Oppo R11s review

Telephony and speaker

The phone app is simple but functional. The dialer supports smart dial, or you can go into the Contacts tab for a more extensive search. You can block numbers from calling you, a handy way to screen unwanted calls. You need to head to the Settings menu for more options.

The dialer app • Smart dial • Contact details • Phonebook

The Oppo R11s is a dual-SIM phone with VoLTE support. This technology offers superior audio quality but needs to be supported by your carrier.

The Oppo R11s scored a Good mark with its single loudspeaker. It's fairly quiet in the vocal range, but it performs great for music and the sound output is rich and clean.

Apps

The Oppo R11s has the complete Google package, but it brings its own alternatives to many of them. We already saw several, like the Theme Store and Phone Manager. It's time to meet the others.

Google Calendar oversees your daily routine, but that's for the international models. The Chinese ROM comes with an iOS-like Calendar app. The Weather app seems similarly borrowed from Apple. It pulls data from AccuWeather, too.

The Calendar app • The Weather app is powered by AccuWeather

Oppo has pre-installed the free version of WPS Office. It can create Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files and it offers a nice selection of templates to give you a flying start. Note that some templates are paid, and you'll occasionally see banners for the premium version of the app.

There is also a dedicated File Manager app with File safe option that allows you to lock certain files with a fingerprint/pattern for safe keeping. FTP connections are supported, too.

Free WPS Office • WPS Office • Files • All files • Sharing files over FTP

The Backup and Restore app has an extra feature that's not found in its name - it can clone phones, simplifying the transfer from your old device. For backups, it will make a copy of System data, Applications, and Personal data.

The Backup and Restore app can also move your data to a new phone

Multimedia

The Gallery app is pretty standard. 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. The app should eventually start creating smart albums by location tags, time, or faces.

An iOS-like gallery • Browsing by folders is the only option • Viewing an image • Editing a photo

The ColorOS music player is also a standard affair. 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 one more advanced setting is Dirac's Real HD Sound. It's 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.

The ColorOS music player • Browsing the music library • Dirac Real HD Audio is the player's equalizer

Audio output is a mixed bag

The Oppo R11s performed nicely in the first part of our audio quality test. When working with an active external amplifier it produced impressively output with excellent clarity and above average loudness.

Headphones caused some notable degradation with volume dropping to below average, stereo crosstalk increasing and some intermodulation distortion creeping in. Frequency response was affected as well, even if it wasn’t too bad. All in all the R11s is hardly the audiophile’s dream phone, its performance coming a step below most 2017 flagships.

Oppo R11s frequency response

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