OPPO F19s Review: Beautiful Slim Design With Few Shortcomings

Oppo has added a new smartphone to its F19 series in the form of Oppo F19s. The device joins its older siblings the F19, F19 Pro and F19 Pro+. Oppo is known to flaunt sleek designs for its devices and the F19s is not so different. The device is supposed to fill the gap of a budget king smartphone for Oppo and cement their place in the Indian market.

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Oppo F19s is an aesthetically pleasing smartphone with a large battery, an AMOLED display, 33W fast charging support, and capable pair of cameras. I have been using the device for about 2 weeks now and here is my full review of Oppo F19s.

Oppo F19s is available from Flipkart and Oppo’s official website. It comes with a price tag of Rs. 17,990 for the 6GB RAM and 128GB internal storage variant. You have the option to choose from two color variants which are Glowing Gold and Glowing Black. 

The box for Oppo F19s comes with a carbon-fiber texture. Here are the things you get inside the box:

• Oppo F19s Handset
• 33W Charging Adapter
• Type-C charging cable
• SIM Eject Tool
• Transparent TPU Phone Case
• Documentation

Let’s talk about the on-paper specifications of the Oppo F19s at first:

• Display: 16.33 cm (6.43 inch) Full HD AMOLED Display, 1080 x 2400 pixels, 20:9 ratio and 409 ppi density
• Camera: 48MP + 2MP + 2MP | 16MP Front Camera
• Battery: Li-Po 5000 mAh with 33W fast-charging
• Chipset: Qualcomm Snapdragon 662 Processor
• RAM & ROM: 6 GB RAM | 128 GB ROM | Expandable Upto 256 GB
• Dimensions: 160.3 x 73.8 x 8 mm
• Weight: 175 grams

Oppo F19s features a sleek form factor with a rather thin chassis made from durable polycarbonate material. It definitely borrows some of the design elements from its more expensive siblings in the F19 series. I quite enjoyed the smooth matte finish on the back and the Glowing Gold color scheme which matches with the rails on the side. The unit I received for review is the Glowing golden color variant and it looks too flashy which perfectly suits the festive season ahead in India. I have to say I am quite impressed with the overall looks of this color variant and I surely suggest going for this if you like a flashy golden color on your smartphone.

If I talk about the in-hand feel the phone is extremely lightweight to use with one hand and is surprisingly thin. Overall, the Oppo F19s provides a premium feel in hand considering the price tag it comes with. 

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On the back of the phone, you will find a small Oppo logo tucked away in the bottom left corner and there is a vertically placed back camera module that protrudes a little bit. Now if we talk about the ports and the buttons, the Oppo F19s come with a USB Type-C port at the bottom and thankfully I am glad that Oppo decided to add a 3.5 mm headphone jack. There is a power button on the right side of the phone while the volume buttons are positioned on the left side next to the SIM tray. I found this quite unusual since most of the smartphones today come with both the power and volume buttons on one side and it is usually on the right side of the phone. But personally, I also found the F19’s design more preferable and delivers a refreshing experience. 

The phone supports dual sim and also has a dedicated microSD card slot in case you run out of internal storage. There is an in-display fingerprint scanner which is not something that we see very often these days especially at this price range. 

From the overall look and ergonomics compared to the Oppo F19s the Redmi Note 10 Pro gives it a run for its money but overall I will choose the Oppo F19s for its ultra-sleek design and lightweight form factor.

At the front of the device, I was greeted by the 6.43-inch super AMOLED panel with a 60 Hz refresh rate. Many of the OEM’s today in the affordable and mid-range segment do bundle smoother displays with 90 Hz and even 120 Hz refresh rates but I was disappointed to see that Oppo decided to stick with just 60 Hz refresh rate display. Fortunately, The AMOLED panel provides a very enjoyable experience due to better viewing angles, richer colours, and deeper blacks compared to the IPS LCD display. 

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Also, I found the brightness levels to be acceptable during daylight conditions and faced very few problems with readability under harsh sunlight. And the best thing about the display, believe it or not, is the small hole punch present on the top right side for the selfie shooter. The punch hole is quite small and does not bother much while viewing content or playing games. The phone also has minimalistic bezels around the edges except for the large ones on the chin.

There was one thing that I did not expect was the absence of HDR 10 certification but then you do get WideVine L1 support for HD content on OTT platforms.

While I was very impressed with the commendable design and good display on the Oppo F19s, I cannot say the same for the hardware under the hood. The phone is equipped with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 processor which is, to be honest, pretty old at this point and is usually included in phones under the 15k price range. So this combination does not inspire much confidence in the phone’s ability to handle everyday tasks smoothly. Oppo has provided the phone with 6GB RAM and 128GB onboard storage which is the base variant. I ran a bunch of benchmarks on the phone and here are the results compared to some of its strongest competitors. 

The device managed to score 180360 points in AnTuTu 8.0 and comparing devices such as Redmi Note 10 Pro Max and the Realme 8 Pro blew past it by a huge margin. Even the inexpensive RealMe Narzo 30 Pro nearly scored double the points of the Oppo F19s.in GeekBench the Oppo F19s managed to score 312 in single-core and 1319 in multi-core performance which is very poor considering the note 10 Pro Max that scored 516 single-core and 1761 in multi-core. 

Now if we compare the GPU test the device’s shortcomings in performance continue to be highlighted throughout the performance test and it only was able to score 383 points in 3D Mark Wild Life. In comparison to this, the Redmi Note 10 Pro Max scored a whopping 1109 while the Realme 8 Pro managed to achieve an impressive number of 1047 in the same test. 

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Now I also tried to play the Call of Duty mobile and Battlegrounds Mobile India on the Oppo F19s and used Gamebench to score the performance during both the games. In Call of duty, the Oppo F19s managed to provide FPS of around 43 with 77% stability. These numbers are very poor when you compare them to the likes of Note 10 Pro Max Realme 8 Pro and even the cheaper Realme Narzo 30 Pro. But if you tone down the graphics to medium settings in both the games, they run visibly smoother and the device also doesn’t heat much. 

In my regular usage, I found the phone managed to stay pretty cool for most of the part. During heavy workloads, the temperatures did spike a little bit but never grew hot enough to change the location. Most of the heat generated is then concentrated towards the camera side of the phone. 

Overall the phone performs quite decent in casual everyday use but it definitely feels a bit sluggish when it comes to multitasking and opening heavy apps like photoshop, Snapseed, video editing apps, and more. The phone’s performance is certainly not up to the mark to what the competitors are offering at this price point.

Oppo F19s runs on ColorOS v11.1 which is Oppo’s custom skin and is based on Android 11. It provides a rather simplistic look by default which I like very much. Like many of the Android skins present out there there is also a theme store available on the phone where you can buy or install free themes to change the look of your user interface. I gave a try to some of the free ones available but in my opinion, the default one looks best. The Oppo F19s does come with plenty of bloatware pre-installed and while most of them can be deleted or removed. 

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Rest the phone performs very well even in heavy tasks when playing games such as BGMI or COD Mobile. One part that I did like was some of the gestures that were included in this OS like the three-finger downward motion which triggers a screenshot. You can easily assign different gestures to different activities such as controlling music, app shortcuts, and more. You can also use gestures to turn on the camera which can be used even when the screen is off. But it will take some time for you to configure and get used to drawing the perfect pattern.

Oppo F19s comes with a triple camera setup that includes a primary 48MP camera combined with the 2MP macro shooter and a 2MP depth sensor. It is disappointing to see that the company is allowed to skip on the ultrawide lens which is disappointing in this price range.

The primary camera captures some great shots in bright daylight and the results are quite vibrant with good dynamic range. The auto-focus works fine and I had no problems with this, and the AI scene recognition features detect and automatically recommend the camera settings to enhance the images according to the object and light conditions.

The Night mode is definitely the one that brightens up the low-light shots considerably but keeps the noise in check. Low light selfies turned out to be grainy and low on detail. However, in daylight conditions, the selfie comes out pretty good and it is all thanks to this default template. 

Portrait photography on the Oppo F19s is decent with acceptable edge detection for the most part. The 48MP lens also provides some good natural background blur. Videos that I shot with the phone also came out pretty decent in daylight conditions but at night there is a bit of stuttering and noise in the videos. 

The macro and depth sensors are just here for placeholder and in reality, they serve little or no purpose. I agree there is a dedicated macro mode in the camera app but the macro shots were not much impressive and were grainy. Overall the cameras of the Oppo F19s are very mediocre at best to forfeit.

Considering the weight and width of this phone there is no way you can say that it is holding a 5000 mAh battery. The Oppo F19s easily last an entire day with light to moderate usage and even with heavy gaming you can get around 6 hours of screen time out of it. Oppo decided to bundle the 33-watt fast charger which only takes about 70 minutes to charge this massive 5000mAh battery from 5% to 90%.

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In terms of connectivity, you get both the headphone jack and the USB Type-C port at the bottom of the device. While most of these smartphone manufacturers have been releasing phones with 5G capabilities Oppo decided to go in the reverse direction. They have provided only 4G capabilities for the phone which does not sound so future-proof. If we talk about the bottom-firing speakers I experienced them to be very inadequate and Oppo should have included the stereo output through the earpiece.

In terms of other connectivity options, you get Bluetooth 5.0 with aptX support, and for Wifi, you have dual-band wifi with Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac support.