Encased in a metal body with elements neatly groomed, the phone offers a premium finish - but only from the back. The phone, from the front, doesn’t look as great as its rear. While the F1 offers a 5-inch display, the screen-to-body ratio is around 67 per cent, which, however, more or less is in line with the current standard, but appears to be a little less on a phone with a white-coloured bezel.
While the front of the phone may not be be as good-looking as the rear, the phone, as a whole, offers a good build quality. Not only it features a slim profile, the phone also has a light weight, which adds to the comfortable handling.
Talking about the screen quality, the HD display on the Oppo F1 produces good colours and offers great viewing angles. With Corning Gorilla Glass 4 atop, which is said to be two times tougher than its predecessor, the phone is claimed to be more protected from scratches.
Coming to its cameras, a feature the phone heavily banks on and the company has been bragging about, the Oppo F1 houses an 8 megapixel front facing camera with a f/2.0 aperture lens. Infused with a wide aperture, the front shooter on the phone generated bright photos, but they didn't have as much details as we had expected. Even the 13 megapixel camera at the rear couldn’t woo us in terms of details in the images captured.
As a demo zone is generally set up indoor and is devoid of good light, we usually give the camera performance on phones a benefit of the doubt in our first impressions. But the one at the Oppo F1 launch was properly lit up, and therefore, we were disappointed even more with the results produced by its front and rear cameras. As we are yet to test the camera on the F1 in different lighting conditions, we are holding the verdict on the same for our detailed review.
While its camera may not be rich in generating details, it is, indeed, affluent in terms of features. Some of the interesting features include Screen flash, which converts the F1's entire display into a camera flash for low-light photography; the RAW function to store the RAW format to maximise the possibilities in post-processing images, Double Exposure which lets you shoot twice and automatically overlay one picture over the other to create unique visual effects. While how well these features fare in making the most of the F1’s cameras is yet to be tested.
Given that the phone is touted as “selfie expert” and the first in the photographic-centric F series, we expected a little more from its camera than the ones on other mid-range phones.
The phone has a speaker at the bottom of the rear, which turned out to be a letdown. Neither it was loud nor impressive in audio quality.
