There is no notification LED and the ambient display shows only the clock, date, battery indicator, and missed calls. Oppo could have actually put the ambient display to good use to show app notifications without having to unlock the phone. The R17 Pro places a lot of emphasis on the imaging side of things. The Camera app is feature-rich yet simple to use and offers AI scene recognition for up to 23 unique scenes.
While the selfie camera uses AI automatically, AI for the rear camera has to be specifically enabled in the Camera Settings. The Camera app features an Expert mode for those who like more control over their shots.
Oppo RX17 Pro review
The Expert mode offers manual settings for white balance, focus, shutter speed, exposure, and ISO but does not allow changing the aperture, which is fully at the mercy of the phone. There are also some cool stickers and "Omojis" to play with but the reactions of the animated characters are not as smooth as in iOS. You can also apply live filters, set Flash, and toggle HDR along with a new Dazzle Color mode that over-saturates the images to make them look more appealing.
Interestingly, Oppo has decided to use the larger 20 MP sensor for portrait depth sensing. There is also a dedicated 3D ToF sensor that should help with even more accurate depth sensing, but we found that it is not fully utilized in regular photos. However, the ToF sensor is extremely useful in AR applications. The phone does get considerably warm while using AR applications, though.
Photo quality in daylight is very good with adequate details, rich colors, and good sharpness. The phone does tend to go overboard with the sharpness when using HDR at times so you might want to fiddle around to find the optimal combination for the scene. The AI didn't seem to be of much help apart from identifying the scene. We also noticed a tendency of the camera to brighten up the scene more than required.
The large pixel size helps a lot with night shots and this is where the R17 Pro really shines. Oppo uses a combination of AI and software tricks to reduce noise and enhance colors in low-light scenes. We found that night shots are captured well with minimal noise and color artifacts both indoors and outdoors making the R17 Pro one of the best low-light performers available.
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You will see some artifacts when fully zoomed in, but for the most part low-light pictures are highly serviceable. We see that the HDR results are really good for a smartphone of this class.
Oppo Video Call App
You can choose between Efficient H. The selfie cam also gets a good dose of AI support and a real-time hardware-based Sensor HDR feature that allows for good selfies even with a strong backlight. The AI does a good job of beautifying things albeit it sometimes feels as if the picture is overly smoothened out. Selfies come out well and the portrait effects are prominent. However, we did notice a tendency of the camera to brighten the image more than required.
The Snapdragon is an able upper mid-range chipset that can offer a near-flagship performance. In regular use, we found absolutely no lags in the interface or any hiccups while playing demanding games. AI functions also seem to be accelerated as we will be seeing shortly. That being said, we feel there's still a lot of room for optimization in ColorOS and we hope things get more refined with ColorOS 6. This is noteworthy as the Snapdragon was Qualcomm's flagship just two generations ago.
So overall, we see that the Snapdragon has good number-crunching abilities comparable to the Snapdragon from a couple of years ago. GPU tests tell a different story, though. It trails behind the Adreno by a long shot but performs admirably better than the Adreno and the Mali-G51 MP4.
We did see some performance penalties compared to other SD phones, so there's a likelihood of Oppo's software being at fault here. We also wanted to evaluate how the Snapdragon performs under sustained load. For some reason, it could not manage to sustain well and the maximum clock speed attained was 1. CPU clocks were mostly in the 1.
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Overall, throttling didn't seem to be a major issue with the Snapdragon and the phone also does a good job of keeping the thermals under check. Depending on how you configure them, both Oppo and UC Browsers can nag you to no end with notifications of unimportant news and rumors. We recommend using Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge for a much better and safer browsing experience.
For our testing, we used the latest version of Google Chrome. We found that the R17 Pro scored much below even its contemporary SD phones in all browser benchmarks and only marginally better than the SD phones in some tests. Regular browsing should pose no issues, though. With ample RAM available, you can have tabs open by the dozen and still have a responsive browsing experience. Streaming FHD or even p videos was very smooth. We also played a game of Interland in the Chrome browser and didn't have issues with fluidity or touch responsiveness in the game.
Random Reads were somewhat slower than the above phones but still better than devices with eMMC storage. Sequential writes and reads were good, although we do find that other UFS 2. As detailed in our Realme U1 review, AI benchmark scores depend on many variables and a low score doesn't really indicate that the SoC itself lacks AI capabilities.
We find that the Oppo R17 Pro indeed tries to do a good job with AI but is held back by the software. Android 9 has better AI support than Android 8. Again, an update to Android 9 should help propel the R17 Pro's scores even further. During running the benchmark itself, we found that the Snapdragon was able to easily perform all AI recognition functions and object tracking without breaking a sweat. While the synthetic GPU benchmarks weren't really convincing, games played with absolutely no stutter or lag.
The phone was also comfortable to hold even during extended gameplay. Oppo offers a Game Space app for dedicating hardware resources to the game. It didn't make any perceivable difference to the actual gaming experience, but it does come in handy for minimizing notifications, restricting network activity of background apps, and other distractions while gaming.
The Oppo R17 Pro is a cool performer. The matte glass back may also be contributing to the hindrance of the heat conduction to the surface. The relatively low operating temperatures also meant that thermal throttling isn't really an issue under stress as was evident from our CPU throttling tests above.
The R17 Pro sports a single loudspeaker at the bottom that offers adequate loudness. At mid to high volume levels, there isn't any perceivable distortion, but it gets apparent once the volume level is set to max. Calls on the speakerphone are clear and are serviceable even in noisy environments. However, they do not come with adjustable ear tips so not everyone will find wearing them comfortable for long listening hours.
The in-ear headphones produced good bass though we'd like it to be a bit more punchy , adequate mids, and crisp highs, which can be further tuned with the built-in system-wide EQ. The R17 Pro comes with a 3, mAh battery. Battery life is fine to get you by a typical workday but don't expect it to last till you hit bed with continuous usage. ColorOS does its part in offering granular power management features. In the PCMark Work 2. This is a very good score in controlled test conditions but as mentioned earlier, you cannot be fully independent of the charger while on the go.
We have been evaluating the Oppo R17 Pro for over two months and came away quite impressed.
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The phone offers near-flagship grade performance in most tasks and has the looks to make it count. It comes across as a bit heavy, but the overall construction quality is superb. The display is rich and vibrant and Oppo makes good use of the teardrop-shaped notch to house a capable selfie camera. There aren't too many Snapdragon powered phones on the market right now so the Oppo R17 Pro easily stands above its similar-specced contemporaries.