Sunday, November 28, 2021

OPPO A95 4G Review

One of OPPO’s most popular budget smartphone lineup is the A-series. Recently, the company released its newest member, the OPPO A95 4G. Similar to its predecessor, the OPPO A94, it has some wonderful features, a striking design, good cameras, Qualcomm Snapdragon 662, and a 5,000mAh battery with 33W fast charging. But are these enough to convince you to get one? Find out in our review.

Design and Construction

The OPPO A95 4G has a familiar attractive back cover that can definitely capture your attention. It has a smooth matte finish with an iridescent glow that changes colors depending on the angle. Also here at the back, you’ll find the protruding triple camera setup at the top-left corner.

It is available in Starry Black and Rainbow Silver colorway which is what we have. We love how this design is fingerprint and dust resistant.

Holding the phone, it feels very thin and light at 172g. Do take note that the back panel is slightly slippery, so we suggest using the provided silicone case.

Flipping to its screen, you will see the 6.43-inch AMOLED display with slim bezels and a slightly thicker chin part. There’s also a rather large hole punch notch on the upper left for the 16MP selfie camera, while found at the top of the display by the bezel is the earpiece.

On the left side are the plastic volume rocker and just above it is a triple-card tray for two nano-sized SIM cards and a microSD card.

Meanwhile on the right is the power/lock button. The buttons are firm and clicky. It’s also easily reachable since it’s placed near the middle of the frame.

There’s nothing on top, while down at the bottom, there’s the 3.5mm headphone jack, main microphone, USB-C, and the loudspeaker.

Display and Multimedia

Taking a closer look at the display, we get a very nice 6.43-inch AMOLED display with 2400 x 1080px resolution or equal to 409ppi. Its got the standard 60Hz refresh rate and a 180Hz touch sampling rate.

Well, the display is bright enough to use indoors and outdoors, has a crisp screen, colors are vibrant, and offers good viewing angles. The screen can also go up to a total brightness of 800 nits.

As usual, the display is customizable, from your usual night mode and screen color mode, to dark mode settings that let you set how dark you want to go. The Enhanced style is more preferable to take advantage of the display panel in use. You also get an always-on display and low-brightness flicker-free eye comfort option to reduce the visual fatigue caused by screen flickering.

Audio-wise the quality is on par with what you get at this price range. It has a single downward-firing speaker that emphasizes the treble and also tends to clip the sounds at full volume. The audio jack is available for a better listening experience.

Camera

Now for cameras. It features a triple rear setup, yup, there’s no ultrawide here unlike the 5G variant which is not available in the country. It consists of a 48MP main camera, 2MP for macro, and 2MP one for sensing depth. Meanwhile, for selfies, you get a 16MP shooter.

In daylight, the photos come out decently, details are present with vibrant colors. But the edge detection in portrait shots needs a little more work with the background blur. It is definitely worth your social media uploads. However, the macro camera is a hit or miss as it has trouble focusing on subjects from time to time.

There’s no ultrawide mode available here, but you can zoom in to 2x, 5x, and up to 10x, and don’t expect too much. Low Light shots, on the other hand, is a downer. Details are not that sharp, shots tend to look hazy and lights are overblown. It’s still usable, it needs just a little tweaking in a photo app or editor.

For selfies, it performs pretty well, especially in bright conditions. It can capture some sharp selfies with a natural-looking skin tone. It supports portrait shots as well and turns out to be fine too. There’s also a Front Night mode, which lets you take clear and bright selfies even in dark areas.

For videos, users can shoot up to 1080p videos, and the quality has good details and accurate colors. Stabilization is also present so you don’t have to worry about being shaky. The dynamic range and colors could use some boost though.

OS, UI, and Apps

Running the software department is ColorOS 11.1 that’s based on Android 11. There are tons of customization options here where you change icon styles, app layout, fingerprint style, change font and colors. There’s also an app drawer option in the settings, and you can easily adjust the navigation buttons the way you want them to be arranged.

And like previous ColorOS versions, it comes with a few bloatware and tons of pre-installed apps like Facebook, and Messenger, which can be removed after setup.

Storage-wise, out of the 128GB that we get, we’re left with 107GB out of the box, which is still more than enough for casual users.

Performance and Benchmarks

Under the hood, the OPPO A95 4G is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 662, paired with an Adreno 610 GPU and 8GB of RAM. This device comes with OPPO’s very own RAM Expansion Technology whereby you will be able to increase up to an extra 5GB of unused ROM storage into RAM.

The day-to-day usage of the A95 is pretty decent. Launching apps and multitasking is quite slow for our liking. It can surely handle basic tasks like streaming, web browsing, messaging, and calls.

However, the gaming performance is where you will see the downsides of using a chipset that was released in January 2020. Graphics are not as smooth as you would want them to be, and lag tends to happen if there are many moving parts on your screen. Save for those scenarios, Asphalt 9 tends to run well with this particular chipset.

Take a look at the benchmark scores we got:

AnTuTu v9.2.1 – 179,201
AnTuTu v9.1.7 Storage Test – 21,593 (524.2 MB/s Seq. Read, 253.5 MB/s Seq. Write)
Geekbench 5 – 312 (Single-Core), 1,327 (Multi-Core), 373 (OpenCL)
PCMark – 6,083 (Work 3.0)
3D Mark – 1,147 (OpenGL 3.1), 1,129 (Vulkan), 108 (WildLife Extreme)
AndroBench –514.53 MB/s (Seq. Read), 250.44 MB/s (Seq. Write)

When it comes to biometrics and security, you can unlock the device via facial recognition and the in-display fingerprint scanner. Both work as intended, however, facial recognition works faster than the fingerprint scanner. Also, that in-display fingerprint scanner is way too low.

Connectivity and Battery Life

The OPPO A95 4G has basic features such as WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, and 4G LTE for connectivity. When it comes to battery, the device gets a large 5,000mAh capacity with 33W fast charging. This takes no more than an hour to charge up from 0 to 100%.

When we ran it through our standard video loop test which involves putting the phone at 50% brightness, 50% volume, Airplane mode turned on, and with headphones plugged in, the device provided 18 hours and 25 minutes of playback. So definitely, this device can last at least a day if you’re not a heavy user.

Conclusion

The OPPO A95 4G is priced at PHP 15,999. Is it a good enough device? In some ways, yes. It’s a good-looking phone, aesthetically, if you’re into that, it has an AMOLED display with brightness up to 800 nits and has good cameras. However, the refresh rate is not 90Hz like most of its competitors, and considering its aging chipset it’s a bit pricey, and we all know that there are many other better choices around this price range.

So, will you be getting this phone? Let us know in the comments.

OPPO A95 specs:
6.43-inch FHD+ (2400 x 1080) AMOLED display
180Hz touch sampling rate
Qualcomm Snapdragon 662 CPU
8GB LPDDR4X RAM (+5G RAM expansion)
128GB storage
Triple rear cameras:
• 48MP (main)
• 2MP (macro)
• 2MP (depth)
16MP front camera
4G LTE
Dual-SIM (nano)
WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac
Bluetooth 5.1
5,000mAh battery w/ 33W fast charging
GPS, A-GPS, BeiDou, GLONASS, Galileo, QZSS
3.5mm audio jack
USB Type-C
ColorOS 11.1 (Android 11)
160.31 x 73.76 x 7.95mm
175g
Rainbow Silver, Starry Black