Oppo N1 Review A New Alternative Phone For You

If you never hear about the Chinese Oppo brand name, we won’t blame you for that. It would actually be wise of us to point out that the company has been making a rapid expansion all around Asia recently. And we got a chance to review the company's flagship phone, the Oppo N1.

The N1 is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 SoC, which by today's standard, would be considered as a mid-end chip when compared to the more powerful Snapdragon 800 series SoCs. Don't get us wrong: the phone is still fast and was extremely responsive to the touch. Couple that with a healthy amount of RAM (2GB, to be precise), and you'll never likely to experience a laggy moment on the phone.

The Oppo N1 is designed for effortless selfies

Notably, we should mention that the N1's 5.9-inch display is actually praiseworthy. Text and images are sharp and show no loss of detail, even when zoomed in. Oppo has been smart by opting for an IPS LCD display rather than using a Super AMOLED display, which actually works to the N1's benefit as the colors on the screen don't look overly saturated or extremely whitewashed.

But the most amazing thing about the N1 is its fully rotatable, swivel operated camera. You think we're exaggerating about this, but the N1's camera is genuinely a technologically marvel in its own right. Oppo had its engineers fuss so much over it because the company didn't want its flagship to be just another phablet: they wanted a masterpiece. The end result of this obsession is a 13MP camera built with over 60 components that can be rotated to the front and used to snap a 13MP selfie.

The N1 camera features a rotation of 206° and will firmly lock in position at any angle

However, there are a couple of tradeoffs for this photographic benefit. First off, the N1 has no expandable storage beyond its internal capacity, which means what you see is what you get. The second tradeoff is the lack of 4G LTE support. There is an upside to the lack of 4G connectivity and that's a battery life that lasted us two days on a full charge and standard usage.

Additionally, the N1 is also equipped with a functional backpad, which allows users to perform a multitude of tasks by either tapping or swiping across the rear surface.

To test the N1, we subjected the phone to our synthetic benchmark tests. At the end of the day, the N1 yielded scores of 34,764 for AnTuTu, 15,845 for 3DMark and 22,598 for Quadrant, which are obviously very impressive. On our Epic Citadel benchmark, the N1 managed an average of 28 FPS on the Ultra High Quality settings.

The phone body is made with a smooth, delicate material for a ceramic-like elegance, designed to keep your device free of fingerprints and eternally soft to the touch

In conclusion, the Oppo N1 is a phone that definitely ticks off all the boxes for being a photo- centric smartphone. Again, it's a smartphone that actually lets you snap clear and sharp 13MP selfies, making it one of the most photogenic smartphones on our list to date.