OPPO R15 Pro Review: The Verdict
The OPPO R15 Pro offers flagship looks, feel, and features without the top-tier price-tag. It's more expensive than OPPO's past couple of phones, but the R15 Pro is also the company's most polished offering to date.
What we love
- 128GB storage
- Water-resistance and NFC
- Great battery life
What could be improved
- Secondary rear-facing lens isn't very useful
- No optical image stabilisation
- ColorOS is quirktacular
The essentials
- Performance: Not quite flagship fast, but no complaints.
- Battery: Almost two days per charge.
- Screen: Great. Vivid and bright.
- Camera: Very good for the most part, but a dedicated zoom lens or optical image stabilisation would have been nice to have.
85/100
The OPPO R15 Pro is the embodiment of "affordable premium".
It's got the look, feel, and features of a top-tier phone, but comes in at $779 outright. Better yet, OPPO has cut very few corners in reaching that price. You don't get the latest and greatest processor on the block, the camera doesn't have optical image stabilisation, and the secondary lens isn't very useful, but otherwise, there's little that's missing. The R15 Pro even has NFC and water-resistance, two features OPPO smartphones have historically omitted. And of course, there's a notch.
The OPPO R15 Pro truly is a budget flagship.
OPPO R15 Pro Plans
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Flagship feel
The R15 Pro is very in vogue. It's got a big notched display, it's a got a shiny glass back. From the front, you'd struggle to tell it apart from the likes of the LG G7 and the Huawei P20 Pro.
Flipping it helps, partly because of the big Oppo logo on the back, but also thanks to some brave colour choices from OPPO. Locally, the R15 Pro comes in purple or red. We've got the purple in for review, and it's a lovely shade. It's deeper than what you get on the lilac Galaxy S9; it almost looks like black. In most cases, you'll get subtle black-to-purple gradient that gives the phone a bit more personality without looking ostentatious.
Coming back to the notch, you can't black out the space around it like on some competing devices. Instead, you're able to prevent apps from using that space, which you'll probably want to do as the notch obstructs their interface in most cases. Frustratingly, you need to do this on an app-by-app basis.
As you'd expect, facial recognition is on board, and it's fast and reliable. The implementation is based on simple image recognition rather than a 3D scan as on the iPhone X and OPPO Find X, so it's not as secure as a fingerprint reader or PIN. You do however have the option to unlock the phone using the fingerprint reader on the back if that's more your jam.
Notably, the R15 Pro is one of the few sub-$1,000 phones to feature 128GB of storage out of the box. It also has a headphone jack, which has become increasingly rare when it comes to top-tier devices.
More than a feeling
While the inclusion of a headphone jack means you can argue the R15 Pro isn't a true 2018 flagship, OPPO has only made a few compromises in keeping costs down. The most noticeable (but least important) is that the phone charges over micro USB rather USB Type-C. It's not a big deal.
More significant is that it's powered by a lower-grade processer than the latest breed of top-tier devices. The Snapdragon 660 isn't a slouch - it's the best midrange processor around - but it's also the same processor OPPO used in the R11s and R11. This is because Qualcomm hasn't launched a better 6-series chipset yet, but it means the performance gap between the R15 Pro and a top of the line 2018 phone is ~technically~ larger than that between last year's R11 and a top of the line 2017 phone. (In case you're wondering, OPPO skipped R13, presumably because superstition.)
In reality, this isn't as big a deal as it sounds. Sure, a pricier phone will be a touch faster, but we wouldn't call the difference significant enough to matter for most. The OPPO R15 Pro never felt slow in our testing, and we certainly weren't ever frustrated with the phone. 3D games are potentially the most affected by OPPO's processor choice, but we didn't encounter any issues in terms of performance.
Camera quality is normally the biggest sacrifice you make by opting for a more affordable smartphone, and that's still true to some extent with the R15 Pro. It's doesn't go toe-to-toe with the likes of the Pixel 2, the iPhone X, or Huawei P20 Pro. That being said, the R15 Pro houses OPPO's best camera to date, with marked improvements to brightness and detail in lowlight photography. The lack of optical image stabilisation means it might take a couple of attempts to get a sharp shot when shooting in the dark, but you'll get great images otherwise.
Our main camera-related complaint is that secondary rear camera doesn't do much. While last year's R11 used the secondary lens as a dedicated optical zoom, it predominantly exists to provide depth information for the R15 Pro's portrait mode shots. Portrait mode works quite well, but sacrificing optical zoom feels like a step backward.
As with other OPPO devices, the R15 Pro runs a heavily customised version of Android called ColorOS. ColorOS is still a weird hodgepodge of Android and iOS, and OPPO can't quite seem to decide what to do with it. The last version of ColorOS was a lot more like using an iPhone complete with a slide up control centre separate from the notification pane, but it feels more like Android on the R15 Pro. There's no still no app drawer though, and you can't add one back in without installing a third party launcher.
There's definitely some quirks to get your head around - such as "locking" apps in place to ensure you get all of your notifications - but OPPO's software is more polished this time around and free from the potentially deal-breaking issues we saw on the R11s when it first launched.
Who is the OPPO R15 Pro for?
If you're after flagship look, feel, and features without quite paying top dollar, the OPPO R15 Pro is worth considering. It's a polished device with almost all of the bells and whistles you could want.
However, at $779 outright, the phone the R15 Pro directly competes against in terms of price are last year's top-tier devices. The Samsung Galaxy S8, Apple iPhone 7, and Huawei Mate 10 all come in at a similar ballpark. We've been mulling this over for a couple of days, and we can't quite decide whether a "budget flagship" or last year's flagship is the better buy. Realistically, there isn't a single correct answer.
The R15 Pro is an excellent phone that's worth its asking price. The huge 6.28-inch display, 128GB of storage, and almost two-day battery are all ticks in its favour, and hey, maybe you like notches. On the other hand, 2017's best will offer performance gains (predominantly when it comes to 3D graphics) and some camera improvements thanks to features like optical image stabilisation. But if you're not punishing your phone with intensive 3D games and aren't taking the majority of your photos at night, the R15 Pro arguably gets you more phone for your dollar.
And if you do decide to go down the R15 Pro path, rest assured that you're getting a flagship device - even if the price suggests otherwise.
OPPO R15 Pro camera samples
I don't want an OPPO R15 Pro, what else can I buy?
OPPO R15
If you want to save further, the "non-Pro" OPPO R15 will set you back $659. There's a couple of differences in processing power and camera configuration, and you don't get water-resistance or NFC, but the R15 shares most of its core features with the R15 Pro.
Nokia 7 Plus
The Nokia 7 Plus is another solid mid-tier Android option, coming in at $649. The design isn't quite "on trend" as the OPPO R15 Pro and you don't get water-resistance, but it's worth considering if you'd prefer a clean, unfettered take on Android.
Huawei Mate 10
Out of last year's top phones, the Mate 10 is our pick for best alternative to the R15 Pro. It's got an all glass design, a two-day battery, and excellent cameras. You do however miss out on water-resistance and an extra-tall display, and there's a smaller amount of storage out of the box.
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