Friends+Design
- Very similar to the Realme X - beautiful, 'shimmering' rear (plastic) panel, and a modern, notch-less 6.5-inch OLED screen - easily one of the best, most premium looking phones in this price bracket
- The notch-less display spans almost edge to edge, with a pop-up selfie camera mechanism (which is quite something to have, in this price bracket)
- Fairly fast in-display fingerprint reader
- The pop-up camera on the Oppo K3 has a very quick ejection and retraction mechanism, which makes face recognition work pretty seamlessly too
Display
- Very good 6.5-inch OLED screen - colors are lively, with deep blacks
- The lack of a notch really helps make the screen appear immersive, and consuming content on the screen is a pleasure
Software
- ColorOS UI is now much more streamlined than before - there’s also now an app drawer, and a useful shortcut menu accessed by swiping from the sides
- The gesture navigation is nice and intuitive too
- Thankfully, it's not ad-strewn either, like some of the recent phones from Xiaomi
- ColorOS still has some bloatware though, and is not quite as clean/simple as stock Android
Performance
- Very good performance backed by the powerful Snapdragon 710 chipset - everything from daily use to high-end games is smooth
- GPU performance is an especially strong point of the Snapdragon 710, so if you are into gaming, the phone tends to comfortably outperform rivals
Camera
- Very good set of dual rear cameras (16MP+2MP) and front camera (16MP)
- Good overall image quality in daylight, and fairly good quality in low-light as well
- Night mode is pretty effective too
- Good portraits
- Pretty good selfies too, from the 16MP front camera
- Oppo's EIS does a solid job of stabilization during videos at up to 1080p/30fps
- Support for 4K video recording (without EIS though)
- Overall, the Oppo K3 is among the very good camera setups of this price bracket, comparable to the excellent cameras on the Redmi Note 7 Pro and the Realme 3 Pro - and pretty close to it's cousin Realme X as well (just a notch behind perhaps)
Audio
- The Dolby Atmos-boosted speaker sounds pretty rich and gets fairly loud
- Also has support for FM radio, unlike Realme X
Battery
- Good battery life with a 3750 mAh cell - you will comfortably get a day of use, even with heavy usage
- The class-leading VOOC fast-charging nicely complements the long battery life - it fills a completely depleted battery in 1:18h and it's at the 50% mark 30 minutes into it - which are some excellent numbers
Verdict
- The Oppo K3 looks like an incredible value package, no matter how you look at it - and is in fact almost identical to the Realme X - both these phones will inevitably disrupt this price bracket in a big way - what you get is top-end specs, a 'full screen' AMOLED display with a pop-up selfie camera, very good performance, an excellent set of cameras, and super fast charging - you can't ask for more
- Between Oppo K3 and Realme X - the choice will ultimately boil down to your preference of colour and might even be based on ready availability of one or the other - and between the two base models, you choice will come down to whether you value RAM or storage more - but basically, you can't go wrong with either
