Chinese New Year with the OPPO R9s

By Hitech Century | January 31, 2017 |

When Chinese New Year rolls in every year, it acts is an ironman triathlon of sorts for people and phones alike. On the first three days of Chinese New Year, it is considered customary to visit the homes of family, friends and relatives to wish them well for the lunar new year. Wellwishers wake up at the crack of dawn and from there on in, it is a nonstop marathon of snacking, feasting, drinking and the odd wager or two. Rinse and repeat at every friend/relative/family member you visit which can stretch well until sundown. Continue this for at least three days. Five if you’re a traditionalist. The sequence of who you visit is determined by an esoteric formula based on your place on the familial totem pole, your grandparents, your parents, your relatives and your fellow siblings.

In between all this, your phone will be worked the hardest it will ever be in its service life short of attending a wedding or CES. It is expected to take, in succession, dozens upon dozens of shots under increasingly trying conditions as sundown approaches. It is expected to be constantly on and active as you attempt to coordinate meet-ups via social media. It is expected to act as a navigator as you use attempt to brave and avoid the traffic jams enroute as you head back to your hometown. It is needed to entertain you when you are forced to endure the interminable long waiting periods in between meet-ups, feasts and whatnot. What better way to put a phone through its paces than to bring it with you on Chinese New Year.

Over the course of three days, the R9s was a real trouper, surviving a punishing usage profile that would have had many other phones in its price range giving up the ghost long before sundown. Here’s what we found made it one a solid choice not only to survive the Chinese New year gauntlet but as a daily driver too.

Cool Camera
OPPO’s R9s is one of the notable few phones in the market that comes with a bright F/1.7 aperture lens that affords better low light performance. Paired with this is a custom made 16-MP IMX 398 sensor that was made in collaboration with Sony which comes with phase detection autofocus tech that offers more focus points and faster subject acquisition. On paper, this is about 40% faster than regular Phase Detection autofocus tech used in many mainstream cameras. The camera is also able to take 4K video too. All this gets saved on a generous 64GB of built-in storage though in practice you get about four fifths of this in effective usable storage. If that is not sufficient, you can still augment it via a microSD card. The front camera has a similar resolution as the rear at 16-MP but has an F/2.0 aperture. Both front and rear cameras lack optical image stabilisation but electronic image stabilisation helps compensate somewhat.

What made the R9s effective was its gesture-based shortcuts on the display. While it does require you to retrain your muscle memory somewhat from pressing a button, you can simply sketch a circle on the touchscreen to immediately fire up the camera.With some practice, you can do this one handed with the tip of your thumb. Very handy if your other hand is greasy on account of tucking into the obligatory New Year cookies and prawn crackers. Optionally, you can also designate one of your fingerprints as a camera shortcut via the fingerprint reader. Handy that.

[Image OPPO]

The F/1.7 helps substantially in taking good shots in low lit conditions and combined with a High Dynamic Range (HDR) mode, the phone was certainly capable of handling the gamut of subjects for the holiday: group shots, wefies, food shots, short videos and the like with pleasantly predictable results. The fact that it also has a Beauty 4.0 mode meant that it was able to enhance mugshots to some degree as you’re able to tweak how rosy or how white the subjects are while it automatically banishes blemishes and crow’s feet. Your mileage may vary with male subjects but in general the R9s’s Beauty Mode veers on the conservatively modest side of things as opposed to some third party apps that attempt to give you eyes like lemurs and the skin tone of someone who hasn’t seen daylight since Reagan was president. Not bad when you need to take a selfie after a late night of partying with eyebags that would put a panda to shame.

Excellent Endurance
The R9s comes with OPPO’s proprietary VOOC fast charging tech that affords it the ability to juice the 3,010mAh battery to about 75% capacity in about half an hour. When you’re on the New Year visiting circuit, every minute counts. While other manufacturers have their own preferred flavours of fast charging tech, OPPO’s VOOC fast charge tech is unique in that it also has a significant of failsafes to ensure that the phone doesn’t inadvertently cook off or heat up when charged.

Even with a punishing routine of heavy use followed by a top-up charge multiple times during the course of a day, the R9s remained reassuringly cool during charging; something of a concern if you keep it in your pocket all day. The fast top-up worked as it said on the tin and we always got enough juice to last through to the next house visit on the circuit without having to resort to an emergency power bank.

The built-in 3,010mAh battery and the efficient Snapdragon processor offered pretty good endurance on par with many other phones though it, combined in tandem with VOOC offered it markedly less downtime and less of a concern or need to nursemaid it to the next charging point. At one point between a five hour road trip between Kuala Lumpur to Johor Bahru, we skirted close to below 30% via heavy use of Google Maps and Facebook Messenger along with e-mail but the phone’s low power mode easily sorted that out.

The only quibble here is that the VOOC tech on the R9s is unique, which means that the charger itself along with the microUSB charging cable are somewhat hard to find in the open market or by third party accessory vendors. We toted our charger and cable around everywhere we went in a little pouch though the proprietary charger is a bit on the chunky side, which precludes keeping it in your pocket though it’s compact enough to keep in a handbag or backpack.