Competitively-priced handsets like the Find 7 and Find 7a are changing the game, thanks to the expansion of companies like OPPO into markets dominated by Samsung and Apple.
OPPO is an unfamiliar name in Australia, but it's no small-time player in the global mobile manufacturing world. Generally having restricted its activities to China and other markets, it is only just now preparing to debut Down Under.
These are not cheap knock-off manufacturers we’re talking about here. Admittedly a few of the new names are, but OPPO stands tall with Huawei (pronounced hwa-way) as a producer of well-made and popular gadgets. Best of all, said devices ask a modest price in comparison to what we’ve all become accustomed to.
OPPO’s “Hero Phone” for its Australian launch is the OPPO Find 7. It’s a powerful handset with some very impressive specs.
More interesting by far is the lower-cost OPPO Find 7a. It’s $90 cheaper, but still sounds-off like it could take on the market’s current top-contenders.
The two devices sit in identical, attractive cases and only differ in some key hardware aspects.
Flagships first
The Find 7 will run you $719 at RRP in Australia for outright purchase. Compare that to the roughly $799 of the Galaxy S5 when it came out and $869 of a 16GB iPhone 5s.
Despite being cheaper, the Find 7 packs a bit more of a punch than a lot of the competition. It was the first phone to launch globally with a 5.5 inch quad-HD display – that’s the incredible resolution of 1440 x 2560 that Australians have already seen with the LG G3. It’s about 75% more pixels than the 1080p of the Galaxy S5 and more than double an iPhone’s Retina Display.
The 13MP camera boasts what OPPO calls Ultra HD. It’s a proprietary software trick that combines several photos taken simultaneously to create a single 50MP image. This means that you can blow it up on a huge TV, or zoom in and crop until your heart is content with (hopefully) minimal loss of clarity. You can also create your own GIFs right within the camera so you can finally stop lurking on imgur.
Selfie-takers can also rejoice. As we’re starting to see more and more often, the front-facing camera is 5MP, meaning you won’t be sacrificing too much in the way of quality when posing for a pic.
Finally, OPPO is introducing a fast-charge system. When using the wall-charger that comes with your phone, the Find 7 is capable of charging to 75% in just half an hour. It’s not even a small battery. At 3000mAh it’s bigger than both the Galaxy S5 and iPhone 5s. You can apparently even get 2 hours of “talk time” from just a 5 minute charge. You can be sure we’re going to give that a try.
Other notable specs include 32GB of on-board storage (double that of the above-mentioned S5 and iPhone 5s whose prices we quoted). There’s also a microSD slot if you want to expand that up to a further 128GB.
The real hero
The only real differences between the Find 7 and Find 7a are that the 7a has a smaller resolution, a slightly slower processor and 2GB of RAM instead of 3GB. Also the battery, which retains its rapid-charge abilities, drops from 3000mAh to 2800mAh – which is still more than a Galaxy S5.
It’s also a full $90 cheaper at just $629 RRP. That’s closer to a mid-range Galaxy S5 Mini in price than it is to the flagship Galaxy S5, yet its hardware reads like the more expensive of those two.
The 5.5 inch screen has been bumped down to “only” 1080p. That’s the same resolution found on the Galaxy S5, HTC One (M8) and Sony Xperia Z2, all of which will cost you a pretty penny more than $629.
The same 13MP camera shows back up again with the same features, as does the 5MP front-facing camera.
On-board storage is dropped to 16GB, once again with that microSD for expanding up to a further 128GB if the mood takes you. Power-wise it’s certainly not lacking. It rocks a quad-core 2.3GHz CPU with 2GB of RAM.
This is not a mid-range device. It’s very nearly top-tier in every respect, except you’re paying over $150 less for it. If you’re coming from a two year old phone, which if your contract is up you probably are, then the Find 7a has just as much potential to blow your mind as a significantly more-expensive handset with only slightly higher specs.
Even better, if $629 is in your price-range for outright purchase, you can save even more and switch to a SIM-only plan. BYO phone plans tend to be much cheaper and don’t lock you in to contract. That’s more money and more freedom, sounds pretty heroic to us.
Concerns
Of course, nothing in this world is perfect and the OPPO Find 7 and Find 7a have one feature that does give us pause.
They both run on Android 4.3 and not the more-recent 4.4. This is not a semantic argument or nerdy nit-picking. Falling behind in OS support for your flagship phone may be an indicator of lack of support.
As Android moves forward in future and more updates emerge, you want to feel confident that your phone will continue to improve and evolve. If you never end up getting updates, then you’ll be quickly stuck with an outdated operating system, which is never fun.
With any luck OPPO is either working furiously on an Android 4.4 update right now, or it’s planning to skip 4.4 all together and go with Android L when it comes out later this year.
Alex Angove-Plumb
Digital Content Editor
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