The Oppo F3 Plus is currently the best selfie centric smartphone we have tested so far. Today, the company announced a smaller variant of the phone, called the Oppo F3. It uses the same front facing camera setup as its bigger sibling, offering two cameras, one for selfies and the other for groufies. However, besides the front camera the rest of the phone is completely different. Priced at Rs. 19,990, the Oppo F3 rivals the Vivo V5s and Gionee A1. According to us, the Gionee A1 is the best selfie centric phone in the sub-20K segment.
Let us take you through the front facing camera first, which like the F3 Plus offers a dual camera setup. There is a 16MP camera for solo-selfies and if you are with friends, one can easily shift to the 8MP wide selfie camera. On initial impressions, the image quality seems good and might just be better than the Gionee A1. In addition, the wider 120 degree groupfie camera provides that extra feature which is lacking from the competition. From the few selfies we took with the phone, the overall quality seems quite comparable to that of the Oppo F3 Plus, which is high praise.
(L-R) Normal Selfie, wide-angle selfie
The rear camera on the other hand is not as good as the one we saw on the F3 Plus. The phone uses a 13MP shooter with PDAF, which seems fine under normal lighting conditions, but there is some visible noise as well. The noise increases gradually as you move to low lighting conditions. That being said, the colours look well balanced, and details don't seem heavily compromised.
The camera app offers a ton of settings, filters, modes and even video options such as time lapse, which is not hidden behind menus. There is more to the camera, but we will be able to tell you our final verdict about the image quality once we spend a few more days with the device.
Talking about the design, the phone resembles Oppo's previous budget segment selfie phone, the F1s more than the F3 Plus. What we mean here is that given the price difference, the Oppo F3 feels like a less premium device when compared to the F3 Plus. The metal back has plastic inserts, the quality of the sand-blasted back and the overall fit and finish of various ports and buttons feel somewhat inferior to that of the F3 Plus. Still, the device feature Gorilla Glass 5 at the front of its full HD display, which puts it a step above the Vivo V5s.
(L-R) Oppo F3, Oppo F1s
Performance is being handled by a MediaTek MT6750T SoC, which is aided by 4GB of RAM. Now, while this is technically not a new combination, the performance on initial usage seems good enough for light to medium users. The phone is smooth while navigating day to day apps such as Facebook, Whatsapp, Chrome, Gmail, etc. That being said, if you are coming from a Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 or a Moto G5 Plus and like to play games, the phone will feel a little slow.
There is 64GB of storage on the phone, which can be further expanded using the dedicated microSD card. here is plenty of storage which puts it right at par with the two main selfie centric phones we mentioned earlier (the Vivo V5s and the Gionee A1), both of which offer 64GB of storage and 4GB of RAM.
Overall, We think, the Oppo F3 might turn out to be the best selfie centric smartphone in the sub-20K price bracket. We will check how the phone fairs against its competition as well its bigger cousin, the Oppo F3 Plus in our full review.