Start playing with the phone and you’ll find it’s an interesting little beast, with a power button at the the left edge turning on the phone and unlocking it, while a fingerprint reader with button behind it sits on the back.
This little button can be used to bring the phone back from standby, and relies on similar technology to what we’ve seen Huawei and Samsung use recently, offering a 70 percent chance that your finger will let you open the phone up.
One thing that we’ll credit Oppo with over Samsung is the easy passcode, which like Apple’s iPhone lets you type in four digits, compared to the the minimum six-character password from the Galaxy S6, making this an easier phone to unlock if your fingers aren’t up to task.
Back to the operation of the phone, and we’re using Oppo’s rather bubbly and colourful overlay to Android, the aptly named “ColorOS”, which is a little different to the versions put out by Samsung, Sony, LG, and HTC, and even offers some dedicated music and photography home screens which you can remove if you so choose.
Performance of the phone isn’t bad, and certainly on par with a lot of the phones we saw in 2014, thanks in part to the use of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 quad-core processor, which is exactly what’s in the LG G3, though the speed is a little different, with a 2.3GHz in the N3 compared to the 2.5 in the G3.
Is the difference dramatic?
Not really, and we found for the most part, the Oppo N3 performs very well, with few interruptions or slowdowns, as the phone allowed us to jump across apps quickly and effortless, offering up multi-tasking without any issues, and generally feeling as snappy as most of the other phones we play with.
As for usability, ColorOS reminds us of Huawei’s take on Android, which borrows a little from Apple iOS in that it turns the multiple home screens of Android into the app menus. That means there’s no independent app menu itself, and each home screen will generally feature the app shortcuts, with widgets if you choose to load them on.
That’s not necessarily our favourite configuration of Android, but at least the fact that you can move icons around with ease offers more customisation and control than Apple’s neat stacks of icons.
Oppo does go to a little bit of extra trouble for people who really like to own their operating system, customising the experience to the nth level. Menu settings that we found from a brief poking about included the ability to change how long the soft buttons light up for, what the notification light at the bottom does (which is quite large and can get irritating), fiddle with the carrier information and battery percentage display inn the top bar, and more, with a download quota controller that displays your monthly package and shows just how quickly you’re eating into your bandwidth.
And that could happen quite easily, simply because there’s a fair degree of speed offered here with the 4G modem.
Testing the Oppo N3 on Telstra’s 4GX network in Sydney, we found average speeds of between 15 and 40Mbps, though more is possible, provided the network is working well and not slowing down. For the most part, no one should have any problems with this phone, as it performs spot on like the other 4G LTE handsets that we test.
Perhaps the biggest reason to take a peek at the Oppo N3 has to be for the camera, which includes one of the more unusual cameras you’ll ever see.
It’s not that the megapixel amount is impressive in the way that Nokia’s 41 megapixel Lumia 1020 impressed us, nor is it one of those zoomable camera lenses Samsung used in both the S4 Zoom and K Zoom smartphone cameras.
Rather, this is impressive because it includes electronic rotation, with the one 16 megapixel camera used on the N3 something that you can control the position of simply by dragging your finger up and down on the screen when the camera app is loaded.
Essentially, this means if you’re finding the camera view isn’t to your liking when you’re using the rear camera, you can swipe down ever so slightly to move the camera position for you, changing what you’re looking at along the front.
Alternatively, you can do a broad swipe down and the rear camera will flip around and look square at you: voilà, this is also your selfie camera.
Yes, the N3 only has one camera, something we’ve seen Oppo try before in the N1 Mini, another model with a similar concept, albeit no electronics to control the camera.
In fact, we praised the N1 Mini for its camera, and again, we can do the same for the N3, providing a decent little shooter with a lot of options, more than that neat little gimmicky electronically controlled rotation mechanism, which in fairness most people will probably skip using because it’s so much easier to position the camera using your fingers.
Manual: it’s always faster than random electronic gimmicks.
