OPPO R9s product reviews

Are you looking for a medium-high end phone for a medium-low end price tag? Then you should be looking at the Oppo R9s - fresh to our shores. Looking and acting like a hybrid of the best features from Apple's iPhone range and top-end Android units, this is a phone that is going to surprise and impress.

The first thing you're going to notice is the very iPhone'esque HOME button just above the charging port. This is not a mechanical button though, it's a solid-state fingerprint reader that comes with a few neat tricks such as an advanced hydrophobic coating that means every sweaty fingers (-eww-) will read correctly. Yet it still operates as a regular button too, should you not have the fingerprint recognition activated and set up. I strongly suggest you do, as this unit has some lightning-fast reflexes, unlocking quicker than any phone in the sub-$1k price range I have come across yet.

The front camera is a stunning 16 megapixel unit with some very solid hardware jammed into it. As well as that, you have the Oppo "Beautify 4.0" software sitting on top of the basic Android camera interface to give you added control over fine details, colour control, etc.However, for someone who may want to use the cameras - front or back - for more serious stuff, be aware that unlike most Android phones, you CAN NOT adjust the resolution to save on space and/or bandwidth. You are locked into using maximum resolution whether you like it or not... and that really annoyed me. Someone had to choose to actively shut off that feature from the OS, and that strikes me as just rude to a degree... but maybe that's only an issue for me, as someone who prefers to shoot landscapes instead of selfies. Also on the topic of camera... night or low-light shots are actually surpringly good with this unit. Not the best out there, but certainly one of the best sub-$1k phones I have tried. Catching a moving object can be tricky, but fast shutter and advanced image controil mean you can usually grab something usable from anything short of a screen full of blurry night-noise.

Snapping photos is battery-hungry work, and so we come to the size of it's gas tank... and I must admit to being very impressed not only by the battery life - I shot photos for hours and didn't kill the phone, which is a feat my current handset would fail at - but it also has a turn-around time that most men would envy, thanks to the VOOC charging technology that gives you 2 hours of talk-time after just 5 minutes on a standard charger. You should note however that the "standard charger" that comes with it puts out 5volts at a honking 4amps... double the charging rate of even the toughest phone charger I have seen yet! This rate of electron-pushing will greatly reduce the charge times regardless, so be aware that if you slap this into a normal charger, you could be getting anything from 0.5A - 2.0A and extended charging times. It's also still on the older microUSB charger cable, rather than the new no-flip USB Type-C. Persoanlly, I liked that as it meant I didn't even need to unpack the supplied cable, instead just fitting it into my existing infrastructure.

Performance-wise, it performs credibly, with some good grunt on image processing and day-to-day tasks. If you want a rig for gaming and/or heavy-lifting then you should consider that this will have some issues as the workload starts to crush. I tried playing some immersive 3d VR apps through it and they were a little stuttery in places, where the 3d rendering was getting serious, but for general usage by someone more into snapping 100+ selfies throughout the day, this held its own very well indeed.

Storage is pretty important, though with the easy access of cloud-based storage having a monster on-board storage space isn't the be-all and end-all unless you like having a small mountain of apps to clutter uip your screen. That said, this unit has a very generous 64GB of internal storage, plus you can opt to have a microSDXC card expand storage - up to 256GB. But seriously... just don't go that crazy.

Pre-installed software is often the bane and bloatware of modern handsets, but Oppo have managed to keep things fairly trim, but I struggle to see why they have re-skinned Android 6.0 to look so much like a "cheap iPhone" - right down to the icon styles. That wasn't an aspect I liked very much, as a die-hard Android fan since my first smartphone. ColorOS 3.0 is another Android-overlay system that tries to do too much to rehash something that works fairly well. "Android 6.0?!" you may exclaim, and I agree... with 7.0 having been out for a while now, why is this unit still working off an older release? When I had the opportunity to ask their marketing and technical representatives at the product launch party, they couldn't tell me. In fact, they were at a loss to answer many of my "Why did/didn't you do this?" questions... so that may remain a mystery. Still, for all it's "subtle issues" and "awkwardness, it's a functional setup that does work, even if it makes you feel you have somehow jumped teams.

It comes with the usual comms features - Bluetooth 4.1, WiFi a/b/g/n/ac, GPS and it supports USB OTG... but it doesn't have NFC so you can forget using it with your Swipe'n'Go payment apps or for scanning those NFC-enabled advertising stands. (Actually, YAY on that last one!)

Overall, this is a sleek and stylish phone hitting way above it's price-peers. With nice stylistic touches like the "6-string antenna bands" etched into the case and that neat dual-action home button, this is going to turn a few heads and catch more than a few eyes when you pull it out in a group of techies. Sure, it has some slight issues that make it a little less appealing to some demographics, but it's far from being a bad contender in today's cut-throat market. If I needed a phone that was focused on social media and selfies, this is certainly a phone I would consider... however my phone needs make this unit a little off my radar.