Oppo is a subsidiary company of BBK Electronics, China. BBK Electronics also owns Vivo, OnePlus, Realme, and iQOO. So, the same company makes all these five bands’ phones. Thus, Oppo, Vivo, OnePlus, iQOO, and Realme are the same company.
A phone is “made in China” does not mean its quality is bad. iPhone is also manufactured in china, is its quality terrible? Of course not. The world’s most advanced consumer drone company is DJI, too, a Chinese company. So, a country’s origin does not play any role in the quality of a product. Instead, it depends on which company makes the product.
Watching YouTube reviews is not the correct way to make a purchase decision. Tech reviewers don’t use the same phone for a long time as we the consumers do. Moreover, a new phone will always perform faster. The phone will show its real performance after a few months — 8 to 12 months later.
Everything has pros and cons. Oppo phones also have many advantages and disadvantages. But, if the drawbacks of something outweighs the benefit, then we should avoid a product. We believe the value proposition of Oppo phone is not present. There are many reasons for that. A few of them described below.
Oppo phones are unnecessarily expensive.
There are several ways to market a product. If a product is excellent in quality, consumers would not only buy but also recommend it to friends and family. It is called the word of mouth marketing. Electric car manufacturer Tesla follows this principle. But sometimes a company needs a few advertisements to raise brand awareness. That’s why every company advertises their product. However, there is another way to promote a low-quality product, and that is — heavy advertising.
Oppo over advertises its phones. There’s a joke that 70% of this earth is water, and the rest is Oppo advertisement. Oppo also heavily sponsors various programs and employs many celebrities as a brand ambassador.
Moreover, Oppo gives retail sellers a very high commission (up to 30%) compared to other phone manufacturers. So, sellers have a vested interest in selling these Oppo phones as they make more profit by selling these.
All of the above — a massive advertisement, sponsorship, the retail commission — requires a lot of money. This money has to come from somewhere. So, Oppo raises its low-quality phone prices to recoup all these costs. It is why oppo phones are expensive.
Oppo has inferior phone specs.
Oppo phones have mediocre phone specs compared to its price. With the same money, you can buy a higher specs phone, or save significant money if you buy the same specs phone from another company.
Oppo frequently uses an outdated MediaTek processor. MediaTek processors are known for poor quality. After a few years, due to poor performance, this processor will make the phone very laggy and slow.
Oppo copies iPhone design.
Oppo routinely copies everything of an iPhone. They take Android OS from Google and modifies the UX to give an iPhone look. However, they always ignore one key aspect — hardware and software optimization for better performance.
The camera megapixel is a gimmick.
Oppo is notorious for pushing high megapixel cameras on their phone. But only megapixel alone is not everything. A higher megapixel does not mean the camera is better than other low megapixel cameras. An iPhone can take a better picture with a 10 MP camera than Oppos 48 MP camera. There are many different camera factors, such as aperture, shutter speed, pixel size, and ISO, that dictate the picture quality. It is why professional photographers never use phone cameras to take pictures.
If your sole purpose is to capture a photo to share on social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. then a high megapixel image does not render any benefit other than taking a lot of storage space on your phone. Most of these social networks shrink and optimizes your photo for better content delivery, which in turn degrades the picture quality anyway.
Furthermore, how your picture looks depends on the end user’s display quality. It does not matter how good your picture’s quality is, if the end user’s phone screen is not that great, your photo will look terrible.
Oppo cheats on the benchmark test.
Every phone is different and has different processors, RAM, camera, storage types, etc. So, comparing them side by side is quite challenging. That’s where the benchmark app comes into play. These apps run in a device and do various software tests and give a score. It is called the benchmark score. A higher score means a better phone.
Oppo’s phone quality is not high and has low specs for the price they ask than their competitor. From an engineering perspective, they can only justify their high phone price by showing a higher benchmark score than their competitor’s benchmark score. But a poorly built phone can’t perform better on these tests. So, Oppo regularly cheats on these benchmark tests.
Oppo places a piece of programming code on their phone OS. The code does not do anything until you run a benchmark app to test the phone. When the program detects this benchmark test, it overclocks the CPU and does other things to deceive the benchmark app (AnTuTu, Geekbench, etc.) to get a high score. They can’t overclock all the time because of the CPU overheating issue. Oppo phones have no thermal cooling system, and their hardware and software are not optimized for the best performance. So, they fake the test to deceive consumers.
Oppo provides no software updates.
Oppo never provides any software updates to their phones. So, the Android OS you get at the time of purchase will remain the same until you buy another phone. Android OS improves each year with added functionality. If you can’t update your Oppo OS, you won’t be able to install new apps from the app store that require a higher minimum API version than available on your phone a few years later.
For example, you buy an Oppo phone with Android 10 (API 29). A few years later, Android 12 (API 31) is released. Your phone will not receive any software update because you are using an Oppo phone. If you try to install an app that requires API version 31, you will fail because your phone API is 29, lower than required.
Oppo fast charger degrades the battery.
Oppo makes a huge deal of its fast charger. But charging a battery too fast would degrade the battery quicker. Though on the paper, fast charging is appealing; it has long term consequences. For mobile phone batteries, it is better to charge them slowly. It protects them from degradation. From our experience, we found that Oppo has not taken any steps to protect its phone battery from degradation. It is why we are not a fan of their fast chargers.
Oppo also confirmed that their 40W fast charging degrades their phone battery to 70% capacity within a few months. At the same time, 15W charging would degrade their phone battery to 90% capacity. So, having a very high number of fast charging is not beneficial for your phone at all. It’s all a marketing ploy.
Oppo phone has terrible long term performance.
A new phone always runs faster, performs better, looks vivid, and has no known issues. However, whether a phone is excellent or not depends on its performance after a few years.
Why Oppo battery drain so fast?
It is a widespread occurrence for an old Oppo phone. There are various reasons for that.
The number one problem is the Android OS. Google used JAVA to write Android, a resource-intensive programming language that takes a lot of processing power to operate. So, the processor consumes a lot of battery energy. Moreover, Oppo uses the old MediaTek processor, which is known to have poor performance. This processor, coupled with lousy software optimization, the battery draining issue gets worse. When an Oppo phone is new, the battery can hold a charge for a long time and take a lot of abuse. However, after a few years, the battery degrades a lot as all Lithium-ion batteries do. This degraded battery can’t hold a charge longer anymore, so the battery drains fast.
Why Oppo phone gets hot?
If you play games, turn on GPS, use google maps, or run a resource-intensive app such as video editor, the Oppo phone gets very hot. These tasks require more processing power, which in turn, drains the battery and generates a lot of heat. Besides, Oppo does not have any thermal cooling system in place for their phone. For all these reasons, Oppo’s phone gets very hot. We need to keep in mind that a phone that gets hot repeatedly will degrade in performance and make the phone slower in the long run.
Other issues.
We have talked to many Oppo users. According to them, an Oppo phone develops many issues over time. For example, it can’t send messages anymore, WiFi does not connect, can’t detect sim, doesn’t charge, hangs a lot, etc.
Conclusion.
We believe that it is your money, your decision. If you love Oppo, then, by all means, buy an Oppo phone. However, do your due diligence before your purchasing choice. Because of all the problems associated with this phone, we would go with other low priced mobile from another manufacturer instead of buying an Oppo phone.