Huge screen and a 48-megapixel camera

You may not be very familiar with Chinese smartphone maker Oppo, so here’s what you should know: The company makes pretty good phones and sells them at an affordable price. It also has ties with OnePlus, and the company’s F-series phones are often precursors for the next OnePlus phone. 

With that in mind, I present to you the new, Oppo F11 Pro. I’ve had some limited hands-on time with it, but — like previous Oppo F-series phones — it’s a mix of pretty powerful features and a decent price. 

Don’t expect too much, though. Fancy tech like Oppo’s 10x optical zoom is nowhere to be seen, and the Oppo F11 Pro (despite the “pro” moniker) is not a device that can measure up to the most powerful flagships of today. On the other hand, certain features make it an interesting contender in the amazingly competitive mid-ranger arena. 

The F11 Pro has a huge, 6.53-inch LCD screen that’s unspoiled by notches. That’s because the 16-megapixel selfie camera is hidden inside a pop-up mechanism on top of the phone. The other feature you should note is the dual, 48/5-megapixel camera on the back, which is quickly becoming the norm for mid-range phones. 

The phone is powered by Mediatek’s new Helio P70 chip and comes with 4/6GB of RAM, 64/128GB of storage and a massive, 4,000mAh battery. There’s no in-display fingerprint sensor here — the F11 Pro has a traditional sensor on the back of the phone. Amazingly, the phone has an ancient microUSB connector instead of the now-ubiquitous USB-C, but it does come with Oppo’s ultra-fast VOOC 3.0 charging, which makes this slightly less annoying. Finally, the F11 Pro also has a 3.5mm headphone jack. 

Side note: You probably expect better specs from the upcoming OnePlus phone, and you’re right; I’d wager that the main similarities between the F11 Pro and the OnePlus will be the 48-megapixel rear camera and the selfie pop-up camera. 

On the back, the F11 Pro has a colorful, diagonal gradient that was a bit too gaudy for my taste, but it does do just enough to distinguish itself from most other phones. The phone comes with a gray plastic case, which offers additional protection but totally kills the gradient effect. The F11 Pro feels solid in the hand and is well-built, though these days it’s hard to find a phone that isn’t. 

The display is huge and only has a fairly small chin on the bottom, so if notches annoy you, you’ll like it. And yeah, it’s an LCD and not an OLED, but lately LCD screens have gotten so good that it’s hard to tell the difference. I compared the F11 Pro’s display directly to the iPhone X’s OLED display, and the iPhone had a little better contrast and was a tiny bit brighter, but the differences were minute. The pop-up selfie camera is just as annoying as the rest of them, but it is a little nicer looking with its central positioning and transparent sides. 

In my (short) time with the Oppo F11 Pro, I’ve managed to take some beautiful photos, especially during a day trip to the beach. I hoped that the phone’s 48-megapixel camera will shine here, but the photos taken with that setting on were horribly oversharpened. 

This is likely due to the fact that in that mode nearly all of the camera’s other features, including HDR, zoom and AI assistance, aren’t available. Most of the time, you’ll want to leave the camera at the default, 12-megapixel setting, which produces smoother photos with minimal loss of detail. 

As is typical of most phones that weren’t made by Apple or Samsung, bokeh shots were pretty bad, too soft, with focus all over the place. 

And although the Oppo F11 Pro doesn’t go overboard with the selfie camera — it only has a 16-megapixel sensor — I’ve found the selfies satisfactory once I turned the beautifying features off completely. 

As with most Chinese smartphones these days, the software (in this case, Oppo’s ColorOS 6) and the amount of pre-installed crapware you get with the phone will annoy you, but it really depends on your level of tolerance for this sort of thing. There’s nothing jarringly wrong about the ColorOS, though I often had problems locating this or that option in the Settings menu, and some elements of the UI, like the drop down menu that appears when you slide down from the top of the screen, were ugly. 

I didn’t have enough time with the F11 Pro to properly judge its performance, but unless you’re a heavy gamer or a very demanding user, it’ll likely do just fine. I’ve played a game of PUBG on the highest graphics settings and (amazingly, I won) and the phone hardly stuttered. Furthermore, the absence of notch made the game more immersive, though the display’s curved edges did obscure some of game’s info. The battery charges really fast and lasts a while — 30-minutes of PUBG only took it from 81% to 67%.  

Overall, a good point of reference for the F11 Pro is the recently launched Vivo V15 Pro. On the surface, the phones are similar: 48-megapixel camera, pop-up selfie camera, huge, notch-less screens. But the V15 Pro has a number of advantages over the F11 Pro, including the triple rear camera, an OLED screen, and an in-display fingerprint sensor. The F11 Pro is cheaper — $350 vs. $407 for the V15 Pro — but still not amazingly cheap as Xiaomi’s recent Redmi Note 7 Pro, which has very similar features and costs $200. As it often happens, this leaves the Oppo F11 Pro somewhere in the middle, but all things considered, it’s still a pretty good deal.  

The Oppo F11 Pro comes to India on March 15 for 24,990 rupees ($350).