Oppo N1 review: Head spin

Display

Easily one of the key selling features of the device, the 5.9" screen of the Oppo N1 has a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels, resulting in around 373ppi. Oppo puts the screen brightness at 450 nits, not all that much for an IPS LCD like the N1's but in reality the screen looks pretty bright.

Hardly a surprise for an IPS unit, the side viewing angles are excellent - it's a high-quality screen, no doubt about that. The screen's digitizer is super-sensitive and the phone can be used with gloves (if you turn that on in the settings menu).

Oppo N1 screen next to HTC One Max screen

The pixel arrangement is standard RGB with an equal amount of green, red and blue pixels in a line. Below you can see it magnified using our trusty microscope.

The contrast of the screen is pretty good and about in line with the excellent Find 5 display. Color reproduction is also pretty great adding up to great image quality screen.

The only sub-par element of the otherwise great display is its sunlight legibility. The less than stellar brightness combined with the very high reflectivity add up to pretty poor contrast when exposed to direct sunlight.

Sunlight contrast ratio

• Nokia 808 PureView
  4.698
• Apple iPhone 5
  3.997
• Samsung Galaxy Note 3
  3.997
• Samsung I9300 Galaxy S III
  3.419
• Nokia Lumia 925
  3.402
• Samsung I9505 Galaxy S4
  3.352
• Samsung Omnia W
  3.301
• Samsung Galaxy S
  3.155
• Samsung Galaxy S4 mini
  3.127
• Samsung Galaxy S4 zoom
  3.118
• Nokia N9
  3.069
• Samsung Galaxy Note
  2.970
• Sony Xperia Z1
  2.950
• HTC One S
  2.901
• BlackBerry Q10
  2.856
• Samsung Galaxy S II
  2.832
• Samsung Galaxy S II Plus
  2.801
• BlackBerry Z30
  2.790
• Huawei Ascend P1
  2.655
• Sony Xperia ZR
  2.672
• Nokia Lumia 900
  2.562
• HTC One Max
  2.537
• Nokia Lumia 720
  2.512
• HTC One
  2.504
• Sony Xperia Z
  2.462
• Samsung Galaxy S III mini
  2.422
• Motorola RAZR i
  2.366
• Samsung Galaxy Note II
  2.307
• Apple iPhone 4S
  2.269
• HTC Desire 600 dual sim
  2.262
• LG Nexus 5
  2.228
• HTC One X
  2.158
• Nokia N8
  2.144
• Oppo Find 5
  2.088
• BlackBerry Z10
  2.051
• Apple iPhone 4
  2.016
• HTC One mini
  2.003
• LG G2
  1.976
• Sony Ericsson Xperia ray
  1.955
• Samsung Galaxy Camera
  1.938
• HTC Butterfly
  1.873
• Huawei Ascend P6
  1.865
• Nokia Lumia 1520
  1.813
• Sony Xperia V
  1.792
• Sony Xperia U
  1.758
• Meizu MX3
  1.754
• LG Optimus 4X HD
  1.691
• HTC One V
  1.685
• BlackBerry Q5
  1.682
• LG Optimus Vu
  1.680
• LG Optimus GJ
  1.666
• HTC Desire V
  1.646
• Sony Xperia Z Ultra
  1.578
• Samsung Galaxy Core
  1.563
• LG Optimus G Pro
  1.552
• LG Optimus 3D
  1.542
• Nokia Asha 302
  1.537
• Sony Xperia M
  1.473
• Oppo N1
  1.470
• Nokia Lumia 610
  1.432
• Gigabyte GSmart G1355
  1.361
• HTC Desire C
  1.300
• Nokia Asha 501
  1.270
• LG Optimus L7
  1.269
• LG Optimus L9
  1.227
• Meizu MX
  1.221
• Sony Xperia E dual
  1.203
• Samsung Galaxy Pocket
  1.180
• Sony Xperia tipo
  1.166
• Samsung Galaxy mini 2
  1.114

Battery life

The Oppo N1 did fabulously in our dedicated battery life test but that was to be expected from a battery this big. The N1 makes use of a 3610 mAh battery. True, it’s not removable, but you won’t need to keep a spare with that sort of endurance.

For starters, it took us the amazing 25h of talk time on a 3G network to bring this battery down. Next up was our dedicated web browsing test where it endured for more than 9h. And finally, our dedicated video test ran for a total of 11h 15min before the battery ran flat.

We took into account the standby battery consumption with the screen off and we came up with our proprietary battery rating of 79h. That means that the Oppo N1 battery should be good for more than 3 full days given that you use it for an hour of calls, an hour of web browsing and an hour of video watching every day.

We rarely see scores north of 60h around here, so 79h is almost as good as it gets for a smartphone these days. The N1 also slides between its two main rivals - the HTC One Max (81h) and Samsung Galaxy Note 3 (75h).