that promises 2 hours of talk time with only a 5 minute charge time. While that might indeed sound like an ideal compromise, it does come at a price. Two, in fact. One, you are beholden to OPPO’s chargers, as no other charger or power bank advertises support for VOOC. Second, you will be missing out on the USB-C fun, as VOOC technology itself seems to be stuck using micro USB connection for now.
Conclusion
The Oppo R11 is a solid, highly usable smartphone clearly designed to straddle the divide between offering good solid features and the bleeding edge in terms of features – and price. If you don’t mind the Apple-like ColorOS interface, then the R11 may be just for you.
The Oppo R11 is a dual-SIM phone powered by a Qualcomm chipset, which means excellent support for a wide range of mobile wireless connectivity. This includes ten LTE, four GSM, CDMA, and five 3G bands. VoLTE is supported as well for improved audio quality.
It’s definitely a good buy for someone looking for an aesthetically-appealing midranger that tops the department in terms of camera prowess and build. However, the R11 might trip some up with its software and interface that can turn out to be quite an acquired taste.
A phone with capabilities of standing its own ground.
Oppo has been producing Android handsets with more than a passing similarity to Apple's very popular iPhone lines for some years now. How Apple's lawyers haven't become involved, I can't quite discern, but what that has largely meant for Oppo has been an increasing array of iPhone-lite style handsets with increasing value propositions.Oppo has been producing Android handsets with more than a passing similarity to Apple's very popular iPhone lines for some years now. How Apple's lawyers haven't become involved, I can't quite discern, but what that has largely meant for Oppo has been an increasing array of iPhone-lite style handsets with increasing value propositions.
The R11 is Oppo's first model to sport a 20MP+16MP rear dual camera, as well as having a 20MP front facing camera. Oppo worked with Qualcomm to customise its image processor, the 14-bit Qualcomm Spectra 160 ISP, as well as optimise the performance on the Snapdragon 660 Mobile platform for the R11.
And photography is where Oppo is trying to not only match but outclass the competition. The R11 joins a growing list of phones to feature a dual-camera setup with wide-angle and telephoto lens, while it also packs a high-res selfie camera. Portrait mode is available on both cams, and Oppo has worked hard to offer high-quality bokeh effects. Optical-like zoom, depth of field, high-res panorama, and 4K video complete the extra-solid camera specs.
Oppo R11:Design
The Oppo R11 is made entirely of metal, something we are already used to in the midrange class. The phone looks extra sharp at just 6.8mm slim, if you don't count a small camera hump. The highlight of the new design are the four-string antenna lines carved out of the shell by customized tungsten blades. The antennas flow with the top and bottom edge, and they don't interfere with the unibody part at all. Oppo is clearly getting up to speed with the latest trend.
As the R11 is an Android phone, you'll also find two backlit capacitive keys on either side of the home button. For some reason, Oppo has chosen to swap the positions of the keys from the standard Android layout, with the back button on the right side, and the menu button on the left - perhaps they're drawing inspiration from Samsung here, because all Samsung phones used to have this setup too before swapping to customizable on-screen keys with the S8. Unfortunately, there's no option to reconfigure this.
Measuring in at 154.5mm x 74.8mm x 6.8mm with a carrying weight of 150 grams, the Oppo R11 fits neatly in the hand and doesn't feel too bulky. Like its design inspiration, the fingerprint sensor on the front isn't a button per se, but instead a plate with a tiny motor behind it that vibrates when pressed to give the impression of a button. Volume controls run up the left hand side, while the right hand side houses the power button just below the dual SIM/microSD card tray. Like many of its sort, you've got the choice to drop two Nano SIMs into the R11, or just one and then add a microSD card, but you can't do both.
The back is also subtly curved, unlike an iPhone. It also curves at all edges. These two factors contribute to a better grip and more confidence that the phone won’t easily slip out from your hand, despite having an all metal body.
Oppo R11:Display
The AMOLED on the Oppo R11 is capable of 410 nits of maximum brightness - a fine score for this type of screen, and just a few nits short of the OnePlus 5's achievement. The contrast is excellent, as expected.
The color accuracy on the Oppo R11 is far from spectacular with an average deviation (DeltaE) of 6.1 and a maximum of 12.4 in the whites. Oppo chose to tone up the main RGB colors and they ended up oversaturated. Not sure if the extra punch will be universally liked, but it shouldn't be that much of an issue.
While most Android flagship phones are now sporting QHD displays, the majority of Oppo's competition, including the Xiaomi Mi 5 and OnePlus 5 are still using Full HD displays. The iPhone 7 Plus, of course, also uses a Full HD display. Personally, we're fine with a Full HD display, as we don't think the extra pixels are even noticeable on such a small screen and most online media content is still 1080p or 720p resolution anyway. Same goes for websites and other online that's currently designed for Full HD resolution screens, so you're really not missing out much. If anything, the choice of screen used and resolution actually help make the phone more frugal in power consumption.
Honestly, the Full HD display isn’t really a big thing, at least not for OPPO’s core market. Very few of the major OEMs, not even Xiaomi, has completely jumped onto the QHD train. Their customers don’t seem to mind either. These users prefer a longer battery life over extra pixels they may not even notice, especially with majority of online content mostly still averaging at 1080p. It’s a tradeoff users are willing to make for an overall better experience.
Oppo R11:Performance
Oppo's flagships have always tended towards using mid-range processors to deliver their grunt, and in the case of the R11, that comes in the form of Qualcomm's Snapdragon 660, paired with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of onboard storage. For the price, that should be a pretty potent combination and for the most part it is.
The most remarkable thing about the OPPO R11 isn’t it’s all too familiar design or its bright and bezeled display. It isn’t even its price. OK, maybe price does factor into it. But when taking the R11 for a spin, its most impressive feat is how well it performed in the field, so to speak. It it performed admirably well for a smartphone that might not exactly fit the “premium phone” mold.
A lot of that has to do with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 660. Release just last month, this, along with the Snapdragon 630, is Qualcomm’s first mid-range processor to use its own Kryo cores, putting it in the same group as its Snapdragon 821 and 835, albeit at lower clock speeds. This meant harnessing the power of Qualcomm’s Spectra ISP for dual camera support, its Adreno GPU for graphics prowess, and support for 2×2 MU-MIMO 802.11ac Wi-Fi, among other things.
Oppo R11:Camera
The cameras are the unmistakably highlight of the OPPO R11. For the rear, we’re looking at a dual-camera setup. The secondary camera has a longer focal length and effectively offers a 2x optical zoom from the primary camera. The primary camera is a 16 MP Sony IMX398 sensor with an f/1.7 aperture. On the other hand, the secondary camera is a 20 MP Sony IMX376 sensor with an f/2.6 aperture.
That sounds like a pretty beefy setup on paper, but we all know how great camera specs don’t necessarily translate to great camera performance. Image processing is a very important piece to the puzzle. Thankfully, OPPO made sure to pay careful attention to this detail by working with Qualcomm on a platform level.
In our experience, the R11’s cameras live up to the hype. Images produced in good lighting were sharp, had accurate colors, and exhibited excellent dynamic range. Even when we took an image with the sun in the background, the R11 was still able to capture a good amount of detail in the shadows.
Images taken at 2x zoom were of about equal quality. The software processing is noticeably slower at about three to four seconds, however, as the phone has to combine the images taken by both cameras in order to produce the zoomed in image. We hope that OPPO will focus on improving the image processing speed of telephoto capture in future iterations.
Oppo's default camera app, like the rest of the phone, borrows heavily from the iOS playbook, which means it'll be instantly familiar to most users. Standard photo and video modes are accessed with right and left swipe motions. However, it's not quite a perfect copy given that there are a few small oddities in the Expert camera mode, such as the way the text for each manual control doesn't quite line up nicely with the rest of the screen. That's possibly a limitation of the switch from Chinese to English.
In terms of camera quality, the use of a 2x optical zoom gives the Oppo R11 the same essential camera capabilities as the much more expensive Apple iPhone 7 Plus.
Although the OPPO R11 runs Android 7.1.1 Nougat out of the box, OPPO’s ColorOS 3.1 skin quite frankly makes the experience feel closer to iOS. The notification panel toggles have been replaced with a control center, the system apps use many design elements from iOS, and some features have been blatantly copied over. Take OPPO Share, for example. It’s a clear clone of AirPlay, down to the triangle in the logo.
To be clear, we understand OPPO’s reasoning for copying Apple’s software. Many Chinese skins use elements of iOS, but some do so better than others. Unfortunately, OPPO’s Color OS just isn’t one of those skins. It feels as if the focus was placed on cloning rather than developing a great user experience.
The cameras are the unmistakably highlight of the OPPO R11. For the rear, we’re looking at a dual-camera setup. The secondary camera has a longer focal length and effectively offers a 2x optical zoom from the primary camera. The primary camera is a 16 MP Sony IMX398 sensor with an f/1.7 aperture. On the other hand, the secondary camera is a 20 MP Sony IMX376 sensor with an f/2.6 aperture.
That sounds like a pretty beefy setup on paper, but we all know how great camera specs don’t necessarily translate to great camera performance. Image processing is a very important piece to the puzzle. Thankfully, OPPO made sure to pay careful attention to this detail by working with Qualcomm on a platform level.
In our experience, the R11’s cameras live up to the hype. Images produced in good lighting were sharp, had accurate colors, and exhibited excellent dynamic range. Even when we took an image with the sun in the background, the R11 was still able to capture a good amount of detail in the shadows.
Images taken at 2x zoom were of about equal quality. The software processing is noticeably slower at about three to four seconds, however, as the phone has to combine the images taken by both cameras in order to produce the zoomed in image. We hope that OPPO will focus on improving the image processing speed of telephoto capture in future iterations.
In terms of camera quality, the use of a 2x optical zoom gives the Oppo R11 the same essential camera capabilities as the much more expensive Apple iPhone 7 Plus.
Oppo R11:Software
Although the OPPO R11 runs Android 7.1.1 Nougat out of the box, OPPO’s ColorOS 3.1 skin quite frankly makes the experience feel closer to iOS. The notification panel toggles have been replaced with a control center, the system apps use many design elements from iOS, and some features have been blatantly copied over. Take OPPO Share, for example. It’s a clear clone of AirPlay, down to the triangle in the logo.
Oppo R11:Battery
The Oppo R11 is powered by a 3,000mAh battery (Li-Po) sealed inside its metal body. The phone supports the fast VOOC charging standard and is bundled with the proper charger for it, a 5V unit at 4A for a total output of 20W. In our tests, it reached a 65% charge (from flat) in half an hour, and full charge in an hour and a half.
ColorOS features a few power saving modes that are enabled by default, so you may notice how the phone often intervenes by killing background apps for you. If that causes issues, you can exempt specific apps from this behavior. We found it too aggressive to our taste and had to disable it for a few apps (a minor note: we wish we had a way to do this from the app switcher, instead of having to go into the settings).
We ran our battery tests and the 3,000mAh battery posted an overall score of 81 hours, matching the Oppo R9s and the R9 (also known as F1 Plus). The R11 did great on talk time, web browsing, and video playback test, while its standby consumption is just about average.
With average mixed used, we got around 19 hours of battery life in a day. Definitely not the 2-day life that Sony used to brag about, but still gives you enough time to postpone charging until you get to bed. You will indeed charge it almost every day, but even then OPPO tries to make it as painless as possible. The phone features the company’s own proprietary VOOC Flash Charge that promises 2 hours of talk time with only a 5 minute charge time. While that might indeed sound like an ideal compromise, it does come at a price. Two, in fact. One, you are beholden to OPPO’s chargers, as no other charger or power bank advertises support for VOOC. Second, you will be missing out on the USB-C fun, as VOOC technology itself seems to be stuck using micro USB connection for now.
Conclusion
The Oppo R11 is a solid, highly usable smartphone clearly designed to straddle the divide between offering good solid features and the bleeding edge in terms of features – and price. If you don’t mind the Apple-like ColorOS interface, then the R11 may be just for you.
The Oppo R11 is a dual-SIM phone powered by a Qualcomm chipset, which means excellent support for a wide range of mobile wireless connectivity. This includes ten LTE, four GSM, CDMA, and five 3G bands. VoLTE is supported as well for improved audio quality.
It’s definitely a good buy for someone looking for an aesthetically-appealing midranger that tops the department in terms of camera prowess and build. However, the R11 might trip some up with its software and interface that can turn out to be quite an acquired taste.
Comments
Post a Comment
LEAVE A COMMMENT