Oppo A74 5G Review

 

5G smartphones continue to proliferate in India even though there is no clear picture of when 5G services will actually be available. We recently tested the Oppo F19 Pro +, which was the first F-series company phone to offer 5G, and today we have the first A-series 5G phone, the Oppo A74 5G.

Price is less than Rs. For 20,000, the Oppo A74 5G competes with other 5G offerings such as the Realme Narzo 30 Pro 5G, Samsung Galaxy M42, and the recently launched Realme 8 5G. What makes A74 5G unique is that it is one of the first phones in India to use the Qualcomm Snapdragon 480 SoC. Time to see how this chip compares to MediaTek offerings, and whether the Oppo A74 5G is worth buying.

Design of Oppo A74 5G

The design of the Oppo A74 5G is rather simple. It has a plastic body with a plastic back and clear borders around the mirror. The Purple Purple color I look good though, due to the two colors visible under the light at certain angles. This phone feels very heavy at 188g and not too small at 8.42mm, but after a few days of using it, I found it manageable. The plastic back is a huge magnet of fingers however, and it is very difficult to stay clean.

The power button pushed back on the right side has a combined capacitive fingerprint sensor. It works well every time I use it. There is also facial recognition as well, which was quick and equally responsive. The Oppo A74 5G has a headphone jack, a USB Type-C port, and a single speaker, all on the floor.

The Oppo A74 5G uses a 6.5-inch full HD + LCD panel. It has a 90Hz refresh rate that makes navigation and scrolling feel wet and fast. The hole-punch cut of the selfie camera is bigger than normal and is less noticeable at first in apps, but it's something I'm used to after a while.

In the Oppo A74 5G sales box, you get a USB cable, a SIM output tool, a case, and an 18W power adapter.

Specification of Oppo A74 5G and software

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 480 SoC is the one that puts the Oppo A74 5G out of the competition. Initially, it is easy to dismiss the SoC as an entry-level component due to its position in the low-level 400 Qualcomm series, but in reality it is not. It is built on an 8nm process, which means it has to work efficiently. When it comes to CPU cores, there are two Kryo 460 Gold coins and six Kryo 460 Silver coins. These are the same cores used in Qualcomm's Snapdragon 678 SoC, but slightly slower.

The GPU on the Snapdragon 480 SoC is the Adreno 619, which is also used on the Snapdragon 750G SoC even though it is also slower. All of this suggests that it should be far more powerful than its model number, which could lead to faith.

The Oppo A74 5G is available with a single configuration with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. ColorOS 11.1 allows you to use up to 5GB of internal storage as RAM, although I have not seen much difference with this enabled during my use. There are dual-band Wi-Fi ac, Bluetooth 5.1, FM radio, and a standard sensor suite.

ColorOS is rich in feature and is familiar with many options for customizing the look and feel of the Oppo A74 5G. It is still full of many installed applications and many of them often generate spam notifications. This includes stock apps such as browser and music player, which can be downloaded.

Oppo A74 5G performance and battery life

The performance was really good last week when I used the Oppo A74 5G. The OS runs smoothly without any lag or hiccups, and the interaction sounds faster due to the high-resolution screen. Call quality and speaker volume are also satisfactory. The display is bright enough and the content is well presented, with good sharpness and color. The videos look good too, though the camera hole is slightly disturbing when viewing anything that fills the screen.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 480 holds its own on the benches. The Oppo A74 5G scored 3,18,144 points on AnTuTu, as well as 518 points and 1,726 in the Geekbench single and more tests respectively. These numbers were roughly the same as the MediaTek's Dimension 800U SoC, while the Spapdragon 480 even traded the Qualcomm's Snapdragon 732G SoC, available on the Redmi Note 10 Pro Max.

The Oppo A74 5G handled the games well too, whether it was a simple title like Orbia or a heavy one like Call of Duty: Mobile. I’ve noticed that some frames have been dropped in a few games after long playing times, but this hasn’t been a persistent problem. The wire is also not very hot, which can be caused by the graphite tubes used inside to distribute heat.

Battery life was very strong in my experience due to the powerful 5,000mAh battery. I could easily get a day and a half of normal use, and even more so when I didn’t use the camera too much or play too many games. Charging this battery is not a very fast thing, and even if it is an 18W charger, it charges about 66 percent per hour. It takes another 40 minutes or more to complete the charging cycle.

Oppo A74 5G cameras

The cameras on the Oppo A74 5G are not a good thing, and surprisingly, Oppo has not installed a very wide camera. I would love to trade with macro and monochrome cameras with ultra-wide, but that’s not available. The Realme 8 5G is one of the latest smartphones about this price so it doesn’t have a wide camera. One can only hope that this practice is not caught. The main sensor is a 48-megapixel camera with an f / 1.7 aperture, while the front has an 8-megapixel selfie camera.

Breaking it properly, the phone's cameras are out of order. The performance was quite disappointing, especially in low light. Under good light, the main camera took a good deal of exposure but the areas that looked uninhibited and even the slightest movement of objects caused blurring. Macro photos look great, as long as there is enough light while shooting.