First impressions: Oppo R7 Plus and Oppo R7 Lite offer a slim unibody metal design with 13MP camera

Chinese phone maker Oppo announced its latest handsets, the 6-inch Oppo R7 Plus and 5-inch Oppo R7 Lite at an event in Mumbai on 4 Sept. These phones will be selling for Rs 29,990 and Rs 17,990 respectively. Oppo has employed a full metal unibody design for both these phones and ensured that both phones are on the slimmer side. We got to play around with the devices for a brief period and here are our first impressions.





The higher end variant of the Oppo R7 series – the R7 Plus – clearly looks its part. Sporting a 6-inch full HD AMOLED display, the Oppo R7 Plus is a big-screen device which surprisingly does not seem that huge unless you hold it in your hands. Oppo has managed to keep the bezels on the R7 Plus thin, thereby giving it a really good body to screen ratio. Oppo has kept the top and bottom bezels thin. In fact this is the first thing that strikes you as you hold the phone.


A metal unibody design on the R7 Plus gives it an elegant look, enhanced by its slim size – measuring at just 7.8mm thick. It comes in the gold colour and silver colour variant. Oppo also users a 2.5D curved arc design for the glass, such that the edge of the phone has rounded glass design. On the rear side, the metallic rear cover has also been given a violin-arc design around its edges, to ensure that there are no sharp edges. The phone certainly feels good in the hand, although it is definitely not comfortable to use it single-handedly.

The phone houses the Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 SoC which has an octa-core processor. This is paired with 3GB of RAM and there is 32GB of on-board storage. You can expand the storage using a microSD card slot, which fits in one of the hybrid nano-SIM card slots. Oppo uses its proprietary ColorOS 2.1 on the R7 Plus which is latched on to Android 5.1 Lollipop. According to Oppo, ColorOS 2.1 brings in improvements in terms of phone booting times, app loading times and so on, apart from bringing in a new design flourishes. There is a finger-print sensor on the rear side just below the camera unit in the centre.



On the connectivity front, you have a hybrid dual-Nano SIM card slot which can take in 4G SIM cards as well, there’s Wi-fi 802.11ac, Bluetooth 4.0LE, Wi-fi Direct, GPS with A-GPS and GLONASS. There is a 13MP rear camera which comes with laser AF technology to improve focus acquisition speeds. On the front there is an 8MP camera. While shooting at the venue, both the cameras gave a good output, but we need to really use them on a daily basis to find out how they perform. Camera user interface has lots of options to play around with.

The Oppo R7 Plus comes with a massive 4,100 mAh battery that should easily last you over a day, at least on paper. We will be able to give a complete idea only once we test the R7 Plus. Also as we had seen with the Oppo R5, the R7 series also comes with the VOOC charging which promises 2 hours worth of talktime on a 5-min charge. We will test that as well.




As the name implies, it is alright to call the Oppo R7 Lite, a milder version of its elder sibling – the R7 Plus. The Oppo R7 Lite features a 5-inch HD display and is quite easy to hold in the hand thanks in part to the manageable size, but also thanks to the thin bezels on the sides. The lower bezel on the R7 Lite does have soft keys and we noticed that the top and bottom bezels are taller in comparison to the R7 Plus.



Just like the R7 Plus, the Oppo R7 Lite also features a metal unibody design and it also has the 2.5D curved arc design for the glass and the violin-arc design for the metal edges. Despite being of a metal build, we did not find the R7 Lite to be very slippery in the limited time we used it for. The phone has its power/standby and volume rocker buttons place in the opposite orientations as compared to the R7 Plus. It also comes with a hybrid dual Nano SIM card configuration.

The Oppo R7 Lite also houses the Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 SoC having the octa-core processor with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of storage, with the option to expand storage using a microSD card. It runs on Android 5.1 Lollipop with the ColorOS 2.1 skin atop it. The phone ran smoothly while we were playing around with it and the app icons look good. Oppo has had a good overall user interface design and ColorOS 2.1 enhances it.



Just like the Oppo R7 Plus, the R7 Lite also has a 13MP rear and 8MP front-camera configuration. But instead of the laser AF, the R7 Lite has the phase-detect AF system to ensure quick focus acquisition speed. While the lighting wasn’t ideal at the demo zone, the phone did manage to acquire focus quickly. But as it is with performance, the camera usability can only be spoken about after thorough testing. So we will reserve our verdict till that’s done.

The R7 Lite comes with a 2,320 mAh battery and supports Qualcomm QuickCharge feature which paired with Oppo’s VOOC charging mechanism offers you speedy phone charging.

Conclusion

So all in all, Oppo has launched phones that scream elegance thanks to the beautiful build quality. But with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 SoC, the prices of the phones may seem on the higher side for both devices, looking at competition. We will keep our verdict on hold till we review both these phones.