Oppo R17 Pro Smartphone Hands-on Review

Oppo has given thought to the box packaging as well, which exudes a similar foggy color appearance as the phone itself lending a premium look. Inside the box, we find the R17 Pro itself, a 50 W Super VOOC USB charger, a USB Type-A to Type-C cable, a TPU case, a SIM ejector tool, and the usual paperwork. The phone comes with a pre-applied screen protector. You also get a nice set of USB Type-C earbuds, which is a good thing to have.

The Oppo R17 Pro is sure to turn heads with its design. The aluminum sides combined with a matte glass back exudes a luxurious look. Oppo says that that the texture of the glass prevents fingerprints from spoiling the appearance. While it is true to an extent, it does get greased after extended use. Our review unit is the Radiant Mist variant and the flow of light reflection when light is shone on it at certain angles lends a touch of exquisiteness. At 183 g, the R17 Pro is not the lightest phone out there but users shouldn't face any handling issues.

The back houses a protruding camera housing comprised of 12 MP + 20 MP + 3D ToF sensors with OIS, support for RAW capture, and a host of AI scene recognition modes. Below the camera array is an LED flash. The cameras are excellent but Oppo's sensor choices leave us baffled. We'll come to that shortly. The camera protrusion causes a slight wobble when the phone is placed flat on a desk. There is no physical capacitive fingerprint sensor at the back.

On the left we have just the volume rockers, which are easy to press and give good tactile feedback. Towards the bottom, we have the speaker grill, microphone, USB 3.1 Type-C Gen1 reversible port, and a SIM tray that can take two nano SIMs or a single micro SIM. The SIM tray comes with a seal that should prevent any liquid entry, although the phone itself isn't rated for waterproofing. Going to the right, we have the power button and at the top we have the antenna lines and a noise-canceling microphone.

The 6.4-inch 2340x1080 AMOLED display is one of the highlights of the R17 Po. At the top of the display is a teardrop-shaped notch that houses a 25 MP selfie camera. The ambient light sensor is hidden in the notch. There is no built-in selfie flash and the phone brightens up the display as a faux flash or to provide light for unlocking the phone using facial recognition in the dark. Oppo says that a lot of work has gone into designing the notch in a way that is flush with the screen. The speakerphone is not conspicuous and you'll have to look hard for it as it is neatly sandwiched between the glass and the frame. Given the space constraints of the teardrop notch, Oppo uses an AI algorithm instead of a hardware proximity sensor similar to the Qeexo EarSense in the Find X. The transition from the frame to glass is fairly seamless but there's still room for improvement.

Overall, if design is one of the primary criteria that can influence your buying decision, the Oppo R17 Pro should be high on your list.

The Oppo R17 Pro is powered by the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 710 (SD 710) SoC. The 10nm SD 710 is the first of the 700-series and is positioned right in the middle of the flagship 800-series and the mid-range 600-series. There aren't too many phones with the SD 710 yet, and going forward we expect OEMs to embrace the newer SD730 or SD730G as the SoC of choice for upper mid-range smartphones. Still, the performance of the SD710 is nothing to scoff at, and it is pretty responsive for almost whatever you throw at it. The R17 Pro comes with 8 GB RAM and 128 GB UFS 2.1 storage option without microSD expansion. You can use USB drives with the supported OTG function, though.

When it comes to connectivity, the R17 Pro is well-endowed. The SIM tray can take dual nano SIMs with dual standby and VoLTE support for both the SIMs. Wireless connectivity is offered up to 802.11ac along with Bluetooth 5.0, NFC, and GPS. FM radio is not present. The usual set of sensors including compass, ambient light, gyroscope, accelerometer and an in-display fingerprint sensor are available. Face unlock is supported via the front-facing camera but there's no IR camera onboard.

There is a single loudspeaker at the bottom that offers sufficient clarity just below the maximum volume. Similar to the OnePlus 6T, the R17 Pro comes with a 3,700 mAh battery that is implemented in a bi-cell 1850 mAh x 2 configuration. The battery can be topped up insanely fast thanks to Oppo's SuperVOOC fast charging that can top up the battery by 40% in about 10 minutes.

The R17 Pro still runs on ColorOS 5.2 based on Android 8.1 Oreo, and the ColorOS 6 update based on Android 9 Pie update is only scheduled to arrive in August this year. Before we go deeper into the software, let's get this out of the way — ColorOS is chock full of features and functionality that some users, especially those coming from stock Android, might actually find that it takes time to get used to all of them. The OS also includes many apps in the base image that not everyone will find useful. Thankfully, you can uninstall most of them and save some space. Oppo also bundles its own AppStore apart from Google Play, which you can ignore if not required. The Oppo AppStore is not as populated as the Play Store but includes most popular apps. A minor gripe is that you often get two update notifications for most apps — one from the Play Store and another from the AppStore. 

Listing out all that ColorOS has to provide begets an entire article in itself so we'll focus on a few important ones. True to its name, ColorOS appears very colorful and eye-catching. It is pretty evident that Oppo has taken a lot of cues from iOS, including the absence of an app drawer. Swiping to the left of the homescreen brings up a fully customizable so-called Smart Assistant that offers quick access to common apps, favorite contacts, weather, step tracking, online orders, and more. It is more of a shortcut page than anything "smart". A swipe down from the top brings up the notification shade with big colorful icons and the brightness slider. A useful and customizable sidebar that offers handy shortcuts for apps and tools such as Screenshot, Screen Recorder, Camera, and File Manager can be invoked by a swipe from the right edge of the display.

In the Settings, apart from the regular ones, we find options to set the Theme, Lockscreen Magazine, and Wallpaper. We liked the image selection offered in the Lockscreen Magazine that helps show off the vibrant colors of the AMOLED panel. ColorOS also offers a slew of privacy protection features and settings to secure financial apps. The device will warn you if any apps fail the security checklist. To top it all, you also get a separate Secure Keyboard whenever password fields are detected. The Secure Keyboard also prevents taking screenshots and screen recording. Prompts for microphone and camera usage by third-party apps also show up in the status bar. Gesture-based navigation is also provided for and is very intuitive to use.

However, not all is well with ColorOS 5.2, at least in our testing. For one, you don't get to see any app icons in the system tray apart from the clock, cellular and Wi-Fi strength, and battery indicator so it is easy to miss notifications unless you actually swipe down the notification center. Also, we found that notifications get delayed sometimes even under good connectivity. A more worrisome observation is that some apps such as Telegram, Discord, Slack, etc. fail to show up notifications unless they've been opened at least once and are running in memory. We hope Oppo addresses this shortcoming in a future update.

Call quality on the Oppo R17 Pro is very good and cellular reception was excellent even in areas with supposedly shoddy coverage. Both the SIM slots are VoLTE compatible if your provider supports it. Although there is only one noise-cancelation microphone, it works well to cut out excess background noise. The phone supports wireless AC and could reach the full 50 Mb/s speed offered by the ISP. GPS-A, GLONASS, BDS, and GALILEO are supported.

You have control over the locating mode and can choose either a device-only GPS feature or a high accuracy mode that uses the Internet to more accurately identify the location. We set the option to Device Only to get a fair assessment of the GPS radio's tracking abilities. Indoors, the phone could not secure a proper fix but the signal reception was good outdoors with up to 4 m accuracy. Battery drain while using the GPS was slightly on the higher side, but the phone didn't heat up.

The Snapdragon 710 is an able upper mid-range chipset that can offer a near-flagship performance. In regular use, we found absolutely no lags in the interface or any hiccups while playing demanding games. AI functions also seem to be accelerated as we will be seeing shortly. Since ColorOS is a relatively heavier skin, it did have its bearing on the SoC sometimes. But given the copious 8 GB of RAM the stutters were rare to come by. That being said, we feel there's still a lot of room for optimization in ColorOS and we hope things get more refined with ColorOS 6.

We evaluated the SoC performance using a variety of synthetic CPU and GPU benchmarks. For comparison, we pitted the Oppo R17 Pro against a few other Snapdragon 710-powered phones and also against the HiSilicon Kirin 710, Snapdragon 660, and Snapdragon 835 SoCs. When it comes to raw CPU scores, the Snapdragon 710 was about 10-15 % better than the Kirin 710 and was within striking distance of the Snapdragon 835. This is noteworthy as the Snapdragon 835 was Qualcomm's flagship just two generations ago. Interestingly, the Snapdragon 660 in the Samsung Galaxy A9 wasn't too far behind the R17 Pro's Snapdragon 710. However, the Snapdragon 660 in the Asus ZenFone Max Pro (M2) did trail by at least 15% as it was clocked lower than normal. So overall, we see that the Snapdragon 710 has good number-crunching abilities comparable to the Snapdragon 835 from a couple of years ago. 

GPU tests tell a different story, though. The Adreno 616 in the R17 Pro posted somewhat low scores in most GPU tests. It trails behind the Adreno 540 by a long shot but performs admirably better than the Adreno 512 and the Mali-G51 MP4. We did see some performance penalties compared to other SD 710 phones, so there's a likelihood of Oppo's software being at fault here.