Oppo recently created a new category within its smartphone lineup, called the F-series, with its central focus being camera quality. The Oppo F1(Review) was the first model to kick-start this series back in January and today the company has launched the F1 Plus, which was teased a few months back.
As it turns out, the F1 Plus is the same as the Oppo R9, just rebadged for our market. The latter was announced last month alongside another variant called the R9 Plus for the Chinese market. The F1 Plus is also billed as a "Selfie Expert" smartphone owing to its high-resolution front camera. However, this is not merely an Oppo F1 with a better camera and bigger screen - the company has added many more creature comforts that were missing in the debut model, which makes this an interesting product on its own.Look and feel
There’s no getting around the fact that the design of the F1 Plus has been heavily "inspired" by the current iPhone design. It’s not the first time companies have drawn inspiration from popular smartphones and it certainly won’t be the last. Oppo seems to have made efforts to ensure that the F1 Plus is not a direct ripoff, and the end result is quite satisfying.The phone feels incredibly premium in your hands thanks to the metal chassis and the rounded glass edges in the front. It very light too at 145g and is surprisingly comfortable to use with one hand thanks to very narrow bezels on either side of the screen. The display is a 5.5-inch full-HD Amoled panel which produces vivid colours and good levels of brightness. You even get Gorilla Glass 4 for protection. We noticed that the top half of the screen takes on a light blue hue when you tilt it forward, which is most noticeable on white backgrounds like web pages. At first we thought it was due to the screen guard that comes pre-installed but it is in fact the display.Specifications and software
The F1 Plus is powered by MediaTek’s MT6755 octa-core SoC, which is also known as the Helio P10. It’s a 64-bit chip built on the slightly older 28nm fabrication process and packs in a Mali T860 GPU. Coupled with 4GB of RAM, the overall performance is quite a bit faster than say, a Snapdragon 616. In AnTuTu, we got a score of 51, 022 points while GFXbench returned 16fps in the T-Rex test.The phone also has 64GB of storage, Wi-Fi b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0, GPS, Wi-Fi Direct, Miracast, and USB OTG. NFC and FM radio are two features that are sorely missed. Also, it wouldn’t have hurt to throw in support for Wi-Fi ac too. The F1 Plus supports 4G for Indian bands and VoLTE.
Colour OS has a slick new look in v3.0 when compared to previous Oppo smartphones, and no prizes for guessing what inspired it. We have a new set of icons, some of which are straight out of iOS. Hitting the Recents capacitive button lines up all your apps as cards, which you can slide sideways to flip through, or flick upwards to close. The notifications shade is split into two tabs; one for notifications and the other for all your toggle switches. Battery life
The F1 Plus packs in a 2850mAh battery which lasted for 13 hours and 3 minutes in our video loop test. Under regular use, we had no trouble going beyond a day with 4G. The phone also supports Oppo’s VOOC fast charging system, which managed to juice the battery up to 56 percent in just half an hour. One thing to keep in mind is that along with the special charger, you need to carry the specific USB cable that ships with the phone. A standard Micro-USB cable will not work for fast charging.Performance
The F1 Plus runs very smoothly for everyday use and you’ll usually have about 2GB of RAM free for apps. We didn’t face any noticeable lag during our time with the phone. The fingerprint sensor is blazing fast and almost never skipped a beat. We did find the ambient light sensor to be a bit slow to react to changing light. 4G works on both SIM slots and a new SIM is registered quickly without the need for a reboot. Call quality is good too, and the speaker is fairly loud for conference calls.