Oppo F3 Plus review: Double take

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 Plus 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, free-hand doodling too. Slightly more advanced features can blur part of the image (to simulate shallow depth of field) and pixelate areas to censor a part of the image or just for artistic effect.

Video player with gesture control

There's a dedicated video player app on the Oppo F3 Plus, 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).

Picking a video • Simple on-screen controls • Pop-up play

Pop-up video playback is available too. However, it refused to work on our standard video test file. It worked just fine on other clips, so we won't dwell too much on the issue.

Music player with Dirac Real HD Sound

The ColorOS music player (like the gallery) has a clear iOS aesthetic and is fairly simple in operation. You can browse the local music library by track, artist or album and that's about it. You can favorite songs to make them easier to find. 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 pretty advanced sound controls on board the F3 Plus, courtesy of Dirac Research AB. Real HD Sound is an equalizer with multiple presets and three sliders for manual tuning - Bass, Baritone and Treble. This works with headphones only, as Dirac Power Sound powers the loudspeaker. Oddly enough, you have to enable the equalizer and select something other than the first "Closed" option. Skipping the latter will just leave your audio unaugmented.

Dirac Real HD Audio is the player's equalizer

The Oppo F3 Plus lacks an FM radio.

Audio output started off great, but lost some steam with headphones

When plugged into an active external amplifier, the Oppo F3 Plus delivered excellent clarity and nicely high volume - about as good as we could have expected.

Adding in a pair of headphones causes moderate damage to the stereo quality and introduces some extra intermodulation distortion. Frequency response also starts to fluctuate a bit while volume drops to just above average. Not a bad showing, all things considered, but far from a perfect one either.

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