“The OPPO F11 Pro comes with a glass sandwich design with a gradient colour pattern that might remind you of the OPPO Find X from last year” 

OPPO had been teasing us about the launch of its F11 Pro smartphone for quite some time, and the brand has finally launched the handset in India today. Although there are many talking points about the new handset, a clear standout is the pop-up or “rising” selfie camera that allows for the OPPO F11 Pro to offer an incredible screen-to-body ratio. We managed to get our hands on the phone just ahead of the launch and are now ready to share our unboxing experience and first impressions.

Unboxing experience

The retail box for the OPPO R11 Pro comes with all the usual suspects. This means you get a VOOC charger, standard documentation, SIM ejection tool, and a TPU case, which effectively diminishes the handset’s looks but more importantly, keeps it protected. The company has also bundled proprietery earphones with the handset, which look remarkably similar to earpods.

First impressions

There is no point beating around the bush as you might have already figured out by the images, the OPPO F11 Pro is an attractive handset. Both Thunder Black and Aurora Green colour variants look really attractive and are likely to be appealing to younger audiences. The brand has opted for a glass-like material at the back with a matte finish on the sides to ensure that the phone does not feel overly slippery. Rounded sides at the back it easier to hold the phone even with one hand. Again, taking design cues from the OPPO Find X, the top and the bottom sides of the phone are curved slightly inwards to give it a concave shape.

The dual camera setup at the back has been placed by the company in a vertical orientation (within a stripe), right in the middle of the rear panel above the pill-shaped fingerprint sensor and company branding. The pop-up camera is placed right above this stripe. So if I consider the minor design details, the OPPO F11 comes across a delicately crafted device.

Talking about design and ports, the new phone from OPPO comes with the power button is located on the right side and comes with a green tint in the middle that looks really nice when you see the phone up-close. On the left, you will find the volume buttons and the microSD card slot located on the right. On the bottom side, you will find a micro-USB charging slot, loudspeaker grille and a 3.5mm headphone jack.

Thanks to the pop-up selfie camera, the phone manages to offer an impressive 90.9 percent screen-to-body ratio. In person, the 6.5-inch display looks vibrant and immersive, and the lack of notch feels extremely satisfying. Notch design, although being a non-issue, has been always about compromise and as we get a large display in a relatively compact body here, we might see more phones with this design going ahead. If leaks are to be believed, even OnePlus 7 might come with this same design, which might actually be a very good thing. Although we managed to spend limited time with the phone, the display brightness seemed like it would hold well under bright sunlight.

As the phone packs a dual camera setup with a primary 48MP IMX586 sensor and a 5MP secondary sensor, the F11 Pro has been claimed to offer an impressive camera performance. The pop-up or “rising” selfie camera is a 16MP shooter that also shows up for a face unlock feature. In our initial testing, which was mostly performed indoors, the OPPO F11 Pro managed to take some really detailed images and looks like an impressive camera phone. However, we will reserve our full judgement on the optics for the detailed review. For those who are interested, you can manually suppress the pop-up camera at times and the hardware will still not be damaged, as per the claims made by the company.

Moving to the performance, the OPPO R11 Pro is powered by a MediaTek Helio P70 chipset, coupled with 6GB of RAM. As you might expect from this hardware, I didn’t face any stutter or lag issues in my brief time with the phone. If I talk about the platform itself, the OPPO F11 Pro runs ColorOS 6.0 out of the box and seems to pack very little bloatware. There are visual improvements from the previous iteration of ColorOS, and you can check most of them out in my Realme 3 review. For more details about the software and performance, you will have to wait for the phone’s full review.

Covering the rest of the specifications, the phone comes in just one configuration, i.e. 6GB RAM/64GB storage and packs a 4,000mAh battery that supports VOOC 3.0 fast charging, which has been claimed by the company to charge the phone up to 50 percent in about thirty minutes.

The OPPO F11 Pro will be competing against the likes of POCO F1 (review) and ASUS Zenfone 5Z (review) in this price range. It is hard to say on the basis of first impressions if the phone will pose a tough fight against the competitors, but one thing we can say for sure is that the OPPO F11 Pro is definitely one of the best-looking smartphones in the mid-range.