Oppo Find 7 Review

Oppo Find 7 has been released after one year of the release of the Oppo Find 5 that was the flagship product for a company which otherwise was an obscure company. The Oppo Find 7 is the next generation flagship phone from the same company with much advanced specs. Oppo has two almost identical handsets i.e. the Find 7a with 1080p screen and the Find 7. The Find 7 is Oppo’s current flagship, and brings a few crucial enhancements over the previous flagship, the Find 7a.

The Oppo Find 7 shuns the 5.5” 1080p display for one with the breathtaking Quad HD (1440x2560) resolution, and sports faster processor, more memory, and a larger battery. While the Chinese phones are generally known for their cheap prices, the case is different for the Oppo Find as it is expensive phone when compared with the domestic rivals. Its hefty price can be justified by the fact that it is the only handset available globally that has a high-resolution 5.5-inch 2,560 x 1,440 pixel display other than the LG G3. Despite having said that, it is expensive enough for a display that you may not really need and for features that really do not stand out from the competition.

Let’s see if the Oppo Find 7 manages to wow buyers with its innovative features?

Here are the accessories that you will find in the box of the Oppo Find 7.

• The Oppo Find 7
• A/C Adapter
• In-Ear Stereo Headphones
• MicroUSB Cable

Although, Oppo is a Chinese based company, and there is a general perception of cheap phones created by the Chinese manufacturers, but to a surprise the design and build quality of the smartphones made by Oppo totally contradicts that opinion. Though, the Oppo Find 7 did not break the mold as much as the N1 did but there is no second opinion that the design and build quality of the Oppo Find 7 definitely oozes premium appeal from every angle.

The Oppo Find 7 bears an overall simplistic design with clear cut lines. Though, it be unsuccessful to mount a challenge against an aluminum –clad phone such as HTC One, but it does not beg any question – its high end beginnings are obvious enough even to passersby. As you would have thought, it is made of polycarbonate whereas the rear shell possesses an intricate mesh texture which is soft to touch and also resembles with carbon fiber. More interestingly, the camera ring, the buttons on the side and also the chrome ornaments seen the frame, they all add to the beautiful and sturdy construction of the phone.

The Oppo Find 7 measures 152.6 x 75 x 9.2mm and weighs 171g which is exact the same measurement as the Find 7a. The only difference is the one gram of added weight which can be justified by the fact that the battery capacity has also been increased by 2,800mAh to 3,000mAh.

The Oppo Find 7 has one foot in phablet district with a big 5.5" screen. However, we still found it rationally easy to operate as its controls (lock key, volume rocker) are placed quite conveniently and are accessible with just one hand as well.

Its display no doubt one of the killer features of the Oppo Find 7. It is a 5. Inch IPS panel with a Quad HD resolution of 1440 x 2560 pixels that results in around 534ppi. Though the colors are not very accurate and are hard to read outdoor but the viewing angles are great. The screen contrast is also good enough. Moreover, its pixel density ensures crisp viewing experience. Although, the sunlight legibility is a different story. Its maximum screen brightness is 390 nits which is quite low and does not help at all outdoors. Moreover, since the screen is too reflective, it makes reading the screen outdoor very hard.

The phone comes with a 3,000mAh battery which is a step above the 2,800mAh found in the Oppo Find 7a. Although, the company did not cite official talk and standby time for the Find 7, but keeping in mind that it is a 3000 mAh Li-Po battery, we expect it to offer at least a day of moderate usage.

Well, keeping the fact that Quad HD displays are indeed battery hog. It means they take a lot of power to run and to perform activities that require the screen to be on such as web browsing and watching videos one should not expect the Oppo Find 7 to perform extraordinarily when it comes to standardized battery test.

Though, what is more worthful point here is the inclusion of Rapid Charger which basically is a larger than average wall charger that comes with the phone. The charger is a 4.5Amp charger that can fully charge the battery in about an hour, which definitely is a plus point.

The Oppo Find 7 comes with all types of connectivity features you would expect it to have. These include quad-band GSM, penta-band HSPA and quad-band LTE Cat.4, dual-band Wi-Fi b/g/n, DLNA and Wi-Fi Direct, Bluetooth 4.0, NFC, microUSB 2.0 with USB On-the-go support. With the help of the System Update app, you can update Find 7 software over the air or from a local file which is saved in the internal memory in the form of a ZIP file.

Apart from this, you will also find a Data Monitor App which is preloaded in the phone to keep track of data used over Wi-Fi and the carrier network. Though, there is no Infrared port form remote controlling electronics that you may find in many other seasonal flagship phones.

As far as browsing experience on the Oppo Find 7 is concerned, as expected, the web browsing is a breeze thanks to a beastly processor ticking underneath the Find 7. Navigating and loading even the heavier web pages do not take much time, thanks to the responsive nature of Chrome browser.

Oppo Find 7 runs on Oppo's proprietary Color OS v1.2, which is another name for a heavily skinned Android 4.3 Jelly Bean. For this form factor, double tap to wake is a must to have and therefore, the Find 7 has it. Moreover, it is packed with a skinned and ultimately simple and user friendly mod of Android.

Oppo’s Color OS along with Android 4.3 Jelly Bean maintains a fine balance between offering extra functionality and keeping the whole thing simple and accessible. Furthermore, we are more than happy with the addition of double tap to wake type functionality considering the size of the phone.

Now, let’s see the included gestures in the Oppo Find 7. There are two gestures that you find by default, and these can be drawn directly on the screen when it's locked. One is for the shortcut to the camera app by drawing an ‘O’ while the other is for the flashlight by drawing a ‘V’. In addition, creating your own gestures and defining their behavior is very easy. You can easily create your own gestures, though, they won’t work if the screen is off. For your own gestures to work, you have to swipe the top left side of the status bar in order to open the gesture panel.

Availability of an enormously massive treasure troves of themes right through a built-in app is another most interesting feature that you find in the Oppo Find 7. Meanwhile, changing the look and style of the homescreen as well as lock screen is also quite easy. The device likes to keep things huge on the homescreen. Its apps are organized in a grid of 4 x 4 above the dock and the widgets are hardly optimized for the large and high resolution screen. Needless to say that the Settings menu and built-in apps will only go through a change in icons while everything else will look the way manufacturer has initially aimed for.

What’s more? Color OS also leaves no stone unturned. Oppo's Color OS supports themes, one of which changes the appearance and functionality of Color OS to match that of stock Android 4.3 Jelly Bean. Essential apps in the phone have seen intervention from Oppo, however, we like their simple, down to the point yet modern look and standard functionality. There are some extra apps also added that simply is the cherry on the top. Furthermore, you can also lock certain apps that contain sensitive content with the help of its pre-loaded encryption app. In addition, you can also keep track of which apps are using what kind of data and functionality on your phone via the Permission Monitor App.

On the whole, the Color OS in the Oppo Find 7 is more feature rich as compared to stock Android, and on top of that it has been quite deeply customized as well. Though, it is still Android, therefore, those users who are familiar with the OS will not have any problem in finding out their way around Color OS. In actual fact, majority of Oppo's embellishments are quite welcome and enhances the overall user experience.

The phone offers more power than any other smartphone in the same range and this added power makes the interface to work as smooth as silk, even most heavy 3D games are not a challenge. The reason of this fast and furious performance is its 2.5GHz quad-core MSM8974AC chip along with 3 GB of RAM. The Oppo Find 7 has the same chipset and processor, and identical GPU as that of its sibling Find 7a. Both the devices are quad-core Krait 400 Snapdragon 801 CPU and Adreno 330 graphics but the Find 7 comes with MSM8974AC variant.

Taking into consideration that the Find 7 is the only phone besides LG G3 that features a Quad HD display, so one should expect slightly lower graphic benchmark results. On the whole, the device is capable enough to power through everything ranging from the basics like navigating around the user interface to heavy gaming without any glitch.

As far as the storage is concerned, the phone offers generous 32 GB of storage on board, however, there is also an option to expand the storage via microSD card for up to 128GB more.

The Find 7 comes with a 13 megapixel camera with a wider-than-average, f/2.0 aperture, a dual LED flash and a 1/3.06'' sensor along with some added options such as stitching a 50 MP photo and 4K video recording while the interface is simple and unobtrusive. On top of that, the phone also comes equipped with a 5 megapixel front facing camera that takes some nice photos. There is a dual-LED flash that can work in fill light mode and can produce a natural looking photo without any color shift or strong shadow.

The camera interface, as we mentioned before, is simple and uncomplicated as well as spaced out in an ergonomic manner. Although, it is not the most functional camera that we used to see in today’s flagship phones, yet it does have some very notable tricks. For example, in addition to normal shooting modes like Panorama and HDR, there are some extra modes. These include Slow Shutter Mode for taking artsy looking night photos, HD Picture Mode for creating massive 50MP photos and lastly a RAW Mode which outputs shots in a .dng format for easy post-processing.

Picture quality of photos taken with HD mode on are simply amazing. Using HD mode is also very simple and it works very fine. It takes only 5 seconds to process the image. The 50 megapixel photos come with a huge amount of details. There is one more interesting feature that the camera can take 10 normal photos of 13 megapixels each and then stitch them together and interpolates the resulting still. That is, it stretches them, though the results are not always exemplary but it provides significant amount of details. You can also use Slow Shutter mode if you wish for longer than usual exposure as it gives longer exposure from 1 to 32 seconds. With this mode, you can take some really nice long exposure shots but for the best results, you will need to use a tripod.

Colors are contrast of the photos taken with the Oppo Find 7 are just fine and the white balance measurements are largely accurate with good sharpness across the entire frame. Dynamic range varies across images. Fine details are observable even when crop 100% and that too without being too sharp. So, on the whole, we are liking the camera performance. On the other hand, low light scenarios pictures are a little blurry but still are acceptable. The front facing 5 megapixel camera gives average results in terms of photo quality but it offers something extraordinary than any typical frontal shooter.

In addition to 1080p resolution clips, the phone is also capable of recording 4K videos along with 720p slow-mos. An HDR video mode is also available. Video quality is also great on both modes. There is lots of resolved details with accurate colors and very good contrast. Although, shadows tend to be on the dark side. Both modes produced samples with a steady 30fps frame rate.

A crisp 5.5 inch Quad HD display and powerful speaker are the features that stand out when we talk about Find 7 Multimedia functionality. What else do you need? Oppo proprietary apps like Music and Video Players are in charge of your multimedia needs. Both of the apps are exceedingly simplistic in nature, though the music one does offer several equalizer presets. Both the interfaces are quite simplistic in nature and are easy to use and navigate. While the player is on, the notification area lets you control the playback via an expandable notification but there are no music controls on the lockscreen.

Watching videos and even TV shows is not a problem – thanks to its large and crisp QHD display and powerful speaker located on the rear. Apart from that, there is a rich video codec support that includes DivX and MKV files at up to 2K resolutions.

The loudspeaker present in the Find 7 is extremely strong and quite clean too but it does lack somewhat fullness. Audio quality is good but not the best. It has excellently high volume levels to go with its very clean output.

Talking about Gallery app, Oppo has designed it with a less-is-more tactic, and therefore, we tend to see less features as compared to the vanilla app. It's also relatively basic, but not as bare as the stock. The available features when viewing a single image are pretty standard. You can also bring out shadows or the highlights by using the image editor that offers light adjustments. Moreover, applying effects, color styles, red eye correction, sharpening, face glow and straightening can also be done.

The new flagship device from the Oppo seems to be a stellar phone on paper as it has got an excellent and huge Quad HD display, powerful processor, plenty of memory and a high resolution camera with some really cool features, but it does have some drawbacks as well.

The build quality is excellent. The body is fairly ergonomic for a 5.5 inch device. The phone does not run on the latest Android 4.4 KitKat and rather costs you too much. We would have been expecting fairly generous battery capacity but its Quad HD display throws the Find 7 at the bottom of the seasonal flagship ranking when it comes to battery life.

The Find 7 is the company’s best phone to date, and it means something for a relatively unknown company like Oppo that has already put out some solid phones. Though, there are some factors that Oppo can't keep under control. What Oppo can do is to make a solid device that is a perfect combination of strong performance and a Quad HD screen and this is exactly what we have got here.

Despite a smattering of faults, it still stands tall, but the fact is that there is no shortage of competition that one can get a better device than this like LG G3, Samsung Galaxy S5 or even Sony Xperia Z2.