5G services have finally taken off in India after a long period of anticipation. Phone companies including Oppo have been testing the waters with 5G phones for a long time. Oppo’s latest comes in both 4G and 5G variants. However, we received the Oppo F21s Pro in 4G version.
Design and Build Quality
The Oppo F21s Pro has a plain, straight, no-nonsense design, just like the previous F-series devices with a matte-finished back and side-band. The camera platform is metal, which offers some protection to the lens. The chrome finish on the camera bump and a red dot on one sensor somewhat breaks the monotony in design. The front camera has a punch-hole design. Both surfaces are protected by Corning Gorilla Glass 5 panels. The phone is offered in Dawnlight Gold and Starlight Black colourways.
Key Features
As mentioned above, the F21s Pro that we received, is the 4G version, and the device uses the 6nm Snapdragon 680 octa-core CPU. The device supports dual SIM and includes a dedicated MicroSD memory card slot in the card tray. The device offers 8GB LPDDR4x RAM and 128GB onboard UFS2.2 storage. The F21s Pro uses ColorOS 12.1 based on Android 12. The phone measures 15.99 x 7.32 x 0.77 cm and weighs approximately 182 g.
The phone uses a 6.43-inch FHD+ (2400 x 1080) AMOLED display that provides up to 90 Hz refresh rate and a peak touch sampling rate of 180Hz. A 95 percent DCI-P3 gamut coverage ensures that the monitor displays a wide range of colours. The smartphone uses a triple camera system at the rear. The main camera is a 64-megapixel unit with f/1.7 aperture. The other two are 2-megapixel modules for Macro and Monochrome. There is no telephoto or wide-angle camera. The front camera uses a 32-megapixel sensor. The most interesting camera feature is the Microlens mode, which allows you to observe and capture microscopic details in a subject. The camera allows up to Full HD (1080p) videos at 30 fps.
The Oppo F21s Pro is powered by a 4,500 mAh battery and supports 33W Supervooc fast charging. The device offers a 3.5mm audio jack.
Ergonomics
The F21s Pro is a lightweight device and is quite light for everyday tasks. The display appeared bright and sharp. Fingerprint and facial recognition worked flawlessly, and the interface was quite smooth to navigate.
Performance
The Oppo F21s Pro is a mid-level phone, and it is not expected to be the best in performance. However, the device proved powerful enough for everyday tasks including action games with medium graphics. You may experience lag in heavy games, but that is expected from a device of this specs.
The main camera helps you capture beautiful images in good lighting conditions especially outdoors, but the lack of optical zoom or wide-angle lens limits its utility. Low-light images are noisy. But the F21s Pro offers an interesting Microscope mode, which provides some interesting perspectives. It lets you zoom into dust particles and moulds for up to 30x magnification. It is challenging to keep the subject in focus with the extremely shallow depth-of-field, but the ‘orbit light’ around the depth lens switches on and keeps the subject perfectly illuminated for a shake-free image.
Coming to multimedia, the device offers good visuals combined with powerful audio. However, we have been quite unhappy with the lack of stereo speakers in the previous Oppo devices, and this device carries the same weak link.
Value for Money
The Oppo F21s Pro retails at an MOP of Rs.22,999. The price would have been attractive, however, the launch of 5G services changes this. In fact, F21s Pro has a 5G variant, which retails at a premium of just Rs.3000, though both don’t share the same core specs.
Verdict
The Oppo F21s Pro offers some credible performance and imaging capability for the price, but lack of 5G spoils its chance in the market. We would have liked to review the 5G variant of the F21s if we had a choice, but since we did not get a chance to experience it, we cannot comment on its performance.
Plus
- Decent design
- Good camera
- Microlens
- Price
Minus
- No 5G support
- No stereo speakers
Final Rating
