Oppo R15 Pro

A THRILLING SCREEN AT THE RIGHT PRICE, BUT THE SNAPPER COULD BE SNAPPIER.

PASS THROUGH A metropolitan area or fringe of your local CBD and you might have seen huge billboards for Oppo’s latest phone. Here’s a phone made for capturing the essence of the outdoors, they say, and there’s certainly truth in that advertising: the R15 Pro takes winning photos in natural light. Switch the HDR (high dynamic range) option on the rear-facing dual lens and you will be amazed by what you’ve just captured.

We’re at the point in the evolution and life cycle of smartphones where we can lead with the performance of the camera, especially in this price range and higher, as it’s the one feature that truly sets phones apart in how we use them the most.

Our landscape shots blew away last-year’s champion, the Huawei P10 Plus (see issue 66, page 15), with truer-to-life skies, clouds packed with intricate details and reflections in the glass of an adjacent building. It’s fast, too, responsive to taking shots and video. However, you’ll need to fiddle with the settings tree to emulate tricks found on higher-end phones, like the depth of field effect that blurs the background while keeping the subject in tight focus.

That’s found under the portrait mode, and in there, you’ll find a lot of gimmicks to alter the lighting, or more fancy augmented reality effects. There’s a weird tendency for the software to automatically smooth your subject’s skin (helpful when you’re feeling a bit dusty), but that can be turned down or off. It’s frustrating that the power of the dual lens camera feels locked away behind Oppo’s software, when its rivals have got this right for a long time.

The R15 Pro’s selfie prowess is also a bit questionable, with missing details and the overall result of image feeling a bit ‘fudgey‘ — that is, unless you have the beauty mode on, and the phone half an arm’s length away from your face. Best you stick to the rear lenses.

All of this is housed in a very handsome chassis. Our test unit was a striking metallic fire engine red colour, with the same shimmer you’d see on a particularly exciting, wellwrapped present. The camera bump can be mitigated with the included gel case, which adds more texture. In your hand, the phone is wonderfully weighted, and the 6.28-inch 19:9 AMOLED display (not a typo) is a pearler.

Thanks to the stellar facial recognition system, the screen will turn on from face down to firing in roughly 1.3 seconds. It’s near instantaneous if you use the rear-mounted fingerprint sensor instead.

The phone comes with 128GB of storage that can handily be expanded up to 256GB. It also has an audio jack and supports IP67 water resistance, which means you can drop it in a deepish puddle but don’t leave it there.

In testing, our benchmarks revealed this to be a powerful device, thanks to its Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 CPU, but its 3,430mAh battery was rather underwhelming. In the real world, though, the R15 Pro can certainly last from dawn to dusk, depending on your usage. If you’re feeling the pinch, the included fast charger offers 50% charge in 30 minutes.

So, yes, it gets the nod, and for the price, it’s great value. If Oppo had made the camera more flexible and gone with USB-C rather than micro USB, we’d be far more enthusiastic.