OPPO brings the selfie-focused F1 Plus to international markets

The new OPPO F1 Plus targets style-conscious customers with a taste for stylish self-portraits.

A rebranded version of OPPO R9, which launched in China in February, the OPPO F1 Plus boasts a beautiful – if not original – appearance, solid specifications, and a tricked-out 16MP front camera.

Inside the sleek 6.6-mm body of the F1 Plus ticks the Helio P10, MediaTek’s current mid-range champion, with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage, upgradeable by up to 128GB via microSD. The 5.5-inch display is a Full HD IPS LCD display covered in Gorilla Glass 4, while the battery is a built-in 2850-mAh unit that OPPO reckons should be good for up to 14 hours of heavy usage. The company’s trademark VOOC fast charging technology is present, making it possible to charge up to 75% of capacity in just 30 minutes.

The design is obviously inspired by the iPhone 6S, complete with a protruding circular camera. You get a metallic unibody with rounded edges that OPPO calls “Comfort Grip” and the phone weighs just 145 grams, which is quite impressive for a 5.5-inch device.

As a member of the OPPO F series, the F1 Plus excels when it comes to photography and the front-facing camera in particular. The 16MP selfie camera, dubbed Hi-Light, is actually higher-res than the 13MP sensor on the back, and the wide-angle (78.1°) lens ensures that you and your friends can fit into the picture.

OPPO claims that the Hi-Light camera employs a special pixel arrangement that maximizes image quality, but the wording is vague enough to make us a little apprehensive about the claim. Hi-Light is said to be “four times more sensitive than standard cameras, has twice the dynamic range and captures shots with four times less noise, compared to cameras without the technology.”

If you’re not exactly confident in your looks, Beautify 4.0, the latest generation of OPPO’s beautification mode, will smoothen out your skin tone and define your facial contour, whatever that means.

Other noteworthy features are the front-mounted fingerprint sensor and Color OS 3.0. In fact, the OPPO F1 Plus is the first device to feature version 3.0 of OPPO’s Android OS implementation, a jump from version 2.1 found on other devices. System speed is said to have been improved by 25%.

We have the OPPO F1 Plus in our labs and our review will be coming soon. In the meantime, know that the OPPO F1 Plus will become available from today in India for Rs. 26,990, with other markets in Southeast Asia and Africa to follow in the next days. The OPPO F1 Plus will not be available in the United States.

In UK and Europe, the OPPO F1 Plus will be available from May for £299 and €389 respectively.

OPPO F1 Plus looks like the latest bombshell in a war that brought us amazing devices at mid-range prices. What do you think?