Oppo’s latest phone has the best notch yet

Oppo has announced the F9, a phone with a notch that actually looks pretty great. Seriously, look at it — it’s smaller and less obtrusive than even the Essential Phone’s, with a speaker sleekly integrated into the top edge of the phone. It doesn’t require an extra-thick on-screen status bar, nor does it look like it was created with some sort of hole-punching device.
The notch feels like a natural part of the F9’s design, the bezel-less screen breaking away for a moment to let the selfie camera through before spilling back to the edge. Oppo has gone to great lengths to eliminate the notch with the ultra high-end Find X, of course, but the F9 is the first time I’d say a phone looks straight-up better with its notch than it would without.
The F9 is attractive from the other side, too. Like several other Oppo phones, it uses colorful gradients — my unit is “Twilight Blue,” which goes from electric blue to almost black — but the F9 sets itself apart with a sweeping diamond-like pattern that’s only visible from certain angles. It’s hard to photograph, but I did my best.
oppo f9
This isn’t a flagship phone in terms of specs, however. The processor is an eight-core Mediatek Helio P60, the screen is a 19.5:9 1080p LCD, and the 3,500mAh battery charges over MicroUSB — though it does at least use Oppo’s VOOC fast-charging tech, which is the same thing as OnePlus’ Dash Charge. (I’m not just saying that — I put a VOOC Micro USB cable into the Dash charger that came with the OnePlus 6, and sure enough it fast-charged the F9 with an onscreen VOOC logo.)
The F9’s primary camera is a 16-megapixel f/1.9 module with a 2-megapixel secondary sensor used for backup information, while the selfie camera is 25 megapixels at f/2.0. There’s a headphone jack, a microSD slot, a rear-mounted fingerprint sensor, 6GB of RAM, and 64GB of storage. It’s also the first phone to use Gorilla Glass 6, which is supposed to survive up to 15 drops from one meter, which I have not tested.
The F9 is launching in India and Southeast Asian markets including Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. It’s also coming to Middle East/North Africa markets such as Egypt and Morocco. Pricing information isn’t yet available.
Meanwhile, a similar phone for China, the R17, is set to launch later this week with higher specs including an OLED screen, a Snapdragon 670 processor, and an in-display fingerprint sensor. The connection between OnePlus and Oppo can be overstated, but it’s true that the two companies cooperate with supply chain resources and often end up using similar components. The OnePlus 6 has the same screen and notch design as the Oppo R15 Pro, for example — so could a presumed 6T end up with a notch like the F9 and R17’s later this year?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Linktree’s free workaround lets you add multiple links to your Instagram bio

Image
Instagram only gives you one opportunity to link to outside resources inside its photo sharing platform. This might not be a problem for a majority of the users, but for those wanting a little more customization and even more options, it leaves much to be desired. Enter  Linktree , a free tool for Instagram designed to improve traffic to your outside link, be it a blog, portfolio, or store. How it works is fairly straightforward. After connecting Linktree to your Instagram profile, you’ll receive a single link to place in your Instagram bio. Once that link in place, you can customize what it’s linked to within your browser, be it a single website, or a collection of sites you’re looking to direct followers to Say you’re a photographer who’s using Instagram as a marketing tool for your wedding photography. Using Linktree, you can direct Instagram followers to your blog, your portfolio site, and even your other social media accounts. Until now, you would’ve been stuck choosing b
Read more

EVERYTHING WE KNOW ABOUT THE PIXEL 4, THE MOST-LEAKED PHONE EVER

Image
Google’s  Pixel 3 might have been the  most-leaked phone in history . Long before its unveiling, we knew practically everything about it from unboxing videos, photo comparisons, even a full review of the device. Surely, for the Pixel 4, Google would clamp down on leaks to leave some surprises for its debut on  October 15th , right? Let’s just say, if that was the plan, it didn’t exactly work out. We’ve now seen the Pixel 4 XL from every angle and in three different colors. At least seven different sources have touched this phone, many of them confirming the same specs. We not only know which cameras it’ll have, but also what they may be capable of, including air gestures (go figure). That doesn’t even count information Google has already shared  on purpose. So if you want to know almost everything about the Pixel 4 nearly a month before it’s announced, buckle up. We’ve sifted through all of the rumors and information we can find to compile everything we know — and everything we
Read more

Our favorite iOS apps for the iPhone and iPad in 2018

Image
As 2018 comes to a close, it’s time to look at some our favorite apps of the year. While not all of these are brand new, many of them popped up onto our radar for the first time in 2018, and are definitely worth the attention. Others are some of our favorites that are still best-in-class despite having been around for some time now. We aim to do things differently at TNW, and as such you’re not going to find the recommendations you’re probably used to seeing: Gmail, Skype, Dropbox, and the like. Instead, we want to focus on the best-of-the-best that you may not have heard of, and others that are just special enough to warrant a mention. As always, we’d encourage you to share some of your favorites in the comments below, or on Facebook. Enlight Pixaloop (Free Pixaloop  is one of my favorite apps on the market. Unlike typical image editors that allow you to remove red eye or apply a filter, Pixaloop allows you to create stunning photo animations with a few clicks on your
Read more