Oppo was a new mobile phone brand for us. The company, which is Chinese, has been expanding outside its home market to develop other regions. The firm has a premium positioning concept and after developing in China has been growing its business in Asia, but is now expanding into the Middle East as well as India and Australia. The company has an established business in Blu-ray players and headphones, so phones are an extension to the brand.
The company’s tagline is “the Art of Technology”, so it doesn’t chase volume and wants to change the perception of Chinese brands globally. It wants to have the best product in each segment that it competes in, with the best user experience and sees itself as #2 to Apple in China in brand perception. Oppo is a sponsor of FC Barcelona and much of the branding at the show was around football.
The phones that Oppo was showing looked very good – they had the rounded edges that come from using 2.5D Gorilla Glass as the display cover. Display resolutions were FullHD on most phones apart from the Fine 7 which is a QuadHD display (given that the firm has an “Apple-ish” approach, staff were surprisinglyy critical of high resolution) and most displays in the firm’s handsets are based on AMOLED technology. The company has its own interface layer on top of Android as an operating system.
The latest model is the R7S smartphone. It is a 5.5″ model with an AMOLED display (1920 x 1080), protected by Gorilla Glass 3. The phone has dual SIM slots and an octa-core Snapdragon 615 SoC, with 4GB of RAM and an Adreno 405 GPU. It will first be released in Australia, followed by Asian markets. Pricing has not been revealed. (BR)
