Hands-On With The OPPO R15 Pro Android Smartphone

- March 30, 2018

OPPO announced the R15 and R15 Pro (R15 Dream, as its known inside China), earlier this month. However we have finally gotten our hands on the device, and it's a beautiful device from OPPO. Internally, it's not sporting the most high-end flagship specs, but it is powerful enough for most people. With a Snapdragon 660 processor inside, with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. So you're going to get some great performance out of this one, as well as great battery life, giving users a great balance here.

On the front of the R15 Pro, OPPO is using an OLED panel provided by Samsung, with a Full HD+ resolution of 2280×1080 which means it is a 19:9 aspect ratio This aspect ratio is due to the notch on the front of the phone, which does give you a bit more screen real-estate. Despite being a larger display, and only sporting Full HD+ resolution, the display is still very sharp. It does have a bit of saturation, but not as much as Samsung's smartphones, which might be a good thing. Out of the box, OPPO is using gestures to get around the OS. Which means you can swipe up on the left to go back, swipe up in the middle to go home and swipe up on the right to go to recents. These are customizable, and you can also opt to go back to regular on-screen buttons. These gestures allow you to get a bit more screen real-estate here, which is never a bad thing.

OPPO is continuing to push its camera game to the next level with the R15 Pro, proving a 16-megapixel and a 20-megapixel camera on the rear-side of the R15. Both sensors sport f/1.7 apertures, which means great low-light performance, and in our short testing period, that seems to be true. The camera UI is pretty simple, but also pretty familiar. It's exactly the same as the iPhone's camera user interface. Which might not be a bad thing, as it is very simple to use, and does have a few more features, like a pro mode. OPPO is touting the portrait mode here on the R15 Pro, and it does work really well. It can be used for taking portraits of people, or macro shots of other objects as well. OPPO has also included some artificial intelligence here on the R15 Pro's camera, to help you take even better images. OPPO says that this was done because it found out that most users simply open the camera app and snap a photo. Without adjusting the shutter speed, or any other settings. So using AI, users will be able to shoot better photos in auto mode as well.

On the front of the OPPO R15 Pro, you'll find a 20-megapixel sensor with a f/2.0 aperture. It's not quite as high of an aperture as the rear cameras, so it won't be as good in low-light, but it's still pretty good. And thanks to the larger megapixel-count, it does provide better images with less noise. OPPO also has various gestures available for taking selfies without actually touching the phone. This is great for those that want to take a photo that doesn't look like a selfie. Unfortunately, there's no flash on the front, which could have been put in the notch area here, but then again, a front-facing flash usually leads to more"frightening" images, especially in dark settings.

Software-wise, OPPO is using ColorOS v5.0, which is based on Android Oreo. So it's the latest version that is available right now, and it will get updated to Android P, though the timeline is not clear – which is to be expected since Android P is only on its first developer preview right now, so it's still really early in the cycle for the next version of Android. With ColorOS v5.0, OPPO has made some changes, making it easier to use, and even more customizable than ever. Additionally, it has optimized a number of apps to not only take advantage of the larger screen, but to make them ever faster. Even though that's not really needed on the R15 Pro since it has the Snapdragon 660 processor and 6GB of RAM under-the-hood already, so it's a pretty powerful device.

The OPPO R15 Pro is going to be available beginning in April, in four colors: Rouge Red, Frost White, Nebula Purple and Ruby Red. OPPO is only available in 31 markets right now, so it won't be available globally (technically), but in all of its current markets. China will get the R15 Pro but it's renamed to the R15 Dream Mirror Edition.