OPPO unveils photography focused entry-level A37

OPPO has unveiled its latest entry-level smartphone today, called the A37. Rather than your typical stripped down cost effective handset, OPPO boasts that the A37 is capable of taking some rather impressive pictures, thanks to some special software trickery. Best of all, thesmartphone will be priced at just $199.

So let’s start with the camera hardware. On the back, the smartphone features an 8 megapixel sensor with large 1.4um pixels. Although the resolution might sound small when compared to today’s flagships, the larger pixel size should allow for better light capture than many other smartphones, resulting in superior low light performance and less noise. If you’re really concerned about the resolution, OPPO has also reintroduced its high resolution photo stitching software, which can take five pictures and process them into a single higher resolution 24 megapixel image.

On the front, the OPPO A37 packs a 5 megapixel OmniBSI sensor, with the same 1.4um large pixel size. The phone also offers a display flash when using the front facing camera, which quickly shoots the screen brightness above its usual highest setting. Selfie lovers may also appreciate the wave gesture countdown feature, which works in a similar way to LG’s Gesture Shot by starting a countdown when the user waves their hand in front of the camera.

The handset’s other hardware specifications are much more in line with what you might expect from a low cost model. The OPPO A37 features a 5-inch 720p display, a quad-core Snapdragon 410 processor, 2GB of RAM, and 16GB of internal storage. The phone also comes with dual-SIM support, a microSD card slot, and a decently sized 2,630mAh battery. The A37 runs OPPO’s ColorOS 3.0, which is unfortunatley still based on Android 5.1 Lollipop rather than Marshmallow. 

That’s a fair bit of hardware and software on offer for $199. What do you think?