Oppo A12 Review: Power-Packed Budget Offering
The entry-level budget segment witnesses a lot of smartphone launches every year. According to various sales reports, this segment sees the major chunk of smartphone sales and also makes it the toughest segment for brands to compete with their products. This time, Oppo marks its entry in the segment with the Oppo A12. Oppo A12 comes with a 6.22-inch HD+ display, Helio P35 processor, and a mammoth 4,320 mAh battery. Will it able to make it stand out in the entry-level budget segment? Let’s find it out.
Design: As soon as you unbox the phone, it captivates you with its look at first glance. The front fascia of the smartphone is dominated by a 6.22-inch HD+ display, a dewdrop style notch that houses the front camera and further surrounded by thick bezels. The front look of smartphone is similar to the other smartphones of its segment. The thing which makes it different from others is its rear diamond cut edge design. The rear part of the smartphone is made up of plastic but it doesn’t seem to lose its premium-ness. There is a horizontally aligned dual camera with an LED flash and a fingerprint sensor at the back. We found the sensor to be accurate and fast in terms of performance.
The SIM tray and volume rockers sit on left side. The left side is a traditional spot for the SIM tray but Volume Rockers is typically found on the right side and it takes little time to adjust with it. The Power button is situated on the right side of the smartphone.
In the times of disappearing headphone jacks, it's pleasant to see that the Oppo A12 still has one. It would have been nice if the company introduced Type-C port in the smartphone as many smartphone companies are offering Type-C port in the budget segment. Overall, we like the look and feel of a smartphone and it is important to mention that it perfectly fits on hand.
Display: Oppo A12 is equipped with a 6.22-inch HD+ IPS display panel and gets the protection of Gorilla Glass 3. We feel that the brightness of display under direct sunlight is not up to the mark. Indoors, the display panel didn’t disappoint us at all when it comes to watching movies, playing games on it. We compared the display of Oppo A12 with Coolpad Cool 5, Realme 2 Pro and Realme 3 Pro and found that detailing of the subject was best visualized by Oppo A12 whereas Coolpad Cool 5 won the race on the parameters such as accurate colors and brightness level. The smartphone offers Night Shield for preventing the strain on eyes when you are using the smartphone for a longer period of time.
The Oppo A12 doesn’t support Widevine L1 DRM protocols so don’t expect HD streaming in Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. Overall, the display is good considering the price you are paying for it.
Camera: Oppo A12 comes equipped with dual camera setup at the rear. It features 13 MP primary sensor and a 2 MP secondary sensor. The rear camera captures decent pictures with good detailing and color accuracy. The daylight shots were full of details and crisp. When it comes to Night photography with this phone, it can capture more light as it can open its shutter for the period of 30 sec which is nearly double than competitively priced Realme 2 Pro. The night shots also display good clarity and at least do justice to the price you are paying for it.
Coming to the video part, the videos can be recorded at Full HD resolution at 30fps. The videos recorded by smartphone are just fine but the area where it lacks is its stability. For Selfies, it houses a 5MP front camera sensor. It can capture decent selfies but of course, they aren’t full of details. Talking about its zooming capacity, the smartphone offers 5x digital zoom and able to provide satisfactory outputs even in the pictures clicked at 3x-4x Zoom. I wonder why Oppo is still relying on dual camera setup when competitors are offering a quad-camera setup with a more resolution camera at a similar or lesser price.
Camera Samples
Zoom Test
Performance: The Oppo A12 is powered by MediaTek Helio P35 SoC an octa-core processor which is considered to be equivalent to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 665, works absolutely fine and even performs better than its close competitors. The smartphone comes with up to 4GB RAM and paired with up to 64 GB internal storage. The unit that we got was a 4GB+64GB variant. We played PUBG, GTA San Andreas, and Free Fire on it and the A12 didn’t disappoint at all. There were minor glitches but that can be easily ignored. We tried PUBG with a higher graphic setup and it managed to perform well in that case too. The heating is a general issue with almost every smartphone but Oppo A12 doesn’t heat up so easily until you play the high-end games for long hours.
Oppo A12 supports dual SIM (Nano) and runs on Android 9 Pie with ColorOS 6.1 out of the box. The UI of the smartphone is good but the advertisements that come in between are really annoying. Once you switch on the data connection, the notification panel starts flooding with advertisements.
The Oppo A12 comes with a mammoth 4,230 mAh battery which is enough for a full day if you are a moderate user. We played two hours of the game, watched videos on YouTube, browsed the web, and lastly called the friends but it still left us with 20 percent juice for the next day.
For security, the Oppo A12 comes with Fingerprint and Face Unlock option. The fingerprint sensor works quickly and accurately while we felt that Face Unlock could have been a little faster.
Verdict: The Oppo A12 easily performs the day-to-day tasks and if you have the soul of a gamer inside you, it can please it as well. The only area where it lacks compared to the competition is the Camera. Most of the smartphones at this price point offers better camera options. If you are looking for a great performing smartphone or buying your first smartphone, Oppo A12 could be the ideal choice for you. If you want to look elsewhere, then Realme 5s, Xiaomi Redmi Note 8, Realme Narzo 10, and Motorola G8 Power Lite are worth mentioning in this segment.
