Friends+Design
- Attractive, premium design - the back of the device feels like glass finish (though it is actually not) and the surface tapers towards the edge and is textured for a comfortable grip
- While it is not a gradient finish in true sense, the texture and use of a different material allows for a change in its hue depending on how the light reflected from the surface - the finish is striking for a phone in this price range
Display
- Nice 6.2-inch display with HD+ resolution and 19:9 aspect ratio here - but the best part of course is the tiny dewdrop notch that makes minimal intrusion into your screen area
- Screen resolution could have been higher though
Software
- ColorOS UI is inspired from iOS in terms of all the aesthetics, runs smooth on the device, and adds plenty of add-on features
- Support for gesture based navigation (a la Android Pie)
- There is plenty of app bloat though - as is often the case with custom Android UIs - with lots of pre-installed apps (most of which can be uninstalled), duplicate apps for things like the browser, and unnecessary additional Oppo app stores
Performance
- Decent day-to-day performance backed by the solid Snapdragon 450
- While the performance is decent, it's far from the best-in-class, there are many Snapdragon 636, 660 phones in this price bracket that will give you much better performance for your money
Camera
- Decent rear dual camera system - includes a 13-megapixel main sensor paired with a 2-megapixel sensor, which helps with both depth effect as well as 2x zoom - it understands the composition well and with HDR, it manages to retain a lot of detail
- Decent front camera for selfies
- Bokeh mode is average - the Oppo A7 can sometimes struggles with differentiating the foreground from the background
- Low light performance is also strictly average
Battery
- Excellent battery life with a large 4230mAH battery - which combined with the aggressive battery conserving tendencies of ColorOS means that you can get up to 2 days of battery on this one
Verdict
- The Oppo A7 is an ok stand-alone phone and does well on design and battery life - but overall, it doesn't stand up to the top competitors in this price range - the Redmi Note 6 Pro (better processor, higher resolution display), the Vivo V9 Pro (much better processor, higher resolution display), the Nokia 6.1 Plus (better processor, higher resolution display, stock Android) and the Xiaomi Mi A2 (much better processor, higher resolution display, stock Android)
