Smartphone newcomer Oppo arrived from nowhere to win the
hearts of Android enthusiasts last year, with the Oppo Find 5 offering
decent performance and selling for an impressive price. It was a good
start for the previously unknown firm.
Now Oppo's gunning
for the more glamorous, barn-door sized phone end of the market with
the Oppo N1, an enormous 5.9-inch model with a full HD 1080p display and
relatively high-end Snapdragon 600 series chipset.
It's an audacious, slightly bonkers, Galaxy Note 3 or Sony Xperia Z Ultra
competitor, but with an RRP of €449 (around £370, or $615, AU$680) it
seriously undercuts both Sony and Samsung's rival phablets.
Plus
it has a mad swivelling camera, a touchpad around the back and a lean
Android OS heavy on motion and touch gestures. It's innovative and
cheaper than its peers. Back of the net, right? What
immediately sets the N1 apart from other phones of its size is the
innovative rotating camera mount. This houses a fast and impressive 13MP
sensor, one that you can rotate through 180 degrees to capture your own
gurning face at a resolution unprecedented for a front-facing camera.
And
it's a nicely built, sturdy mount, locking into place when it's facing
backwards and automatically flipping the on-screen viewfinder image when
you rotate it. It's no novelty, it's a super idea. Oppo's
also blowing the traditional phone-selling model apart by including an
extremely nice flip case in the box, which is smart enough to
automatically activate and deactivate the phone's display when you open
and close it - like the world's most technically advanced fridge light.
It's
a smooth, stylish case that you'd expect to pay a fair few quid for, so
many big-ups to the Oppo team for bunging it in as a freebie. This case also has a soft area around the back, where there's no padding, like the delicate soft spot on a baby's head.
This
is so you can use the Oppo N1's other unique feature - the rear-mounted
trackpad. Oppo calls this the O-Touch panel, an additional input
method, albeit one that's not hugely useful in the N1's current software
setup.
And there's more. There's also a tiny
keyfob-size remote control called the O-Click included with the Oppo N1,
letting you take photos using the swivelling lens while a short
distance away from the phone. It's the ultimate 'selfie' device, no
doubt about that. It's
a bit of a shame to see hardware capacitive buttons beneath the huge
display, though, as many of today's newest Android models feature the
more versatile on-screen software buttons that can pop themselves into
and out of existence when the OS deems it necessary.
And it's not what you'd call thrilling to look at.
Design
As for the physical size of the Oppo N1, it's huge and fairly heavy. I'm coming from using the modest Moto G and Sony Xperia Z1 Compact as my main mobiles, so opening the box and taking out the massive N1 was a shock.
It
almost seems like a joke at first, but, as usually happens when
switching up a few inches, after a day or two you find yourself getting
used to the extra screen size.
The rotating camera mount
means the headphone socket is placed on the bottom of the N1, where it
battles for space alongside the USB connector and speaker.
The left-hand edge only houses the microSIM slot - accessed by poking a
pin in to pop out the tray - while the right-hand edge has the power
button a little above the middle for easy thumb access.
It's surprising to see there's no SD card support on the N1, as it's usually a banker on phones from lesser known makers. Despite
its size and weight, and the fact that I felt embarrassed flopping out
such a whopper in public for the first few days, it fits in the hand(s)
pretty well.
It's
never going to be usable in one hand alone as you'd need to have King
Kong's hand grafted on to hold it and reach the notifications tab with
your thumb, but it's not impossible to imagine carrying it around all
day. The
free case helps you to hold it. It's textured and grippy, plus it flips
open like a book - so you can hold it like a book. Because it's as big
as a book. A thin book, mind, so it's not that noticeable in your
trouser pocket.
One problem I had with the case was that
it hides the power and volume buttons a little, with the edge of the
case recessing them further back. I never managed to train my fingers
and thumb to find the power button automatically, as the edges of the
case mask the buttons. It
would be nice if the power and volume toggles poked out a bit more,
especially as the volume-down button also doubles as a camera shutter
button when taking photos. But the fact that it's often a little hard to
find meant I stuck with the on-screen software shutter during my time
with the N1.
As for build quality, it feels solid. Easily as impressive to hold as the Samsung Galaxy Note 3, with the matte white plastic and occasional bit of chrome-style finish giving it quite a Samsung-like appearance. It's
also really thin when out of its case, with Oppo measuring it at just
9mm thick. This helps it fit some pockets, although it's still so
enormous there's a worry it'll pop out and end up on the floor if you're
forced to crouch for any reason. So best use that free case.
The
display is another area where Oppo matches that offered by today's more
familiar brands. The N1 outputs at 1920 x 1280 resolution, and the
separate capacitive buttons mean you get all of that screen devoted to
action. It's
a lovely display, bright and colourful, with plenty of contrast when
viewing photos and video clips. It's so bright I never had to have it
anywhere near maximum brightness, even when outdoors, which can only
help squeeze more life out of the phone's hard-pressed battery.
Viewing
angles are great, too. Colours and contrast are consistent even when
your arms start dropping under the weight of it and the phone starts to
move about in your hand, making it ideal for watching downloaded media.
Key features
Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support; penta-band 3G with HSPA
5.9" 16M-color 1080p Super IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen with 373ppi
Android OS v4.2.2 Jelly Bean with Color OS; There is a limited edition with CyanogenMod
13 MP autofocus camera, 206° module rotation; dual-LED flash; HDR, long exposure (up to 8 seconds), shutter remote
1080p video recording @ 30fps with HDR mode, continuous autofocus and stereo sound
Oppo Beauty capture
Touchpad on the back
Dual-band Wi-Fi ac/a/b/g/n, Wi-Fi Direct and DLNA; Wireless TV-out (Miracast)
GPS with A-GPS
16GB/32GB of built-in storage
microUSB 2.0 port, USB on the go support
Bluetooth v4.0
NFC
Standard 3.5 mm audio jack
3610 mAh battery
Accelerometer and proximity sensor
Active noise cancellation with dedicated mic
Premium aluminum and polycarbonate finish
O-Click Bluetooth Remote Control in the package
Main disadvantages
Non expandable storage
No LTE
Non user-replaceable battery
Hefty and big device, near impossible to operate single-handedly
Snapdragon 600 is no longer flagship-grade
The main focus is undoubtedly on the display and camera but Oppo did
well to fill in the details - there's an immense battery, ample 2GB of
RAM and a solid connectivity set. It's the Snapdragon 600 chipset that
looks a bit out of place. Not that you should worry about general speed
and responsiveness, but it just doesn't provide as much in terms of
future-proofing as the Snapdragon 800 . And it can't manage 4K video
recording, which is a potential eyebrow-raiser in a package that bets so
heavily on imaging.
The camera is the most obvious attention-grabber, the lens placed on a
206°-rotating module, which has the earpiece and proximity sensor on
one side and the 13MP camera with dual-LED flash on the other. A
rotating camera design scores big on exclusivity in the current
smartphone game, although we can't discount Nokia's early efforts in the
field with the 3250 and N90. Maybe that's what Oppo meant with "Back to
innovation".
More importantly though, the N1's camera has hardware you rarely see
in a smartphone, and the software backing to make it count in more than
just high-resolution selfies. Oppo N1 at HQ
It's obvious Oppo has gone all out with the N1 - the screen, the
camera, the OS, the design and the marketing. The company wants to be
heard and seen and it sure looks like they have something to show. We're
eager to explore and our next stop is hardware. It goes without saying
that the only way the N1's going to get its back scratched is by us
testing the rear touchpad.
Oppo's tried to make the N1 a little more user-friendly than
the stock version of Android, with the phone full of lots of small
software touch and gesture controls to help you get it set up the way
you want it to work.
For
example, Oppo's included something it calls the gesture panel. This is a
way of launching apps by drawing pictures, accessed by dragging down
from the left-hand side of the Notifications bar (you can edit where it
activates in the settings).
You might want to draw a big
letter "T" to launch Twitter, or a circle to open the camera. It's
debatable whether this is actually any quicker than unlocking a phone
and clicking on an app, and I never bothered with it once the initial
curiosity had worn off.
But you may find a case for using
it. If you don't want to clutter your Home screens up with too many
icons, perhaps it would be a nice way of launching things.
There's
also the touchpad on the back, or the O-Panel, as Oppo calls it. As
with the Gesture Panel, you can associate actions with this via a custom
menu, although these are limited to stuff like using it to open the
camera and change tracks in the music player.
I didn't
use it much, as being placed in the middle of the back of such a large
phone means it's surprisingly difficult to find, plus, despite the soft
bit in the case to allow you to poke at it, it's pretty unresponsive to
touch. Perhaps
if it worked as a music track shifter when the phone is in standby it'd
be more useful. But it doesn't. It only works when the music player is
open and on the screen, which is quite peculiar.
So
it's not very useful at all. Presumably Oppo's hoping the development
community can come up with some better ideas for utilising it.
What
I did use quite a lot were some of the Oppo N1's gesture controls. A
standalone menu lets you set up tasks that activate when moving the
phone, with one particularly useful option being to have the music
player skip through tracks with a shake of the N1.
You
might look a bit odd doing that with the phone in your pocket, but it's
certainly a better use of tech than the bizarre rear touchpad.
You
can also open up the camera by squeezing the display with lots of
fingers, or capture a screengrab by running two fingers down the
display.
The latter only works occasionally, as pulling down tends to scroll whatever you're looking at, so it takes a few goes.
And
as with all this additional control stuff, it depends on you learning
it in the first place and remembering it. As useful as it can be, it
feels like the sort of thing you'll use once, think "Oh, that's clever,"
then forget about and never do again. And
there's the rotating camera. It's a bit of a novelty, sure, but it does
mean you get a 13MP front-facing camera, plus you can do weird things
like put your phone on the top of the fridge, rotate the camera so it's
pointing out into the room, and use the self timer properly for once.
It also produces great shots and is quite a killer feature if you're serious about mobile photography.
CyanogenMod
Possibly the most interesting feature on the Oppo N1 is its ability to run an official, 100% fully featured version of CyanogenMod. The
community-led alternative version of Android is available for
installation on many Android phones and tablets, but Oppo is the first
maker to support it officially.
As
in, installing CyanogenMod on the N1 won't void your warranty, and is
simply a case of sticking the installer on the phone's memory and
running it to completely change operating systems - no "rooting" or
"bootloader" misery involved here.
And it's definitely
worth giving it a shot for a couple of reasons. First, the CyanogenMod
software is significantly closer to the stock Android experience in
terms of look and feel, so is useful to have access to for that reason
alone if you're not entirely won over by Oppo's own ColorOS UI.
Secondly,
CyanogenMod adds stacks of additional features to Android. You get more
toggles, including a torch, in the pull-down Notifications menu, the
lock screen comes with customisable quick-launch shortcuts to a variety
of apps.
Plus there's a burst mode in the camera, a
variety of transition effects to change the Home screen's icon and
widget scrolling, app drawer modifications and much more.
For
fiddlers, CyanogenMod adds a staggering level of depth and control to
the Android experience, plus it's 100% stable on the Oppo N1 - great to
see it working at full power without any functionality caveats
whatsoever.
And if you don't like it, bunging the
ColorOS installer on the phone's internal memory and running it is all
you need to to do switch back to the safer alternative.
Display, Interface, and Performance
Easily one of the key selling features of the device, the 5.9" screen
of the Oppo N1 has a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels, resulting in
around 373ppi. Oppo puts the screen brightness at 450 nits, not all that
much for an IPS LCD like the N1's but in reality the screen looks
pretty bright.
Hardly a surprise for an IPS unit, the side viewing angles are
excellent - it's a high-quality screen, no doubt about that. The
screen's digitizer is super-sensitive and the phone can be used with
gloves (if you turn that on in the settings menu).
The Oppo N1 runs on the quad-core 1.7GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon
600 chipset, which is technically one performance tier behind the
Snapdragon 800 that sits inside some of today's top-drawer Android
models like the HTC One and LG G2.
It's
backed by the standard 2GB of RAM other hardware makers put in their
flagship models, so multitasking works well, with apps staying alive in
the memory.
Meanwhile, switching back and forth between several apps is nice and quick, as is web use in the pre-loaded Chrome browser.
Android 4.2 Jelly Bean is the core behind the Oppo N1, with the maker customising this through a skin it calls the Color OS.
It's
a fairly standard example of a manufacturer Android skin, offering a
different clock and optional weather widget, a floating dock along the
bottom for up to five permanently accessible apps, plus the usual
drop-down notifications tab that's also accessible from the lock screen
if you tap the relevant toggle in the Settings menus. I
was horrified upon first booting the N1, as the notification pull-down
area is absolutely rammed with row upon row of grim grey toggles and
options, but that's really the only place where the ColorOS intrudes on
the usual simplicity of Android.
In
fact, once your eyes have calmed down and noticed there's a useful
brightness slider right there in the Notification area, you quickly
forgive it for appearing so packed, as quick, one-touch access to the
brightness setting is nice to have.
You can have up to
nine home screens, each filled with whatever collection of app
shortcuts, folders and live widgets suits you best.
A
long-press on an empty bit of the display (or the Menu button) brings
up the customisation menu, from where you can install app shortcuts and
widgets, select from a massive number of themes, edit transition effects
and change your wallpaper.
What Oppo has included
that's exclusive to the N1 is a pair of custom home screens dedicated to
music and imaging. These are what Oppo calls its Exclusive Spaces,
which offer easy access to photo messaging and music playback. They're
basically enormous widgets, though, with the music player filling a
whole screen with a record player graphic, which will thoroughly baffle
any teenagers.
This doesn't exactly offer any thrilling
features, simply functioning as a simple music player, much like
Android's smaller, simpler, widget option. Only taking up a whole
screen. One of Oppo's more baffling creations, that.
The
Photo Space page is equally odd. The live camera viewfinder widget at
the top of it is impressive, but it takes low-res images designed to
have text attached to them for sharing via text message and social
media.
It's
something I wouldn't ever use, as there's not a lot of point in
deliberately taking low-res images in exchange for the ability to share
them with a caption embedded upon them.
As for how the
OS and Snapdragon 600 combine here, benchmarking powertool Geekbench 3
rates the Oppo N1 with a multi-core score of 2,008.
That's a little lower than that scored by the Nexus 5,
which runs on the next-rung-up Snapdragon 800 chipset, but you'd
struggle to notice any difference in terms of real-world use.
The Oppo N1 is generally smooth in use, with a camera app that's possibly the fastest I've seen on an Android phone.
It
may not have the very best processor available, but picking up on that
would be like complaining your new car can only do 130mph instead of
145. As long as the windscreen wipers and heater works, it'll still do
what you need.
Oppo's also made a few tweaks to
Android's way of navigating its menus. The Settings zone is now tabbed,
which might confuse you for a few minutes. The ColorOS breaks down the
N1's options into three areas - General, Sound and Display - which are
accessed through three tabs along the top of the screen.
Plus
you can have folders inside the app drawer, if there's a lot of
pre-loaded apps in here you're unlikely to want to use. And there are. I
had one folder dedicated entirely to hiding Google+.
Battery life
The Oppo N1 did fabulously in our dedicated battery life test but
that was to be expected from a battery this big. The N1 makes use of a
3610 mAh battery. True, it’s not removable, but you won’t need to keep a
spare with that sort of endurance.
For starters, it took us the amazing 25h of talk time on a 3G network
to bring this battery down. Next up was our dedicated web browsing test
where it endured for more than 9h. And finally, our dedicated video
test ran for a total of 11h 15min before the battery ran flat.
We took into account the standby battery consumption with the screen
off and we came up with our proprietary battery rating of 79h. That
means that the Oppo N1 battery should be good for more than 3 full days
given that you use it for an hour of calls, an hour of web browsing and
an hour of video watching every day.
We rarely see scores north of 60h around here, so 79h is almost as
good as it gets for a smartphone these days. The N1 also slides between
its two main rivals - the HTC One Max (81h) and Samsung Galaxy Note 3
(75h).
Media
Rather than hide the video content away and
force you to hunt it out or install a file manager like many other
Android models, Oppo's included a standalone My Videos app to make it
dead easy to access clips you've recorded and any files you've put on
yourself.
Open
this and you get a fairly unexciting combined view of all media files
on the phone, including ones you've recorded yourself, legit downloads
and any ripped files you've shuffled across via USB.
One
nice touch that copies a little bit from Samsung is the floating video
option. Tap the icon while a clip is playing and the N1 busts the video
out into a frame that sits atop the rest of the phone OS.
This means you can go about your usual smartphone business while a video plays on part of the display. A simplified player menu lets you pause the clip or close the player, or press the icon again to go back to the full player.
As for music playback, the Oppo N1 offers the same mixed-media installation as many other Android smartphones.
There's
Google's cloud-based Play Music service on here, which is the one to
use if you want access to music uploaded from a desktop and playlists
seamlessly synced between the N1 and any other phones or tablets you
happen to use, plus there's Oppo's own music player.
Oppo's
player isn't what you'd call glamorous, but it does let you create
playlists, pick favourites and, usefully, access files through a
folder-based interface.
So if you've got a beloved 7GB
curated collection of MP3s gathered over the last decade and carefully
placed within a thoughtful folder structure, you can access that on the
N1.
As mentioned earlier in the Essentials part of the
review, whether or not you see lock screen music controls when using the
Oppo player depends on what lock screen you've chosen.
But
what you can always have is the option of motion control or use of the
rear touchpad to navigate tunes. Both methods are a bit hit and miss,
both requiring a few goes to get to respond properly.
Still,
sound from the onboard speaker is extremely loud, although, with the
speaker mounted along the bottom edge of the phone, it's a bit
distracting when watching movies to have the majority of the sound
pointed at your right earhole.
Camera
The Oppo N1 features a 13MP sensor, and, as you've no doubt
already seen, it's housed in a rotating mount so you can have it facing
backwards, standard style, or can flip it around to use it as a
front-facing chat cam. Your casual internet hook-ups have never had it
so good. The
camera app is simple. There are no filters and only a handful of
options, but that's okay as it's a blisteringly fast imaging app and
produces shots so good you don't want to go spoiling them by pretending
they were taken in 1985 on a film camera. When
taking panoramas, the N1 displays a live composite of the scene inside
the viewfinder. Which doesn't achieve much, but it's a clever little
touch. GOOD LIGHT: Outdoors it's great, even on slightly gloomy days. The shutter is so fast it has no problem capturing motionClick here to view the full resolution image The digital zoom is not a disaster. Quality drops, but at 2x it's possibly usable.Click here to view the full resolution image This is with HDR off. Quite nice and you could live with it, but…Click here to view the full resolution image Here's the same scene a few seconds later with HDR activated. It's just great.
Video
Video captured at 1080p is quite good. I
couldn't see anything in the way of artifacts on the footage when viewed
at full size on desktop, although middle distance detail could perhaps
be a little better.
Still, it's many multiples better than the images produced by rival monster phone the Xperia Z1 Ultra, so best not complain too much.
The Oppo N1 comes with a pretty simple-looking video player, which
supports DivX, Xvid, Avi, MVK, MP4, etc. We had no issues playing files
all the way up to 1080p resolution and had issues only once with an file
with AAC sound codec - video was running with no sound. Others with
using AAC played fine.
The interface for video selection is pretty basic too - a list of all
available files. The player supports subtitles too, but there's only an
on/off toggle here, you can't manually pick the subtitle file (so it
would have to have the same name as the video file to work. Video player
While watching a video you get a timeline scrubber, play/pause along
with forward/back controls, a lock option (which locks the display
against accidental touches) and a pop up toggle. Watching a video
A feature that seems lifted right off the Samsung Galaxy flagships is
the pop-up player. It's a small floating window that lets you have
other apps working underneath. You can move it around to get it out of
the way, but there's no resize option. Video as an overlay
The Oppo N1 supports Wi-Fi display but you'd need a display with the standard's support to output video on.
Oppo's tried to make the N1 a little more user-friendly than
the stock version of Android, with the phone full of lots of small
software touch and gesture controls to help you get it set up the way
you want it to work. 
Perhaps
if it worked as a music track shifter when the phone is in standby it'd
be more useful. But it doesn't. It only works when the music player is
open and on the screen, which is quite peculiar.
The
community-led alternative version of Android is available for
installation on many Android phones and tablets, but Oppo is the first
maker to support it officially. 
It's
backed by the standard 2GB of RAM other hardware makers put in their
flagship models, so multitasking works well, with apps staying alive in
the memory.
I
was horrified upon first booting the N1, as the notification pull-down
area is absolutely rammed with row upon row of grim grey toggles and
options, but that's really the only place where the ColorOS intrudes on
the usual simplicity of Android. 
They're
basically enormous widgets, though, with the music player filling a
whole screen with a record player graphic, which will thoroughly baffle
any teenagers. 
Open
this and you get a fairly unexciting combined view of all media files
on the phone, including ones you've recorded yourself, legit downloads
and any ripped files you've shuffled across via USB. 
A simplified player menu lets you pause the clip or close the player, or press the icon again to go back to the full player. 
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