BEAUTY? YES. PRICEY? NO!

The AI- enabled beauty features of the Oppo flagship have trickled down to a more affordable price

The Chinese brand Oppo has a faithful following in India after it staked out its space as a selfiefriendly smartphone. Problem was most of its selfie experts were priced on the wrong side of ` 20,000, keeping them out of the range of many buyers. Having handled some of these upmarket models, I am thrilled to get the same comfortable feel and pretty much the same experience with the recently launched Oppo A83.

The centre piece of any Oppo phone is its Artificial Intelligence- fueled Beauty Recognition Technology. And the tool is available with the A83 with all its bag of tricks — a canny judgement of gender and age, skin colour and texture — that subtly highlights all the good features of a person’s face. Yes, beauty is subjective but Oppo’s technology in its 8 MP front camera tries to help!

The 13 MP rear camera can shoot ultra HD quality, a useful feature that combines multiple shots to create a 50 MP image. The 5.7 inch screen is slightly better than 720p HD. The 3 GB RAM is quite ok and so is the 32 GB storage expansion; the VoLTE add- on to the 4G connectivity that allows you to go all- data and freevoice with a service like Jio. Another high- end feature is the ability to unlock the phone by aligning your face to it. I am a bit disappointed that in 2018, this is still Android 7.1 rather than Android 8.

Otherwise, this is one solid performer with features that will seem generous for the asking price of ` 13,990.