Oppo R7 review: Android in iOS clothing

The R7 is the latest smartphone from Chinese manufacturer Oppo​. Oppo is a giant on its home turf, and is making inroads into the Australian market with a collection of impressive, and impressively priced, handsets.

Oppo wears the influences of other flagships on its sleeve. The R7 is a little Xperia, a dash of Galaxy, and a large helping of iPhone. But the R7 is more than just a knock-off; it's a fine phone in its own right, and has a few features I hope other manufacturers will borrow in time.

First, the hardware is gorgeous. It's a svelte little thing weighing just 147 grams — you'll hardly feel it in your pocket. The design feels like a slimmer Sony Xperia Z3, with the rounded edges and champagne gold backing of an iPhone 6. There's an overall feeling of quality to the phone and it feels far better than a $449 handset should.

The five-inch screen is as good as you'll find on any flagship. The AMOLED display produces vibrant colours and deep blacks across the 1080p screen, making the R7 a great little media player.

The R7 comes with last year's top-of-the-line processor, and that's good enough for a mid-range phone. You'll feel the odd bit of lag when scrolling large websites or documents, but for the most part, you'll jump between apps quickly. Better still, the R7 has a massive three gigabytes of RAM, so apps will stay active longer, handy when bouncing between them.

The built-in cameras are just OK. Overall performance is fine, but the camera just can't cope with a high dynamic range, blowing out bright images and flattening shadows. Using the camera is the only time you're reminded of the price tag.

Oppo advertises fast charging as a marquee feature, and with good reason. Ten minutes on the supplied charger and you've got enough battery to last the evening. The R7's fast charging is easily the best I've seen.

But it is the simplest idea that impressed me most. The Oppo R7 ships with a screen protector on the phone and comes with a silicon rubber case inside the box. Finding a case for anything other than an iPhone or Samsung Galaxy is a nightmare, so I applaud Oppo for providing a case here. It's a small gesture — it probably costs Oppo little but it bought a tonne of goodwill from me.

Still, there's no way to talk about the Oppo R7 without pointing out just how influenced by iPhone it feels.

ColorOS is Oppo's flavour of Android, and it's unashamedly inspired by iOS. The launcher, or home screen, behaves just as you would expect an iPhone to behave, nothing like the standard Android experience. Apps are laid flat, with no second layer "app drawer" underneath.

The default wallpaper looks remarkably like iOS 7's wallpaper. The camera is a minimal black design, with familiar fonts, colours and icons. The notification shade is the same translucent black as iOS. When you want to delete an app, you hold down on one until all apps start to jiggle, then tap a little cross in the corner.

Animations in and out of apps feature the same motion-sick-inducing parallax effect. Even apps you've never launched have those little iOS dots beside them. It's these little details that Chinese brands such as Oppo, Xiaomi and Huawei pull off, with a casual disregard of copyright law, that really impress. Shenzhen rushes in where Seoul fears to tread.

Which is not to say the entire experience is a clone of iOS. It's not. But, by gosh, it'll feel familiar to anyone used to an iPhone. To Oppo's credit, it has copied the right things. Everything is intuitive and easy to use. What it lacks in originality, it makes up for in execution.

Mail and Calendar are the only built-in apps that lack polish, but who needs them? Google Calendar and Gmail do a fantastic job for most flavours of webmail, and Outlook is the best exchange app on Android or iOS. But that leads me to the existential question of Oppo – why did it bother going to all this trouble to mimic iOS?

Stock Android is as good, if not better, than iOS. It's certainly better than imitation iOS. There's nothing wrong with ColorOS, but it just feels weird to use.

I contacted Oppo to ask if it would release a stock Android version of the R7. Michael Tran, the marketing director of Oppo Mobile Australia said "at this point in time, all R7 devices come loaded with ColorOS as standard ... However, we understand that some customers would prefer an unmodified ROM, and have, on occasion, supported that. We may look to offer that in the future, although no specific dates have been determined yet."

I would love to see this happen. A stock Android Oppo R7 would be one of the best mid-priced phones on the market. But as it stands, ColorOS sits in a strange valley between iOS and Android.

Thanks to a partnership with Dick Smith, you can test the Oppo R7 for yourself at more than 400 stores across Australia, and see if it's right for you. I hope more manufacturers learn from Oppo and bring real phones to retail stores, not just plastic dummy phones.

The Oppo R7 is a beautiful, well-built phone that offers style far beyond its price tag. But the software, however well executed, will never feel quite right.

The Oppo R7 is $449 RRP unlocked, or available on Optus Plans starting at $40 a month.