By Dexter Francis De Vera
I love seeing smartphones in front of me with all their sleek designs. But when it comes to buying one, I get confused. Here’s my review of OPPO‘s latest entry-level smartphone offer, the OPPO A95, a power-packed device with a stylish design and ultra-long battery life, making it the perfect companion for getting the most out of daily use. So, let’s go through what the OPPO A95 has to offer.
The Design
The exterior design of the OPPO A95 is a simple one, kinda reminiscent of the OPPO Reno 6Z that has a matte finish with a sparkly glitter look. The A95 comes with two color options—Glowing Rainbow Silver and Glowing Starry Black, with an attractive back cover that can capture your attention. The ‘glow’ design makes the back cover fingerprint-resistant, keeping it clean at all times. It is scratch-resistant, wear-resistant, and fire-resistant, thanks to the durable patented materials and manufacturing process. The curved edge makes it comfortable to hold the phone. Weighs only 175g and the sidebar size is 7.95mm. The rear panel contains a panel of triple cameras, although it is slightly larger than the others. The three cameras are arranged in a vertical array with a flash module placed to the side. The camera lenses are within a black rectangle with rounded corners. The OPPO A95 comes with a triple card slot that sits above the volume rockers, and despite it being a thin phone, it still comes with a 3.5mm audio jack.
The Screen
Regardless of whether you are a fan of the AMOLED display or not, this phone’s 6.43 inches screen, renders a wide range of brightness making it okay to check the phone in any lighting condition. The display is vibrant and has pretty good color accuracy depending on the mode that you set it on. For most of my review period, I had the display calibration set on Vivid. In vivid mode, reds and yellows were more brilliant. The color reproduction seemed a little more pleasant and realistic in this mode.
The Camera
Of course, as always, the main focus when it comes to hardware for OPPO is the smartphone’s camera. It’s no surprise that OPPO has packed the A95 with high-resolution sensors, taking photos and video on a new level. The camera can do long video recordings thanks to the Steady Video feature which stabilizes removing unwanted movement while shooting high-quality videos. It also features SoLoop, OPPO’s exclusive smart video editor so you can effortlessly create videos in your preferred style of movie-quality clips you can easily upload as short videos to your social media. I managed to capture many usable shots for prints and above-average shots for my social media postings. The overall camera performance doesn’t disappoint me at all.
The Battery Life
If there’s one thing we can rely on when it comes to OPPO, it’s the battery life. Their track record of squeezing every ounce of battery life from their devices has been commendable so far. It’s no different when it comes to the A95. The handset’s battery capacity is 5000mAh which can last about 7 hours on a single charge when used intensively and more than 10 hours when used normally. I went about a day on a single charge when it was used only for texting and calls. OPPO was nice enough also to include a 33W fast charging brick with the A95.
The Software
For the software side of things, the A95 is running on ColorOS 11.1, one of the latest and greatest from OPPO and we think that ColorOS, in general, is pretty okay to use. The software is quite clean and there is no bloatware. That said, the interface brings what OPPO has become known for—customizability and self-expression. OPPO’s ColorOS has a high level of customizability, everything from icons to fonts can be customized natively, which made OPPO devices different from the get-go.
The Performance
Oppo A95 comes with 8GB RAM and 128GB built-in storage space and uses the Snapdragon 662 chipset. The phone performs adequately during social media surfing and simple multi-tasking. OPPO has simplified a lot of the multitasking in ColorOS. You can drag notifications to get a PIP window for you to respond to messages or urgent emails. A simple swipe and hold up brings up the multitasking view or swipe and hold back to jump to the previous app. The smartphone does very well when it comes to connectivity. Speed on 4G LTE was pretty fast, a welcome surprise as I’ve rarely seen network performance like this from mid-range smartphones.
Gaming on the A95 was pretty enjoyable. It’s also one of the things that amazed me when it came to its performance. The A95 was able to handle heavy games like Genshin Impact and Shadow Fight for about an hour. While the games weren’t set on maximum settings, the graphics were good enough not to take away from the gaming experience. The audio was pretty solid too for this mid-range smartphone. Visuals were relatively crisp with not too many bouts of lag and screen tearing during gameplay.
The Verdict
If you’re looking for an affordable mid-range smartphone, you can’t go wrong with the OPPO A95. The smartphone is a step in the right direction when it comes to performance. Being able to handle multitasking and even some heavy gaming without choking is impressive. In my personal opinion, the OPPO A95 is a brilliant smartphone for the mid-range section. Your camera, viewfinder, and processor are the best features of this phone. Whether you’ve used OPPO phones or not, these features are sure to increase your need to use the phone. Its high processor and latest software making the phone faster will surely make any gamer satisfied.
www.oppo.com
