Oppo K1 design and build
Oppo K1 was launched in the Chinese market in October last year. The back panel of Oppo K1 comes with a gradient design. We have the Astral Blue variant available for review, which is quite striking. Apart from this, the piano black variant of Oppo K1 has also been launched. Its 3D injection-molded back panel gives a cool effect when exposed to light. Fingerprints easily fall on the back panel. The arrangement of buttons and the build quality of the phone is quite good.
The SIM-tray (two nano SIMs and a microSD card) has got a place on the left side of the phone. Oppo K1 comes with dual 4G VoLTE support. At the bottom of the phone is the speaker grill, Micro-USB port, and 3.5mm headphone jack.
Oppo K1 smartphone has a 6.4-inch full-HD + (1080×2340 pixels) display, Corning Gorilla Glass 5 has been used for screen protection. The in-display fingerprint sensor has got a place for security. Please tell that this phone of Oppo brand has an AMOLED panel.
Oppo K1 has Waterdrop Display Notch. The selfie sensor has got a place in the notch, due to less space, the notification LED is not present. As always, there will already be a screen guard on the display. There is a dual rear camera setup on the back of the phone. In the retail box, you get a silicone case, SIM eject tool, Micro-USB cable, 10W power adapter, and a headset.
Specifications and features of Oppo K1
The octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 processor has been used in the handset, which has a speed of 2.2 GHz. This chipset is used in Realme 2 Pro (review) and Xiaomi Mi A2 (review) happened in Only one variant of Oppo K1 has been launched in India. With 4 GB RAM and 64 GB storage variants. The phone includes dual-band Wi-Fi 802.11 ac, Bluetooth 5.0, USB OTG, GPS support. Sensors on board the smartphone are compass, accelerometer, ambient light sensor, and gyroscope. FM radio is not provided in the handset.
Oppo K1 Out of Box will run on ColorOS 5.2 based on Android 8.1 Oreo. The company is expected to unveil some new Oppo smartphones with ColorOS 6 during the Mobile World Congress 2019 (MWC 2019). For better gaming performance, Oppo K1 comes with Hyper Boost Tech. Apart from this, you will also get many additional features like Smart Sidebar, Smart Scan and ORoaming.
Apart from system apps, Oppo K1 does not have many pre-installed third party apps apart from Facebook. Due to the default browser and Oppo App Store, you will see many advertisements. You can disable App Store spam but it will be a problem even after disabling this feature in the browser. Similar problem was also seen in Oppo A7.
Oppo K1 performance, camera and battery life
We used the handset for several days but we did not face any kind of problem. The display of the phone is quite large, due to which you may have some problem in using the smartphone with one hand. Despite the glassy texture on the back and sides of the phone, the phone does not slip from the hand. The touch response of the AMOLED display is also very good.
ColorOS is also very smooth and the phone runs smoothly thanks to the 4GB of RAM. Talking about the in-display fingerprint sensor of the phone, it is not as fast as the standard capacitive sensor. So touch your finger on the sensor properly. The face recognition feature given in the phone works fast. With the help of screen brightness in low-light, it can easily identify your face.
The 6.41-inch display is good enough for watching videos. The speaker was quite loud when watching YouTube videos, but while playing the PUBG Mobile game at full volume, the volume was a bit low.
There was no problem while playing heavy games in Oppo K1. Both Asphalt 9: Legends and PUBG Mobile ran very smoothly after setting High graphics settings and Medium graphics. We did notice that the phone does not heat up much even after playing for more than 30 minutes. Benchmark numbers also indicate that this phone of Oppo brand runs games and apps well. The Oppo K1 has scored 1,28,852 in the Antutu benchmark.
Talking about the camera, the Oppo K1 has a dual camera setup on the back. The primary sensor is 16 megapixels and the secondary sensor is 2 megapixels. There is a 25-megapixel selfie camera on the front panel. First thing about selfie camera. Selfie sensor is equipped with Artificial Intelligence (AI) beautification system. If the user wants, he can also set the beautification level manually.
Image quality is quite good in daylight without any beautification. You can blur the background in selfies, but we found that edge detection does not work properly. Selfie taken in low-light was also very good. The front camera comes with auto HDR support. The 16MP rear sensor captures decent images even in low light. The 2-megapixel rear sensor is only used for edge detection when shooting in portrait mode.
The camera takes a while to focus in portrait mode when there is enough light. Features like Panorama, AR Stickers, Expert Mode will be available in the camera app. If we talk about videos, then Oppo K1 is capable of recording videos up to 4K resolution. Image quality improved at 1080p resolution. To give life to Oppo K1, a 3,600 mAh battery has been given. In our HD video loop test, the phone provided a backup of 12 hours and 36 minutes. The Oppo K1 Vook does not come with fast charging support, but you will get a 10W power adapter with the help of which your phone will be fully charged in 2 hours 30 minutes.
our decision
Oppo K1 is the only smartphone in this price segment that comes with an in-display fingerprint sensor. The price of this handset in India is Rs 16,990. We liked many things in the phone but there are some things which could have been better like USB Type-C port could have been given in the phone. Its build quality could have been better. Low-light camera performance could have been a bit better as well. Apart from this, we hope that the company will fix the problems faced by many apps in its upcoming ColorOS version.
Equipped with better gaming performance, sharp display, selfie camera, better battery life and in-display fingerprint sensor, Oppo K1 is a great option in this price segment.