Last June, OPPO released its latest affordable entry-level smartphone with the all-new OPPO A57 that offers a bigger battery with super-fast charging feature, great sound quality and immersive visual display.
Our good friends from OPPO and it’s PR agency lend us a review unit to experience and share our thoughts about this new affordable smartphone.
So let’s check out what the OPPO A57 can offer.
Unboxing
The packaging box of the OPPO A57 is very simple made of a thick cardboard material with the color of the outer cover box in sky blue while the inner box in black. The design elements found in the box are also minimal sporting with an OPPO logo, the phone models name and its main features. They also used soybean oil-based inks for environmental friendliness.
Opening the top cover of the packaging box you’ll see a secondary black carton box when taken out will have an inner compartment which holds the phone and its accessories.
Contents you’ll be getting in the box includes the OPPO A57 unit, Power Adapter, USB-C data cable, SIM Ejector Tool, Safety Guide, Quick Guide, Protective Jelly Case and Screen Protector that’s already pre-applied.
Design and Build Quality
The OPPO A57 is available in two colorways in Glowing Black and our review unit in Glowing Green.
The glossy back cover is made of durable plastic material with a dual camera lens an LED flash housed in a rectangular camera module located at the top right corner and an OPPO logo on its bottom right.
Even if it’s an entry-level phone, the OPPO A57 shows off its latest Glow Design sporting a nice glittery effect seen on the back cover. With the Glow Design it helps obscures those fingerprint smudges, dust or scratches that usually elicits on the back.
The OPPO A57 has rounded corners and flat edges that is still comfortable to hold even with just one hand.
The all-around frame is made of aluminum with the SIM card tray and volume buttons are found on the left side while the power/sleep button embedded with a side-mounted fingerprint scanner on the right. At the bottom you’ll find the microphone, speaker grille, USB-C port and an earphone jack.
Bezels on the front are slightly thin except for the chin at the bottom screen area which is a bit thick. At the top of the screen you have the front receiver, proximity sensors, light sensors and a water drop notch design for the front camera.
Sporting a 2.5D screen edge or a slight curvature on the display it is further protected using a Panda MN228 glass which is similar to the same technology of a Gorilla Glass.
It gets an IPX4 rating against light water splashes but cannot be submerged into water plus you also get an IP5X rating against dust.
Display and Hardware
The screen size offers a 6.56-inch HD+ LCD display using an A-Si panel with 89.8% screen ratio, 1612×720 resolution, 96% NTSC color gamut, and pixel density of nearly 269 pixels per inch.
It also supports a 60Hz refresh rate good enough for watching almost any videos and decently acquire smooth gameplay experience without any problem.
Brightness of the display can go from 480 nits up to a maximum of 600 nits that should work reasonably well during direct sunlight.
Enjoy better HDR content as the OPPO A57 supports 100% DCI-P3 making the display gets a wider range of colors with good saturation and vibrant as well. Usually, the saturated colors are mostly loved by gamers who enjoys this kind of effect on their display.
The OPPO A57 has an eye-comfort mode making your screen more warmer to reduce blue light, protects and relieves eye fatigue in case of prolong use of the device. You can also enable this feature at night which can make it easier for you to fall asleep.
Hardware and User Interface
Under the hood you will find that the OPPO A57 is equipped with a MediaTek Helio G35 octa-core processor with peak speeds as high as 2.3GHz with 4GB LPDDR4X of RAM clocked frequency range up to 1600MHz. GPU on the device uses an IMG PowerVR GE8320 that operates at 680MHz.
As for its internal storage, our review unit has a built-in 64GB eMMC 5.1 flash memory. If the said storage is not enough there’s also an available 128GB variant. Both variants can extend more storage capacity via a MicroSD up to 1TB.
Here’s our benchmark scores on the OPPO A57.
- Geekbench 5 – 163 Single Core / 902 Multi-Core
- 3DMark – 481
- A1 SD Bench – Read 212.99MB/s, Write 106.16MB/s
- PCMark – 5384 Work 3.0 Performance Score
The OPPO A57 runs on ColorOS 12.1 based on Android 12 with a slew of customization options to change your wallpapers, style of your icons, type of fonts, display themes and lots of useful widgets to add to your screen.
It comes with some pre-installed apps like Facebook, Lazada, LinkedIn, Shopee, TikTok, Twitter, and under the Hot Apps folder you can add more usual apps like Gcash, Instagram etc. without going to the Play Store. You also get some of OPPO’s very own proprietary apps and especially Google tools as well.
The software have additional functions like floating windows, one-handed mode, split screen for multitasking, a sidebar to quickly launch an app, a kid space and enable the simple mode for larger text, icons and louder audio.
Sound Quality
The OPPO A57 has built-in dual stereo speakers located at the bottom and in the earpiece. With the Dirac3.0 it further enhances and optimizes the sound performance of the phone.
The Real Sound Technology feature from OPPO lets you choose between four sound modes from Smart, Movie, Game or Music for the right listening scenarios depending on your current situation.
With all these aforementioned features, the phone produces clear and incredible audio quality. You have good bass and strong mids perfect for watching movies, playing games or listening to your favorite music. If ever you decided to turn the volume to max, it can go very loud but will lose some details so we prefer to set your audio levels to around 50 to 75 percent.
Camera
With a dual-camera setup on its rear camera, it comprises of a 13-megapixel main camera and a 2-megapixel monochrome camera with a ready LED flash to help illuminate or light up your subjects. For your selfies, there’s an 8-megapixel selfie camera.
You have an array of shooting modes found on the camera app like Video, Photo, Portrait, Time-Lapse, PRO, Pano, Sticker and for low-light situations you have a Night mode.
A few missing features we would like to have probably on the next A57 model is an ultra-wide and a macro camera lens. Although, we still are very happy with the camera setup considering the nice price point on the OPPO A57.
As for videos, you can record either in 1080p or 720p @ 30 frames per seconds.
Here are some camera samples we took with the OPPO A57.
Photo mode 1x Sunny Weather
Photo mode 5x Sunny Weather
Photo mode 1x Indoor Sunny Weather
Photo mode 1x Indoor Ambient Light
Selfie Photo mode Indoor Ambient Light
Night mode
Selfie, Low Light with 360-degree Fill Light Activated
The quality on the main camera can capture good decent photos during bright conditions especially when the sun is up and even indoors if the ambient light is very bright. You get nice details with colors that looks natural not too saturated with enough room to edit the photos.
Your selfies will have good quality shots during bright conditions but noise will be present if you’re in a very dim environment. On the photo mode, there’s a 360-degree Fill Light feature that emits a white light from the whole display of the phone to make your selfie shots more clear.
Battery and Connectivity
One major highlights of the OPPO A57 is the built-in battery specs. The A57 has a large 5,000mAh battery and helps charge the device faster with a 33W SuperVOOC fast charging feature.
Based on our charging test, the battery already gets a 26% charge after 15-minutes then went up to 65% after 30 minutes. It took us around 1 hour and 25 minutes to have the device fully charged.
In a single charge, the battery on the A57 can last up to 2 days with moderate use and if you’re a heavy user would last a day.
Under the battery settings, there are some few options you can enable to conserve more battery on the device like power saving mode, super power saving mode, high performance mode, and optimized night charging that controls the charge speed at night to avoid overcharging.
There’s no 5G support on the A57 but still can work with network frequency bands from 2G, 3G, 4G and 4G LTE. It can house two sim cards and the expandable MicroSD card for added storage at the same time.
What We Like
- Design
- Impressive Sound Quality
- Vibrant Display
- Long Battery Life
- 33W SuperVOOC
- ColorOS UI
- Price
What We Want
- AMOLED Display
- Ultra-wide Lens
- Updated Entry-Level Chipset
Conclusion
It’s one of the best affordable phone in the market today as the recommended retail price for the OPPO A57 64GB variant will be at PHP8,999 only while the 128GB variant at PHP10,999 now available in all OPPO stores nationwide and official e-commerce stores on Lazada and Shopee.
Aside from the price, the OPPO A57 is an upright entry-level phone that offers some good built-in features. The glowing design is very appealing, longer battery life, decent camera lens, and clear vibrant display.
Now, if you’re looking for a phone to watch or listen to any multimedia content then we will definitely suggest the OPPO A57 due to the amazing sound quality it provides.
The user interface is very intuitive with a slew of customization feature but sometimes there are instances that it slows down a bit but a few software upgrades might solve this problem.
I wish that OPPO should have equipped the A57 some of the recent entry-level chipset available in the market today instead of the Helio G35. And for the next generation of A57, I hope that they can add an ultra-wide lens on the rear camera.
In general, the OPPO A57 is a very nice all-around performing and budget-friendly smartphone and if you’re not too particular about the specs then by all means buy the OPPO A57.
Full Specifications
- PHP8,999 4GB+64GB, PHP10,999 4GB+128GB
- Glowing Black, Glowing Green
- 56-inch Colour-Rich HD+ Display
- A-Si Panel
- Cover Glass Panda MN228
- 60Hz Refresh Rate
- 480 nits up to 600 nits
- 8% Screen Ratio
- 96% Color Gamut
- 1612×720 pixels
- 269PPI Pixel Density
- MediaTek Helio G35, 8 cores up to 2.3GHz
- IMG GE8320 @ 680MHz
- LPDDR4X @ 1600 MHz, dual 16-bit channels
- eMMC 5.1 storage
- 4GB+64GB, 4GB+128GB
- SD 3.0 Phone Storage Card
- Rear: 13MP f/2.2 Main Camera, 2MP f/2.4 Mono Camera
- Front: 8MP f/2.0
- Video: 1080p/720p @ 30fps
- 5,000mAh
- 33W SUPERVOOC
- USB Type- C Port
- Fingerprint, Facial Recognition
- ColorOS 12.1
- Geomagnetic sensor, Light sensor, Proximity sensor, Accelerometer, Gravity sensor
- Network: 2G, 3G, 4G, 4G LTE
- Nano SIM Card
- GPS, BDS, GLONASS, Galileo, and QZSS
- Bluetooth 5.3
- 11 ac/a/b/g/n/
- WLAN 2.4G/WLAN 5G
- Wi-Fi Display and WLAN Network Sharing
- SBC, AAC, APTX HD, LDAC Audio Codecs
- 187g
- 74×75.03×7.99mm
