Travel with a selfie expert – OPPO F1s

If you have been following me on my social channels, you would have noticed my recent obsession with Selfies. That was me brushing up my Selfie skills as I headed out for the launch of the new #SelfieExpert OPPO F1s phone in Mumbai. The launch itself was a star-studded affair with the Selfie Queen Sonam Kapoor sharing her Selfie tips, the famous photographer Dabboo Ratnani sharing his experience and the popular cricket star Yuvraj Singh making an appearance owing to OPPO taking up his cause against cancer.

As a traveler, one of the main gadgets that I always carry, without fail is a mobile. For me, it serves as a protection, an entertainment and a quick photo capture device. With my travel requirements in mind, here is my review of OPPO F1s as a travel mobile device, with a special emphasis on its mobile camera. After all, it is a Selfie Expert.

1) Overall look and feel

Sleek, light weight and handy is what I will sum up as the appearance of OPPO F1s. Works well for me as it becomes much easier to handle along with my other travel gadgets – the lens, the camera and my knapsack. I have a habit of just stuffing my phone into the pocket of my jeans and this size and shape is just fine for that.

Adding to the looks is the Gorilla Glass – a feature necessary for the butterfingers like me. I always tend to drop my phone and for me this feature of OPPO F1s is welcome for its additional protection against cracking and scratching.

If you ask me to compare it to an iphone 6 – look wise, I would say bigger but definitely lighter than the iphone 6. As compared to a Samsung A7, I personally considered the OPPO F1s to be better looking.

2) Battery Life of OPPO F1s

This is a perpetual crib that I have with my phones. With the roaming and the excessive use of apps as well as camera, my phone battery drains down really fast. I did not want to take the Li-Po 3075 mAh battery of the OPPO F1s at face value and decided to subject my review phone to a travel situation. I left all the apps open, used social media as I normally do and clicked lots of pictures through the day. The battery life was a little better than an iphone. With all my usage, it lasted me for just about 12 hours. As a former user of iphone, I always noticed that my iphone battery would be out in about 9 – 10 hours. Even if I add an hour or two with my non-roaming status, the OPPO F1s definitely had an edge.

3) Processing and Memory capabilities

With a  Qualcomm Snapdragon Octa-core 64-bit processor and 3GB of RAM, the OPPO F1s has no issues multitasking. With an active phone user like me, I was able to navigate between different apps quickly and seamlessly. I am also, an avid gamer and given that, I found that the processor did help in a better game experience. In a travel scenario, where you are trying to share stuff live while on roaming, this multitask facility of a phone can be really useful. What with the low bandwidth and multiple apps open, it will definitely ease your task.

To optimize the phone usage, OPPO F1s has a security scan, that besides detecting security threats, also, helps you optimize the performance of the phone by quickly clearing the cache and shutting down unused applications. This is not to say that the other phones don’t do that, it just felt a tad bit simpler in the OPPO F1s with its one click solution.

Another thing that I would like to mention here is the fact that an OPPO F1s has a dual sim capability. A useful feature when traveling abroad – if you have two different SIMs, you do not have to have two phones or interchange the SIMs.

As far as the phone memory is concerned, the OPPO F1s comes with a 32GB internal memory. You can further expand it with a micro SD card. Definitely welcome with the number of photos and videos that I take.

4) Camera of OPPO F1s

Now comes my favorite and an important deciding factor of a travel phone. The camera! For me, capturing pictures on the go, especially during a road trip, is a good pass-time and also, adds up as my memories of a trip.

The OPPO F1s has quite a few options for camera buffs like me. From a Panorama to filters to an expert mode. I had a hearty time trying out the various options and I must say that some of them can really appeal to your creative self. While the filters give you an easy creative option, the expert mode gives you a handy DSLR experience. It offers you options to control the ISO, shutter speed, exposure and lighting. It also, has a RAW image option. Pretty handy, specially if you are roughing out and you do not want to carry a heavy DSLR.

The OPPO F1s has a 13 megapixel rear camera, with a lens aperture of f2.2, while the front camera is of 16 megapixels with f2.0 aperture. I will deal with the front camera later, for now, let’s see what I think of the rear camera.

Given the different situations and lighting conditions, I have taken a few shots with OPPO F1s. In some cases, I have also, enlisted the help of my friend Somya and Vigyan for their phones – an iphone and a Samsung, to give you a comparison. Note all these photos were taken at the same setting, same time and with no filters.

Outdoors in Natural Light

The pictures taken with the two phones are quite comparable in terms of sharpness and its vivid colors. The difference that I notice –

• The OPPO F1s pictures are slightly more widescreen as compared to iPhone
• The iPhone pictures seem to be absorbing more of the blues and warm tones as compared to the OPPO F1s. This is even more evident in the low light pictures that you can see next.

Low light photography

As mentioned, the blue hues and the warm tones of the iPhone pictures is evident here as compared to the OPPO F1s one.

Besides this, there is not much of a difference in the pictures taken on a automatic mode. The good thing is that with the camera options that OPPO F1s offers, you can choose to adjust your colors, exposures, brightness etc as you desire.

 

5) Selfies with OPPO F1s

I so realise the importance of Selfies when I travel solo. I personally, am quite skeptical of giving my phone or camera out to strangers just so that they can click me. OPPO F1s is positioned as a Selfie Expert, with a higher megapixel front camera. Added to the same is a unique Panorama feature – a good one if you are a huge group of friends and need a group selfie.  Here is what I felt about it when comparing it to an iphone 6 and a Samsung A series

The difference in the skin tones and clarity is evident in the selfies taken above. Sharper, Clearer and a better skin tone with an OPPO F1s. Clearly the OPPO F1s makes me look better :D. No wonder it is a Selfie Expert 🙂

Overall Verdict

From the perspective of a traveler, OPPO F1s definitely tick marks a lot of parameters. To summarize them all –

What is the most appealing is that it is at a much lesser price than the phones I have compared with – viz- iphone 6 and Samsung A7. Where an Oppo is at INR 17,990 , the iphone 6 comes at around INR 38490 and the Samsung A7 is at INR 26,900. For a traveler, I definitely would put it into a consideration set of phones to buy. What do you think? Would you go for it? Comment in and let me know.

P.S: I was invited for the launch of OPPO F1s and as a part of the review, was given a handset to use and keep. My views on the phone are based on my own experience and truly my own.