Prabhu RamIn a hyper-competitive smartphone market, where smartphone brands are increasingly homogenous in specs and features, the fight for vaning consumer interest has taken the form of multiple launches by smartphone brands in a year. Most of such products fizzle out within a few weeks, or even days, of the launch. In such a milieu, OPPO stands tall as an innovation powerhouse. In 2018, OPPO further cemented this reputation with two incredible smartphones: the first being, Find X, which simply pushed the boundaries of innovation, with a moving notch and sporting elegant design aesthetics, and craftmanship. And, then, the incredible R17 Pro!
OPPO’s latest smartphone, R17 Pro is another marvel of innovation, with its well-substantiated claims of being the fastest charging smartphone ever, with 35-40 minutes for a full charge. The OPPO R17 Pro features the “Super VOOC,” a bi-cell battery design that accomplishes such amazing charging speeds.
The R17 Pro is available in two distinct colours — radiant mist and emerald green, with OPPO introducing a gradient color shift that moves from dark purple to light blue color, with a distinctive S-shaped curved design appearing under direct light. The result of such distinctive color gradient is that fingerprints are kept at bay. The R17 Pro comes with a near bezel-less 6.4-inch 2K resolution OLED panel with a dewdrop notch housing the front camera. The display has a resolution of 1080 x 2340 pixels and an aspect ratio of 19.5:9. The R17 Pro uses Corning Gorilla Glass 6 – the most durable glass available today, that should accord protection to the device from any unfortunate nicks and drops.
The OPPO R17 Pro comes with 3 rear cameras, including a 12MP, a 20MP and a 3D sensor lens. On the front, there’s a 25 MP f/2.0 wide-angle selfie camera which also helps with face unlock. The Camera works wonders everytime under various light conditions, and offers pretty detailed photographs.
The Oppo R17 Pro is the first smartphone in India to come with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 710 chipset. The 710 makes the decent battery life possible, to adequately manage, not just daily chores, but heavy duty gaming. There is a whopping 8 GB of RAM and 128 GB of internal storage, and unfortunately, with no support for storage expandability.
The R17 Pro comes with OPPO’s ColorOS 5.2 based on Android 8.1 Oreo. An update to Android 9.0 Pie is in the offing in the near future. The ColorOS skin offers some smart and useful features such as the ‘Smart Bar’ – a floating dock, that provides a quick and easy shortcut to one’s favorite apps.
The R17 Pro comes with a 3700mAh battery, split into two 1850mAh capacities that help OPPO amp up the battery performance.
In conclusion, while the R17 Pro does lack some subjective ‘could have’ flagship features such as water proofing and wireless charging, it makes up for its absence with a superlative battery performance, and an incredible design to boot.
OPPO’s relentless push for perfection should help it challenge, not just Samsung, but Apple when it comes to pushing the boundaries of innovation. 2019 will be an interesting year for smartphones. And surely, OPPO will be a must-watch company.
