Oppo F3 review: Selfielicious

Straight-forward gallery

The Gallery app is fairly simple. It defaults to showing your camera roll sorted by date (we miss the option to change the thumbnail size). Alternatively, you can browse images by folder, including a special "Recently deleted" folder, which will save accidentally deleted photos. Remember that you can encrypt files, but there's no way to do it directly from the gallery.

Oppo F3 Gallery

The app does offer a feature to quickly build a collage out of several selected photos. You can also edit individual photos with the usual crop and filter tools, and do some free-hand doodling too. Some slightly more advanced features the app offers are to blur or pixelate any part of the image.

Video player with gesture control

There's a dedicated video player app on the Oppo F3, not too different from the gallery. It separates files into videos shot with the camera and all videos. During playback, you can use swipe gestures to control the app - sideways to scrub through the video and up/down to change the volume (right side of the screen) or screen brightness (left side).

Pop-up video is oddly missing

But just when we thought it must be the same player from the F3 Plus, it turns out there are version differences here as well. Here, the app is missing the pop-up floating video feature. Also, the app itself doesn't really have any configurable options. The F3 Plus offers subtitle support

Music player with Dirac Real HD Sound

The ColorOS music player (like the gallery) again takes after iOS, and is fairly simple to operate. You can browse the local music library by track, artist or album and that's about it. Songs you mark as favorites get automatically send to a playlist, which you can find more easily. Lyrics can be displayed, but they must be embedded into the file itself- the player will not fetch them from the Internet.

The ColorOS music player • Browsing the music library • Now playing screen • Lyric support

There are some advanced sound controls on board the F3, courtesy of Dirac Research AB. Real HD Sound is an equalizer with multiple presets and three sliders for manual adjustment- Bass, Baritone and Treble. This works with headphones only, as Dirac Power Sound powers the loudspeaker.

Dirac Real HD Audio is the player's equalizer

Just like the F3 Plus, the regular F3 lacks an FM radio.

Audio output

When plugged into an active external amplifier, the Oppo F3 delivered excellent clarity and nicely high volume - matching the excellent result of its Plus sibling.

Unfortunately we also got as much degradation as with the F3 Plus when we hooked up our headphones. Those caused moderate damage to the stereo quality and introduced some extra intermodulation distortion. Frequency response also went a little shaky while volume droped to just above average. Not a bad showing, all things considered, but far from a perfect one either.

Oppo F3 frequency response

You can learn more about the tested parameters and the whole testing process here.