Oppo R11 review: An affordable iPhone 7 Plus?

Overview

Oppo has been in Singapore for about three years now, and while not enjoying the same level of success as Chinese contemporaries Xiaomi and OnePlus, the brand has produced a steady stream of fairly decent smartphones. Its latest smartphone, the R11 (Oppo skips even product numbers for some reason, which means its taken them less than three years for the R series to go from the R1 to the R11) bears a striking resemblance to Apple's iPhone 7 Plus and even includes a similar dual camera setup. 

On the back of the R11 you'll find a primary 16-megapixel f/1.7 lens and a secondary 20-megapixel f/2.6 telephoto lens with 2x optical zoom. The R11 is also the first phone on the market powered by Qualcomm's new mid-range Snapdragon 660 processor. But at S$699, does it offer enough to compete with the similarly priced, but Snapdragon 835-powered, Xiaomi Mi 6 and OnePlus 5? Let's find out.

Design

Oppo's R series phones tend to draw 'inspiration' from the latest iPhone, with last year's R9 being one of the worst offenders. The R11 follows the same trend and looks remarkably similar to the iPhone 7 Plus. From the front, the two phones look very similar, with the same curves, speaker shape and front camera placement. Only the fingerprint scanner is a different shape: it's oblong on the R11, and circular on the iPhone.

As the R11 is an Android phone, you'll also find two backlit capacitive keys on either side of the home button. For some reason, Oppo has chosen to swap the positions of the keys from the standard Android layout, with the back button on the right side, and the menu button on the left - perhaps they're drawing inspiration from Samsung here, because all Samsung phones used to have this setup too before swapping to customizable on-screen keys with the S8. Unfortunately, there's no option to reconfigure this.

The back of the R11 also bears a striking resemblance to the iPhone 7 Plus, with the most notable similarity being the look and placement of the dual camera setup. Even the antenna lines follow the same design and style as the iPhone 7 Plus.

Like the iPhone, the power button is found on the right side and the volume buttons are both on the left. Above the power button you'll find the dual nano-SIM card slot. The second slot also doubles up as a microSD card slot that accepts cards up to 256GB in capacity.

On the bottom of the phone, the speaker grille also looks a lot like the one found on the iPhone. One difference here is that the R11 has a 3.5mm headphone jack. Strangely enough, you'll also find a micro-USB port down here - something you wouldn't expect to see on a phone this late into 2017, with almost everyone else having already switched to a reversible USB Type-C port. 

The only real difference between the R11's design and the iPhone 7 Plus is that the sides of the R11 taper dramatically. As a result the sides are extremely thin, measuring a mere 6.8mm. My colleague described it as "like holding a knife along its edge" and I'm inclined to agree; the sides are so thin, they're actually painful to grip. This is one area where I wish Oppo had just stuck to following Apple and gone with a more conventional rounded edge.

The R11 is available in Gold and Black. A Rose Gold option is also available in some countries, but Singapore is not one of them.

Display and Audio

The R11 has a 5.5-inch 1,920 x 1,080 pixels (401ppi) resolution AMOLED display. While most Android flagship phones are now sporting QHD displays, the majority of Oppo's competition, including the Xiaomi Mi 5 and OnePlus 5 are still using Full HD displays. The iPhone 7 Plus, of course, also uses a Full HD display. Personally, I'm fine with a Full HD display, as I don't think the extra pixels are even noticeable on such a small screen and most online media content is still 1080p or 720p resolution anyway. Same goes for websites and other online that's currently designed for Full HD resolution screens, so you're really not missing out much. If anything, the choice of screen used and resolution actually help make the phone more frugal in power consumption.

The AMOLED display is excellent, with strong contrast, deep blacks and rich colors. Unfortunately, the display’s maximum brightness is a bit dim, which can be problematic when using the phone outdoors, as it makes the display difficult to see. 

As with most smartphones these days, there's a night mode (amusingly called "Nightly Shield") that reduces the amount of blue light on the screen to prevent eye strain.

The display comes with a factory-installed screen protector. Unfortunately, the plastic screen protector smudges and collects fingerprints very easily. Additionally, while you can, you probably should not remove the screen protector because Oppo tells me the display underneath does not have an oleophobic coating (the nanocoating used on most phones to repel oil and smudges).

Audio on the R11 comes from a single bottom-firing speaker. It's fairly average, with minimal bass and it's also a little on the soft side.

Interface

While the R11 runs on Android 7.1.1 Nougat OS, Oppo's ColorOS 3.1 UI makes dramatic changes to the OS, to the point where it looks and feels much closer to (surprise, surprise) iOS.

The notification panel toggles have been replaced with a control center, the system apps use many design elements from iOS, and many of iOS' signature features have been blatantly copied over too. Oppo Share, for example is a shameless clone of AirPlay, right down to the triangle in the logo.

Even aspects of iOS that aren't as good as Android have been copied for some reason. Take notifications, for example. On pretty much every other Android-based UI out there, you swipe right on a notification to dismiss it. On iOS, you swipe left, then press Clear, which frustratingly takes two steps. On the R11, Oppo has decided to copy Apple's approach - you have to swipe left, then press "Delete" to clear notifications. In iOS, if you swipe right on the notification panel, you pull up the Widgets panel, so at least it sort of makes sense why there's a different process for clearing notifications. On the R11, swiping right does nothing. 

Finally, it's also worth noting that the R11 does not have NFC support, which rules out many mobile payment apps and that's sad for a  mid-range device released this late in 2017.

Performance Benchmarks

The Oppo R11 runs on Qualcomm's new mid-range Snapdragon 660 octa-core processor paired with 4GB RAM. The Snapdragon 660 is the successor to Qualcomm's 653 processor, with the biggest change being the processor fabricated from a more efficient 14nm process technology, down from 28nm on the older Snapdragon 653. Qualcomm has also introduced its Kryo 260 CPU cores in the Snapdragon 660, rather than the octa-core ARM Cortex-A72 and A53 big.LITTLE combination seen in the Snapdragon 653.

The GPU on the Snapdragon  660 has also been upgraded with a more powerful Adreno 512 GPU, up from the 510 model seen in the Snapdragon 653.

For the performance assessment, we've amassed other mid-range Android devices that we've recently tested, along with the Oppo R11 predecessor, the R9 series:-

Sunspider Javascript

SunSpider JavaScript measures the browsing performance of a device when processing JavaScript. It not only takes into consideration the underlying hardware performance, but also assesses how optimized a particular platform is at delivering a high-speed web browsing experience. 

The Oppo R11 showed a big improvement over the R9s and R9s Plus, and was only beaten by the Snapdragon 835-powered OnePlus 5. In real world usage, the R11 was snappy and responsive for web browsing.

Quadrant

Quadrant is an Android benchmark that evaluates a device's CPU, memory, I/O and 3D graphics performances. Take this benchmark with a grain of salt, because so far all of our 835-powered smartphones have massively underperformed here, and the R11 also didn't perform up to our expectations. We suspect one aspect of the Quadrant benchmark is incompatible with Qualcomm's newer processors.

3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited

3DMark Ice Storm is designed to test the gaming capabilities of a device, putting its GPU through a rigorous OpenGL ES 2.0 benchmark test that uses fixed off-screen rendering with high quality textures and post-processing effects. The Unlimited version of the benchmark disables v-sync, display scaling and other OS factors, making it ideal for chipset comparison.

Oppo R11 once again showed big improvements over the R9s and R9s Plus, but was no match for the 835-powered OnePlus 5.

Imaging

The R11 features Oppo's first dual rear cameras setup.

• The primary camera is a 16-megapixel Sony IMX398 sensor with an f/1.7 aperture
• The secondary camera has a 2x longer focal length and a 20-megapixel Sony IMX376 sensor with an f/2.6 aperture.

This setup operates in almost exactly the same way as the dual camera setup on the iPhone 7 Plus. In fact, the default camera app is a clone of the iOS camera app, with every icon and setting in exactly the same place, including the zoom icon. Tap it to switch between 1x and 2x zoom, or tap and drag to bring up a circular dial to make smaller adjustments to the zoom.

Image quality from the R11 is decent, with good color reproduction and contrast, although there is some softness towards the edge of the frame. There's no noticeable difference in quality between both rear cameras, but there is some slight processing lag when using the 2x camera, as the phone has to combine the images taken by both cameras in order to produce the zoomed in image. 

The R11 lacks any optical image stabilization (OIS), which makes it tricky to shoot in low light, and as a result, less than ideal lighting conditions tend to result in either soft focus or extremely noisy images. The lack of OIS also makes it hard to capture stable video footage, especially if you're using the 2x zoom.

Just like the iPhone, the dual-camera configuration also allows for a hardware/software hybrid depth effect. The depth effect is activated when shooting with the rear cameras in Portrait mode. Pictures taken in Portrait mode had a fairly convincing bokeh, although the iPhone 7 Plus' Portrait mode bokeh tends to be more pronounced and creamier overall.

On the front, there's a whopping 20-megapixel f/2.0 shooter. There's no bokeh effect for shooting selfies, but if you select Portrait mode when using the front-facing camera, there's a beauty filter that smoothens your skin and removes blemishes.

Battery Life

Our standard battery test for mobile phones has the following parameters:

• Looping a 720p video with screen brightness and volume at 100%
• Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity turned on
• Constant data streaming through email and Twitter

The Oppo R11 is powered by a 3,000mAh capacity non-removable battery, which is slightly on the small side for a smartphone with a 5.5-inch display. Nevertheless, the R11 performed well, lasting thirteen hours and 42 minutes in our video looping benchmark. We can attribute this to its power efficient Snapdragon 660 processor and AMOLED display.

Strangely enough, Oppo has stuck with the outdated micro-USB standard for the R11's charging port. It doesn't make much difference, but as someone that's gotten used to the reversible USB Type-C port, it was annoying having to go back to checking the orientation of the cable before plugging it in.

As with Oppo's other phones, despite using a Qualcomm processor, the R11 uses Oppo's own VOOC fast charging technology (which we've found in the past to be the best out of all of the fast charging technologies out there). The latest version of VOOC will charge the phone from 0 to 70 percent in just thirty minutes and to 100 percent in just over an hour.

Conclusion

The idea of a really affordable iPhone 7 Plus running on Android 7.1 Nougat sounds quite enticing, but the reality is quite the opposite. For starters, Oppo's continued habit of just copying everything Apple does as closely as possible instead of picking and choosing only the good bits has resulted in some particularly frustrating design choices, notably in the software - some things that make sense on iOS just don't work on Android, but Oppo copies them anyway.

The phone's design is sleek, but the R11 looks too similar to the iPhone 7 Plus to award it any points for creativity. And the one area where Oppo decided to deviate from Apple's design, the ultra thin tapered edges, actually makes the phone less comfortable to grip - Oppo would have been better off just sticking with Apple's rounded edges. The dual rear camera setup is a reasonable reproduction of Apple's iPhone 7 Plus dual camera setup, but the cameras themselves aren't as good, and when you're shooting at 2x zoom, you really need optical image stabilization (which is lacking on the R11).

Finally, at S$699, the R11 is quite pricey for a mid-range phone and its set of features. For S$70 more you can get the 6GB RAM/64GB OnePlus 5, which has a very similar dual rear camera setup, looks almost exactly the same, and has a much more powerful flagship-level Snapdragon 835 processor. It also has a UI that's closer to stock Android instead of the iOS clone you get with the R11. Alternatively, the Xiaomi Mi 6 is available for about S$130 LESS than the R11 (export units on Lazada) and also has a dual camera setup (with the added benefit of optical image stabilization) and a Snapdragon 835 processor.

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