Oppo Find 7 review: Dark horse

A custom gallery

The Gallery on the Oppo Find 7 is a custom job, but surprisingly one with less features than the vanilla app. Obviously, Oppo has approached this interface with a less-is-more tactic.

The default view is a grid of folders, with a name and number of images for each folder labeled underneath. You can't filter images by location, time, people or tags like you would in the stock app. Images inside folders are arranged on a rectangular grid and you have two options - image selection mode and start a slideshow. You can select multiple images (folders too) and then Share and Delete options become available.

Gallery

The available features when viewing a single image are pretty standard - set image as wallpaper/contact image, share it, delete it or get a menu with more functions.

The image editor offers light adjustments that let you bring out the shadows or the highlights, you can apply effects, color styles, red eye correction, straightening, sharpening and face glow (which detects faces automatically). Most of these options have a slider that lets you fine-tune the intensity of the effect.

Viewing an individual image • Editing options

Video player has some drawbacks

The Oppo Find 7 comes with a pretty simple-looking video player, which supports DivX, AVI, MKV, MP4, etc. We had no issues playing files all the way up to 1080p resolution and the only real setback were certain files with XviD video or AC3 sound.

The interface for video selection is pretty basic too - a list of all available files. The player supports subtitles too, but there's only an on/off toggle here, you can't manually pick the subtitle file (so it would have to have the same name as the video file to work, and be in the same directory). Also, some foreign language subtitles didn't display all characters correctly.

Video player

While watching a video you get a timeline scrubber, play/pause along with forward/back controls, a lock option (which locks the display against accidental touches) and a pop up toggle.

A feature that seems lifted right off the Samsung/LG flagships is the pop-up player. It's a small floating window that lets you have other apps working underneath. You can move it around to get it out of the way, but there's no transparency option.

Video as an overlay

Music player and Wave effects

Oppo's latest music player has quite a simplistic interface and is very easy to use and navigate. It supports the Oppo's latest audio customizations called Wave MaxxAudio as well as Dirac HD Audio.

The Wave audio enhancements apply on all music-related apps and games no matter if you are using headphones or the loudspeaker. There are a few Wave presets you can use, but you can also customize one preset by yourself.

Wave settings

You can customize some basic options such as maximum bass, treble, volume and dialog, but you can also completely configure the audio frequency curve. So if you are using some high-quality headphones, you can fully customize your audio experience. We wish Oppo had provided an automatic configuration similar to Samsung's Adapt Sound though.

The music player UI is pretty straightforward - your music library is organized into a local list of all music, favorites, artists, albums and folders. There's also an option to add a playlist.

Music player

The Now playing interface is split into two - the current playlist and the album art/music controls screen. You can swipe between the two. By default the player will look for lyrics and display them under the album art, which imitates a vinyl record. You can add album art if it's not built inside the tracks (but the player won't look for it automatically).

There's a playback mode button (normal, shuffle, repeat track) and a toggle for audio enhancement. That cycles through Off, Dolby and Dirac.

Now playing screen • Options

By the way, the music player successfully played a 16-bit FLAC file so there is hardly anything it won't play.

While the player is on, the notification area lets you control the playback via an expandable notification but there are no music controls on the lockscreen.

Audio quality is good, but not the best

The Oppo Find 7 put in a stellar performance in the first part of our audio quality test. It had excellently high volume levels to go with its very clean output. Barring for the slightly high IMD reading this is one of the best score sets we've seen lately.

However, the smartphone faltered quite a bit when we plugged in a pair of headphones. Its frequency response started missing the mark now and then, the IMD rose further and the stereo crosstalk hiked quite a bit. It's not as bad as the stereo crosstalk disaster that was the 7a, but elsewhere the more premium member of the pair lagged behind its stablemate. Volume level dropped as well, adding up to what was a good, but not quite flagship-worthy performance here.

Oppo Find 7 frequency response

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