[rwp-review id=”0″]
Oppo is certainly a company that likes its phones to be big. Consider, for example, that the Oppo N1 Mini we’re reviewing sports a 5-inch display. Yes that’s right.
If you’re unfamiliar with the Oppo N1, it’s a quirky android phone with an amazing feature: a swivel camera which makes the phone the king of all selfie phones. The swivel camera makes it to the mini, and we took it for a spin.
Design
The first thing you’d notice about the phone is how massive it is. It isn’t the only 5″ phone in existence, but the camera and lower bezels take up a big chunk of space that further elongate the phone. Thankfully, though, it is not wide for it to be uncomfortable to hold, and the curved back and matte finish allow for a firm grip.
It is a unibody plastic phone, and while it doesn’t feel very premium, it isn’t particularly cheap; that said, over the sides of the phone runs a glossy plastic band which feels particularly less refined, and I am not fond of the gold lining around the phone and camera either. While the overall build does feel solid, the camera module feels a little fragile. You can manually rotate the camera to face the front or the back and it snaps into position in a click to assure you that you haven’t broken it.
The N1 Mini is 9mm thick and weighs 151 grams, but it hardly feels heavy thanks to its distributed centre of gravity over so much space.
The power button is placed on the left side of the phone, making it accessible by your index finger if you’re right-handed but it would certainly be a treat for left-handed people. The volume buttons are on the right and the ports and speakers are at the bottom.
Display
As mentioned, the N1 Mini has a 5″ LCD display that is 720p (~294ppi). Text looks sharp though (except for Facebook which looks a bit bold), and the colour representation is very good. Videos display nicely and I had no issues watching YouTube.
Software
The Oppo N1 Mini runs Oppo’s Color OS that is based on Android 4.3 Jelly Bean. It’s very customised and almost everything has been skinned, but thankfully it also offers you plenty of themes for you to choose from, so there’s a lot of options to change icons and the overall look of the phone (even a stock android version). The mail app is good with built-in search and nifty sorting options, and the calendar and other apps perform as expected.
The phone also has gestures which allow you to record a gesture and assign it to an action, such as opening applications. A cool widget that the phone has though is a camera widget which activates the camera without having to open the app. It’s very nifty for quick shots that will work fine on auto settings.
Performance
The N1 Mini is powered by a 1.6 GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 400and 2 GB of RAM. With my usage I didn’t experience much lag. The interface runs fine and, after the typical lag experienced in android during the setup phase, there were hardly any hiccups. Apps ran reasonably lag free, with Facebook getting more lag than other apps due to the plethora of images it has to keep up in loading. Scrolling websites and other daily tasks didn’t have any issues.
The phone is powered by a 2140 mAh battery, and with my uses it can last around half a day or until early evening depends on how much abuse it got.
Camera
The swivel camera is really what this phone is about. It sports 13MP and functions as both the rear and front cameras, which will need some getting used to. The plus side though is you get high quality selfies of course, but the camera does perform good overall, especially in the dark.
The interface is thankfully simple and gives you an option to stitch a panorama, take beauty shots which you should avoid at all costs, have an “ultra HD” photo which doubles in pixels, night mode, HDR mode and slow shutter mode. The HDR mode thankfully does not give any green tint or discolouration, though it tends to over-blow the highlights sometimes. Overall, the camera is very good, although I did not find any real use for the Ultra HD mode. The night mode is exceptionally good and made me hate my iPhone 6.
Overall Impression
The N1 Mini is a good mid-range phone with a very good camera and an overall all-purpose good performer. It’s comfortable to hold without it feeling overbearingly large, but I wasn’t particularly fond of the finishing and design elements. The swivel camera needs some getting used to and is a good performer all around despite some overblown highlights in HDR mode.
