LIL’ SIS OF THE 2018 NOTCH FAM

Oppo F9 stands out from the crowd with its purple gradient and sprinkles of gold dust

After the introduction of the infamous notch on Apple’s iPhone X last year, a barrage of phones have copied the trend. The Oppo F9 also comes with a notch, but the smallest of them all. Personally, I despise these notches because they cut into screen content. But to gain a near-all-screen-at-the-front experience, I understand their necessity since there must be some area that hosts all those frontal sensors and cameras, right? Luckily, this hip Oppo F9’s notch is the smallest among all the phones with a size of about 50mm and in a shape p of a droplet, obscuring less content than other phones in the notch family, giving a full widescreen 6.3-inch screen with a resolution of 2340-by-1080 to play around with.

Apart from the tiny notch, this Oppo F9 comes in colours that are so out there! No other phone — that I know of — comes with a shade of purple gradient and a sprinkle of gold dust over the back of the phone. This gradient theme is also applied to the side, top and bottom rim of the phone too, making it very eye-catching.

It’s also nice that the phone comes with two SIM card slots plus an extra microSD card slot, offering plenty of extra storage for photos and videos.

The phone comes with 6GB of RAM. So running an application while having 10 or more other apps running in the background is possible.

Facial recognition like the latest iPhones, extremely fast charge (five-minute charge will net you two hours talk time) coupled with a large 3500mAh battery, Oppo’s prettier-than-real-life selfie capability, AI ready dual-rear camera giving a nice bokeh effect and automatic on-the-fly colour adjustment, are present as well.

Oppo is the second brand that implements a function to block all interruptions while gaming. This is a big boon to people who can’t tolerate being nagged with Line chat bubbles or phone calls during intense ROV sessions, like me.

My gripes? The bottom speaker is a bit too easy to cover with your hands and will, more often than not, hinder the volume if you’re not aware of it. Fortunately, the phone call quality is adequately loud and clear.

This phone doesn’t seem to be built with gaming in mind, as most games cannot be run at their maximum graphic settings. For example, it can only run ROV at medium settings (30 frames per second), or graphic settings need to be toned down to run the Seven Knights game smoothly.

With a price of 10,990 baht, this is a very nice alternative among mid-range phones.