Check Out: Oppo F3

Brands like Oppo and Vivo have carved out a solid niche in the selfie-focused market and they’d have you think that nothing matters more in a phone than the quality of its front-facing camera. Stands to reason then that Oppo has followed up the dual-selfie-camera F3 Plus with a more aggressively priced F3 (Rs 19,990), which features dual front cameras as well. Now, unlike Vivo’s dual-selfie cameras which add depth sensing into your everyday selfies, Oppo’s approach is to augment the primary 16-megapixel camera with a secondary 8-megapixel sensor with a 120-degree wide-angle field of view for ‘everyone-encompassing’ group selfies.

It works as advertised, creating an almost fish-eye effect lens to your surroundings, but it does manage to get in a whole lot more people into the frame. The rear camera turns out photos with good levels of detail if the lighting is good. Low-light images leave a lot to be desired though.

The rest of the package is as generic as they come — a durable polycarbonate body with a metallic finish and a snappy fingerprint sensor, a decent 5.5-inch full HD display, and a 3,200mAh battery that lasts the full day on moderate use. The phone runs on a MediaTek 64-bit MT6750T octa-core chip which, coupled with the 4GB of memory, runs the slightly-dated Android Marshmallow-based ColorOS fairly smoothly and lag-free. No word on when (and if) the F3 will see an update to the latest Android version. The 64GB of built in storage along with separate microSD card slot is a nice touch.

So it comes to this — the F3 is a good option if you spend the bulk of your day taking selfies, but doesn't do enough for the price to earn a clear recommendation. Bear in mind, phones like the Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 and Lenovo P2 which are sold exclusively online (for a lot less) offer far more compelling hardware in the form of Qualcomm’s bread-and-butter mid-range 625 chip.