It has been more than six months since the Oppo F1 was launched. And the company desperately needed to launch an upgraded phone like the Oppo F1s to compete in design and features. However, like the previous smartphone, the focus in this phone is also on the front camera. Today, in the review of this smartphone, we will know all the advantages and disadvantages of this smartphone.
Design and Looks
If you put the F1s and F1 Plus together, it will be very difficult to differentiate between them as both the phones look very similar. The curved edges of the display of the F1s feel good when you hold it in your hand and its slim bezels make it a stylish smartphone. The phone comes with a pre-installed screen guard which gets scratched very quickly. We feel that this could have been removed and given Gorilla Glass 4 for protection.
The 5.5-inch IPS display on the Oppo F1s produces very rich colours. And at maximum brightness levels, the screen is much better than the Oppo F1. We did not face any issues with the display even in direct sunlight. Although the display panel is good, we are not happy with the HD resolution which is quite low for this screen size.
The F1s comes with a fingerprint sensor, which was missing in the F1. The fingerprint sensor works pretty well on the F1s. Just like the F1 Plus, the screen unlocks instantly. There are two backlit capacitive buttons on either side of the sensor. Oppo has also provided a notification LED on the top. The smartphone looks great with a metal body and the glossy gold trim makes the device look quite premium.
The buttons are ergonomically placed, although the volume buttons would have been easier to spot if there was more space between them. The headphone socket is placed at the bottom along with the micro-USB port and mono speaker. But it would have been better if the headphone socket was placed at the top as the cable gets in the way while typing.
There is a 13-megapixel camera with LED flash on the rear. The battery is non-removable. The SIM tray on the right side supports dual SIM. Apart from two nano-SIM slots, a separate card slot has been provided for microSD card up to 128 GB.
The Oppo F1s comes in the box with a 10 watt charger, data cable, silicone case, a SIM ejector tool, headset and some manual instructions. Overall, the F1s is a much needed upgrade that can give tough competition to other smartphones now. Accurate and fast fingerprint sensor and separate microSD card are a bonus in the phone. The phone is 7.3 mm thick and weighs 160 grams.
Specifications and Features
Oppo has given this smartphone a 15 GHz MediaTek MT6750 octa-core processor which has eight ARM Cortex-A53 cores. This is MediaTek’s entry-level chip launched this year which has integrated LTE.
Apart from this, F1s has 3 GB RAM, 32 GB storage, dual band Wi-Fi B / G / N, Bluetooth 4.0, USB OTG, GPS and FM radio. Oppo has not provided NFC or Wi-Fi AC in the phone. F1s supports VoLTE along with 4G LTE on Indian bands.
Just like the F1 Plus, the Oppo F1s runs on Color OS 3.0 which looks a bit like Android and a bit like iOS. But we don’t like the company’s decision to ship the phone with Android Lollipop as it is two generations old now. We may see the Marshmallow update later but it’s always good to have the latest version at launch.
We did find a few glitches in the software that are worth mentioning. Notifications from some third-party apps like Telegram will show up in the notification shade, but you won’t be able to view them from there. Other than that, the interface is pretty smooth and runs without any glitches most of the time.
Oppo has made some changes to the Settings app. There is a blue light filter in the Display submenu. The Lockscreen Magazine lets you change the lock-screen wallpaper every time you unlock the phone. Apart from this, the phone also has gestures like one-handed mode. However, this feature did not work for us when we tried it.
The phone comes pre-installed with several Google apps including Theme Store, Kingsoft Office, Security Center, File Manager and a Video Player. With O-Cloud, you can backup your SMS and contacts on Oppo’s cloud service.
Performance
The Oppo F1s is a very good smartphone and we did not face any major issues while using it for about a week. We were able to perform every task on the phone with ease, including 3D games, and it did not heat up too much while playing games. However, sometimes the smartphone heats up a bit but not so much that it causes problems in operating it. The phone does not have any problem on 4G networks and the earpiece produces a very good sound even in noisy environments. The phone only comes with a touchpad keyboard installed, which works well.
HD media files play well on the phone. Oppo has provided its own Dirac software enhancement for speakers and headphones which works quite well at low frequencies.
A very simple reason to buy this smartphone is its camera performance. First of all, let’s talk about the front camera which is also the most special feature of this phone. This phone has a 16 megapixel front camera with aperture F/2.0 which takes very good quality pictures with detailing. With the Beautify 4.0 software, you can get rid of any kind of ‘stains’.
Like previous F-series smartphones, you can take selfies using just your palm or voice commands. The screen flash makes a lot of impact due to the brighter display. However, it is still a little weak. The front camera can record videos up to 1080p and also offers a few other shooting modes like GIF, filters and double exposure.
All these shooting modes are also present in the 13-megapixel rear camera. Apart from this, an expert mode is also provided in the rear camera. For this you have to choose between one second and 16 seconds. The image quality of landscape and macro shots is quite good. The rear camera comes with phase detection autofocus (PDAF) which can lock the subject very well. We liked the simple interface of the camera app and switching from one option to another is also very easy.
battery life
Talking about battery life, the 3075 mAh battery in Oppo F1s lasted for 10 hours and 11 minutes in the video loop test. During normal use, its battery lasts a little more than a day. However, F1s does not have VOOC fast charging technology like the previous phone. And it takes a lot of time to fully charge the phone with a 10 watt charger.
Our verdict
Oppo has launched another good product in the form of F1s. But we feel that the company could have made it a better smartphone by paying more attention to some small things. We are talking about fast charging, Wi-Fi AC and NFC which may not be very important but we expect these features from a smartphone coming at this price.
The F1s is an attractive phone with its own merits. It has a classy design, looks and build quality and also has some new features. The phone has a good display and the cameras are also claimed to be good.
The biggest problem of this phone is its price. The F1 smartphone has no place in the market now, so it would have been better if the company had launched the F1s at the same price as the F1. But it is very difficult for it to be successful at Rs 17,990 because smartphones with better features and more powerful than this are already available in the market for less than Rs 15,000.