The OPPO F17 is the company’s new offering in the highly competitive mid-range segment. It is the smaller brother of the OPPO F17 Pro but has a lot on board to offer. With a stylish design and a lightweight thin form factor, the F17 is a device that shines like a diamond with its aesthetics. But does the OPPO F17 justify its price tag of Rs. 17,990? Let’s have a closer look at our analysis and find out together. Here’s our full review of the OPPO F17.
OPPO F17 Design and Display – Slimmer the Better
When you hold the OPPO F17 in your hands, the first thing that you would notice right away is how lightweight this device is. At just 163grams and a slim 7.45mm of thickness to its maximum, the device redefines the in-hand experience of a smartphone where other OEMs have been opting for little thicker devices for extra battery capacity. It feels refreshing to hold a device this thin. The frame of the device is made from metal and has a flat shape that blends in smoothly with the thin structure of the F17. The polycarbonate back panel has a leather finish with a minimal OPPO branding to its bottom keeping the back neat and clean – take notes, Realme!
The OPPO F17 has a 6.44-inch AMOLED display with ultra-thin bezels to sides giving it a sleek look upfront. It has a screen-to-body ratio of 90.7% resulting in an immersive viewing experience. The device has a 2.5D curved glass enhancing the in-hand feel while typing, scrolling through social media, with a standard 60Hz refresh rate. The color reproduction speaks for itself on the F17. With its AMOLED panel, the device offers rich colors and deep blacks with sophisticated saturation levels.
The viewing angles of the device were good and you should expect some turnbacks from people while using this in public. It has a tiny waterdrop notch on top which houses the selfie camera. The display gives you a pristine experience while consuming media. OPPO allows you to set the display temperature manually in display settings but we liked the color reproduction on default settings. The device has an in-display fingerprint scanner and is very accurate. We did not face any issues with fingerprint scanning and Facial Unlock works fine as well.
Performance, Benchmarks
The OPPO F17 is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 662 chipset, an octa-core processor with Kryo 260 cores clocked at 2GHz. It is coupled with 6GB RAM with a higher variant offering 8GB of RAM. The device surely is not a Gamer’s Heaven but handles day-to-day tasks without breaking a sweat. It handled social media browsing, emails, instant messaging, and even quick-jumping between apps with ease. The UI itself is fast and responsive, more on it later. It even handled casual games like Subway Surfers and Leo’s Fortune well. However, in graphic intensive games like PUBG Mobile, the device could not output a stable frame rate. Here are some benchmark scores from popular benchmarking platforms.
| Benchmarking Platform | Score |
|---|---|
| AnTuTu | 141234 |
| Geekbench 5 Single-core | 322 |
| Geekbench 5 Multi-core | 1059 |
ColorOS – Wins it, almost
The OPPO F17 runs on Colour OS 7.2 based on Android 10. ColorOS by no means is close to stock android, but in itself is very responsive. It offers a plethora of features for customization and productivity. ColorOS offers features like Dark mode, Always on Display, Edge lighting, Lab Ringtone, 3 finger screenshot, Privacy password, Doc Vault, and more. The name of the features themselves suggests that these would definitely come in handy adding to the convenience of the user. Overall, the ColorOS on the OPPO F17 gave us a fluid user experience with no major issues encountered.
Camera – On Point!
The OPPO F17 has a quad-camera setup to its back with an LED flash. The primary camera is a 16MP shooter with an f/2.2 lens, a secondary 8MP wide-angle camera with an f/2.2 lens and the rest two are 2MP monochrome sensors with f/2.4 lens. Images shot with the primary in broad daylight preserve a lot of details with a good dynamic range. The wide-angle camera does a good job and has a minimal fish-eye effect. The two monochrome sensors ensure the accuracy of colors for shots with the primary camera.
Images shot during the night in bad lightings turn out to be grainy even with the Night Mode enabled. The pictures however are usable if shot with the primary camera. Selfies shot with the 16MP shooter with an f/2.0 lens are vibrant and maintain a good dynamic range between the subject and the background. The rear camera can do videos at 1080p 60fps and even 4K 30fps. Videos are decent enough but can be shaky at times due to the absence of OIS. Overall, the OPPO F17 has a good set of cameras and can provide great images for posting on social media.
Battery Life and Charging
The OPPO F17 has a 4000mAh that supports 30W VOOC 4.0 Fast Charging. The device gave us constant battery life of 1 to 1.5 days of usage. Our testing of the device included 2-3 hours of video consumption on YouTube, an hour of social media browsing, replying to emails, and an hour of casual gaming. The device can easily last you a day with even intense usage and can provide screen-on-time up to 7 hours depending on your usage. The best part of using this device is the 30W charging that can charge the device from 0-72% in just 30 minutes. OPPO says that you can have a talk-time of 4 hours on a 5-minute charge. With a 4000mAh battery capacity and 30W fast charging, battery life will never be a concern on the OPPO F17.
Connectivity
The OPPO F17 is a 4G LTE device that supports VoLTE, VoWiFi, dual-band WiFi, Bluetooth 5.0, GPS, and more. Cellular reception on the device was pretty good with no issues in calls. The device misses out on a headphone jack and has a USB Type-C port for charging and data transfers. It has all the basic sensors onboard like an accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, and an ambient light sensor. The device has all you would need and anticipate from a smartphone, except a headphone jack. It has a single downward-firing speaker which was loud enough and provided clear output even at full volume.
Verdict – Should you buy the OPPO F17?
The OPPO F17 is mainly meant for its design and lightweight. It is a great choice for media consumption with its AMOLED display and the well-sounding loudspeaker. The F17 can’t compete on a performance basis against the Poco X3 or the Realme 7 Pro in the same price segment. But if you are looking for a device with a sleek design and thin, comfortable form factor that fits in your tight jeans pocket easily, then the OPPO F17 is the way to go! The OPPO F17 is priced at ₹17,990 for the 6GB + 128GB variant and ₹19,990 for the 8GB + 128GB variant and is available for sale on Flipkart, Amazon, TalaCliq, and several other retail stores.
