It’s pretty clear from the get-go that OPPO is looking to turn heads with its latest flagship, the R17 Pro. Retailing for around £450, €539 or $600, the OPPO R17 Pro is less expensive than some flagship phones, but not the cheapest flagship on the market. OPPO has gone out of its way to make an exterior design that differentiates the phone from the pack, and further enhances this with a clear TPU case packed inside the box, as well as a film-type screen protector, offering protection for the phone without having to buy extra accessories. It’s easily one of the most unique looking phones on the market and will draw plenty of attention.
Top that off with the OS matching the color scheme in many areas and you’ve got a phone that looks more eye-catching than 99% of phones on the market. The design is nearly identical to the OnePlus 6T as well, mainly because this phone was announced before the 6T and is basically the more exciting looking version of that phone. It’s got the same smaller bezels, that tiny waterdrop notch up top, even the in-glass fingerprint scanner too, all complete with a fading rainbow gradient when you turn on the screen.
The biggest downside? The powdery finish makes this one slippery devil, and I found myself dropping it several times when trying to use it without the included case. What you won’t find on the body is a fingerprint scanner, but that’s not because it doesn’t have one, instead it’s located underneath the display. This is similar in its accuracy and speed to the OnePlus 6T, which is to say that it’s not bad, but it’s not as good as the previous dedicated fingerprint scanner design was. It’s also not IP rated for water or dust resistant, which is more than a bummer, it’s really just inexcusable for a sealed glass phone with no obvious reason to be without it.
Then there’s the odd decision to use a Snapdragon 710 instead of a Snapdragon 845, which, at this price, seems a bit suspect. There are other positive points this phone has that others don’t though, and in all actuality, daily performance feels no different from a Snapdragon 845 in any noticeable way. Having a 1080p resolution on the screen certainly helps things, and 8GB of RAM, of course, does a great job in other ways, but it’s likely you won’t see much of a difference unless directly comparing to a Snapdragon 845 phone while rendering video or other extremely processing-heavy tasks.
The most surprising thing is that the outlandish outward aesthetic is probably not even the biggest selling point. That is actually going to be the camera. Now at a price just slightly higher than the OnePlus 6T, you might not expect cutting-edge camera tech to make it into the phone, but that’s exactly what OPPO has done here. Around back is a triple camera system that works pretty uniquely when compared to other phones out there, and it all starts with this camera up top. Known as a Time of Flight, or TOF camera, this brand new consumer-level tech is designed to give the phone a spatial readout of what it sees by measuring the distance between objects using the speed of light. Check out the video below to see it in action, and don’t forget to subscribe to us on YouTube to get updates when the latest videos go live!