Oppo K1 Design and Build
Oppo K1 was launched in the Chinese market in October last year. The back panel of Oppo K1 comes with a gradient design. We have the Astral Blue variant available for review which is quite striking. Apart from this, the Piano Black variant of Oppo K1 has also been launched. Its 3D injection-mold back panel gives a cool effect when exposed to light. Fingerprints are easily visible on the back panel. The arrangement of buttons and the build quality of the phone are quite good.
The SIM tray (two nano-SIMs and one microSD card) is placed on the left side of the phone. Oppo K1 comes with dual 4G VoLTE support. The speaker grill, micro-USB port and 3.5 mm headphone jack are at the bottom of the phone.
Oppo K1 smartphone has a 6.4 inch full-HD+ (1080×2340 pixels) display, Corning Gorilla Glass 5 has been used for screen protection. In-display fingerprint sensor has been given place for security. Let us tell you that this phone of Oppo brand has AMOLED panel.
Oppo K1 has a waterdrop display notch. The selfie sensor is placed in the notch, due to less space there is no notification LED. As always, a screen guard is already available on the display. There is a dual rear camera setup on the back of the phone. In the retail box you will find a silicone case, SIM eject tool, micro-USB cable, 10 watt power adapter and headset.
Specifications and Features of Oppo K1
The handset uses an octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 processor with a speed of 2.2 GHz. The same chipset is used in Realme 2 Pro (Review) and Xiaomi Mi A2 (Review) has been launched in India. Only one variant of Oppo K1 has been launched in India. With 4 GB RAM and 64 GB storage variant. The phone includes dual-band Wi-Fi 802.11 AC, Bluetooth 5.0, USB OTG, GPS support. The smartphone has compass, accelerometer, ambient light sensor and gyroscope sensor. FM radio is not provided in the handset.
Oppo K1 will run on ColorOS 5.2 based on Android 8.1 Oreo out of the box. It is expected that during the Mobile World Congress 2019 (MWC 2019), the company can unveil some new Oppo smartphones with ColorOS 6. Oppo K1 comes with Hyper Boost tech for better gaming performance. Apart from this, you will also get many additional features like Smart Sidebar, Smart Scan and ORoaming.
Apart from system apps, there are not many pre-installed third party apps in Oppo K1 except Facebook. Due to the default browser and Oppo App Store, you will get to see many advertisements. You can disable app store spam but this problem will still occur even after disabling this feature in the browser. A similar problem was also seen in Oppo A7.
Oppo K1 performance, camera and battery life
We used the handset for several days but we did not face any problem. The display of the phone is quite large, due to which you may face some problem in using the smartphone with one hand. Despite the glassy texture on the back and sides of the phone, the phone does not slip from the hand. The touch response of the AMOLED display is also very good.
ColorOS is also very smooth and due to 4 GB RAM the phone runs without any problem. Talking about the in-display fingerprint sensor of the phone, it is not as fast as the standard capacitive sensor. So touch your finger on the sensor properly. The face recognition feature given in the phone works fast. With the help of screen brightness in low light, it easily recognizes your face.
The 6.41-inch display is good enough for watching videos. The speaker volume was quite loud while watching YouTube videos, but while playing PUBG Mobile games, the sound was a bit low even at full volume.
There was no problem while playing heavy games on Oppo K1. Both the games ran very smoothly after keeping Asphalt 9: Legends on high graphics settings and PUBG Mobile on medium graphics. We noticed that the phone does not heat up much even after playing for more than 30 minutes. Benchmark numbers also indicate that this Oppo brand phone runs games and apps very well. Oppo K1 has scored 1,28,852 in AnTuTu benchmark.
Talking about the camera, Oppo K1 has a dual camera setup on the back. The primary sensor is 16 megapixels and the secondary sensor is 2 megapixels. There is a 25 megapixel selfie camera on the front panel. First of all, let’s talk about the selfie camera. The selfie sensor is equipped with Artificial Intelligence (AI) beautification system. If the user wants, he can also set the beautification level manually.
Image quality is quite good in daylight without beautification. You can blur the background in selfies, but we found that edge detection does not work properly. Selfies taken in low light also came out quite well. The front camera comes with auto HDR support. The 16-megapixel rear sensor takes good pictures even in low light. When shooting in portrait mode, the 2-megapixel rear sensor is used only for edge detection.
The camera takes some time to focus in portrait mode when there is sufficient light. Features like panorama, AR stickers, expert mode will be available in the camera app. Talking about video, Oppo K1 is capable of recording videos up to 4K resolution. Image quality was better at 1080p resolution. A 3,600 mAh battery has been provided to bring life to Oppo K1. In our HD video loop test, the phone provided a backup of 12 hours and 36 minutes. Oppo K1 does not come with VOOC fast charging support, but you will get a 10W power adapter with the help of which your phone will be fully charged in 2 hours 30 minutes.
Our verdict
Oppo K1 is the only smartphone in this price segment that comes with an in-display fingerprint sensor. The price of this handset in India is Rs 16,990. We liked many things in the phone but there are some things that could have been better such as USB Type-C port could have been provided in the phone. Its build quality could have been better. Low-light camera performance could also have been a bit better. Apart from this, we hope that the company will fix the problem in many apps in its upcoming ColorOS version.
Equipped with better gaming performance, sharp display, selfie camera, better battery life and in-display fingerprint sensor, Oppo K1 is a great option in this price segment.