Oppo R11s review: borrowed beauty

Oppo's R11s continues the company's proud tradition of imitating flagship phones from Apple, LG and Samsung, and selling them for half the price. At just $659 outright the R11s feels like a great deal, and it is, but peek beneath the surface and you'll find how the company has managed to cut costs over its competitors.

The hardware is classy. It has a sleek, wafer thin design that embraces the current flagship trend of removing bezels to create a handset that is almost all screen on the front. It resembles LG's gorgeous V30, but the material — particularly the metal back cover — feels lighter and a little cheaper in the hand. And where those other flagships have beautifully rounded edges, there's a sharpness to the R11 where the glass meets the case. That sounds absurdly nitpicky, but in the hand this makes the phone uncomfortable to hold without a case.

The R11s takes unashamed inspiration from Apple and others.

The display is a 6-inch ultra-wide 18:9 OLED, an impressive inclusion at this price, but again it lacks the brightness and vibrancy the best screens available in a handset. It's by no means bad, it just doesn't pop like Samsung's S8 or the iPhone X.

Included inside is a generous 64GB of storage, and there's a microSD card reader to expand storage further. Oppo is marketing the camera as a flagship competitor, and the camera is fine for the price, but nothing compared to the quality of the industry leaders; the iPhone X, Samsung Note 8, Huawei Mate Pro and Google's Pixel 2.

Oppo has had the fastest fingerprint readers available — ao fast I honestly thought they might be fudging it, but testing with some random thumbs in my office convinced me it was the real deal — but going all screen on the front means the fingerprint reader has moved to the back of the device. The placement is higher than I'd prefer but still reachable with smaller hands.

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https://www.theage.com.au/technology/oppo-r11s-review-borrowed-beauty-20180212-p4yzz7.html