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, Piano Black variant of Oppo K1 has also been launched. Its 3D injection-molded back panel gives a cool effect when it comes in contact with light. Fingerprints easily fall on the back panel. The button arrangement and build quality of the phone is quite good.
The SIM tray (two Nano SIMs and a microSD card) has got space on the left side of the phone. Oppo K1 comes with dual 4G VoLTE support. There is a speaker grill, micro-USB port and 3.5 mm headphone jack at the bottom of the phone.
The 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 got a place for security. Let us tell you that this phone of Oppo brand has an AMOLED panel.
Oppo K1 has a waterdrop display notch. The selfie sensor has got a place in the notch, due to less space the notification LED is not present. As usual, screen guard will already be available on the display. There is a dual rear camera setup on the back of the phone. In the retail box, you get silicone case, SIM eject tool, Micro-USB cable, 10 Watt power adapter and headset.
Specifications and features of Oppo K1
The octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 processor has been used in the handset, whose speed is 2.2 GHz. The same chipset is used in Realme 2 Pro (review) and Xiaomi Mi A2 (review) happened in. 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 ColorOS6. 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, Oppo K1 does not have many pre-installed third party apps apart from Facebook. Because of the default browser and Oppo App Store, you will see many advertisements. You can disable App Store spam but this problem will still occur even after disabling this feature in the browser. Similar problem was seen in Oppo A7 also.
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 this 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 quite good.
ColorOS is also quite 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. Therefore, touch your finger properly on the sensor. The face recognition feature in the phone works fast. With the help of screen brightness in low-light, it can easily identify your face.
The 6.41 inch display is quite good for watching videos. The sound of the speaker was quite loud while watching YouTube videos, but while playing the PUBG Mobile game, even at full volume, the sound seemed a bit low.
There was no problem of any kind while playing heavy games in Oppo K1. After keeping Asphalt 9: Legends on high graphics settings and PUBG Mobile on medium graphics, both the games ran quite smooth. We noticed that the phone doesn’t get too hot even after playing for more than 30 minutes. Benchmark numbers also indicate that this phone of Oppo brand runs games and apps well. Oppo K1 has scored 1,28,852 in AnTuTu benchmark.
Talking about camera, Oppo K1 has dual camera setup on the back. The primary sensor is of 16 megapixels and the secondary sensor is of 2 megapixels. There is a 25 megapixel selfie camera on the front panel. First of all let’s talk about selfie camera. The selfie sensor is equipped with Artificial Intelligence (AI) beautification system. If the user wants, they 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 turned out quite good. The front camera comes with auto HDR support. The 16-megapixel rear sensor captures good photos 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. If we talk about video, Oppo K1 is capable of recording videos up to 4K resolution. Image quality was better at 1080p resolution. To bring life to Oppo K1, a 3,600 mAh battery has been provided. The phone provided a backup of 12 hours and 36 minutes in our HD video loop test. Oppo K1 Vook does not come with 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 decision
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 which could have been better like 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 little better. Apart from this, we hope that the company will fix the problems faced by 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.