Yes, you look good

No one in the country could have escaped the aggressive advertising that’s been done by Oppo over the past few months. And now the company has pulled off a coup with Deepika Padukone as brand ambassador, so prepare to see more.

Oppo has been in the phone business since 2004 and has come up with some innovative devices, including one with a swivelling camera. Lately, the company has dubbed itself ‘The Selfie Expert’ and has been catering in India to the bold and the beautiful who want to look good and don’t hesitate to be reminded of it many times a day. It’s latest F3 Plus is also a selfie oriented phone — so let’s head straight to the cameras.

There’s one number that is straight off in favour of the camera being good. That’s F1.7 and it means a nice wide aperture. This is on the main 16MP camera with its Sony IMX398 lens. Any photographer will tell you that it’s the amount of light that a camera can let in that’s far more important than the megapixel count, which companies are fond of touting. The selfie camera has an F2.0 aperture. Unsurprisingly then, it’s a pretty good camera. I was very pleased with my first selfie with the F3 Plus’ camera. In fact, the device has two front cameras, 16MP and 8MP and they’re meant for wide-angle selfies, fitting in all your pouting and face-making friends in the frame. Considering I took the shots in anything but conducive night-time indoor lighting, the images were very bright and clear, missing no details. And nor was there any noise. Skin tones were fine, unless you use the HDR in which case you may end up with warmer than necessary images in some lighting conditions.

But Oppo is proudest of the job it’s done with the dual camera for group selfies. Reducing the need for a selfie stick or struggling with positions, the 120-degree wide angle lens has been chosen to avoid distortion and to give enough of an expanse to take photographs with your friends. Since the camera responds to voice commands, you can take that click with a mere ‘cheese’.

Both cameras also give you that bokeh effect so that you have a bit of blur in the background.

If you’re not quite satisfied with the way you look, there’s a Beautify 4.0 mode, predictably, and the usual filters to apply. You can also make yourself fairer or rosier, as the mood propels you. The camera app is very simple and intuitive, with everything you need up front without having to dig into deep settings. There isn’t a Pro mode, but there are filters and a few other modes that are quite a lot of fun. Double Exposure, for example leads to some artistic shots, taken from the front or primary 16MP camera. If you try it with a selfie you can get a motion blur and blended images of you with different expressions. Or, shoot the first picture of some background and the second of yourself to get an interesting result. That should be a hit on social media, as should the instant gif creating mode, which you can use to create boomerang and other effects to put up on Instagram. The cameras use Dual Pixel autofocus plus a dual-tone LED flash on board.

It looks a lot like most other phones these days. But if there’s one thing that’s distinctive, it’s three plus another three thin antenna lines on the top and bottom of the back of the phone, which makes it look like an interesting design element. It’s a rather large phone, at six inches with a 1080 x 1920 display. The phone works with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 652 chipset 1.9GHz octa-core CPU, Adreno 510 with 4GB RAM and 64GB storage space. Sadly it doesn’t come with Android Nougat out of the box. The phones comes with a 4,000mAh battery and is a dual-SIM device.

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