OPPO's mobile phones have always been selling by taking photos, and this release of U3 is the first mobile phone with a special audio chip under OPPO. In addition to the large screen and mainstream camera, U3 looks like OPPO's pathfinder in the direction of video and audio omnipotence. What will happen to U3 moving in the other direction?
Specifications:
16.7 million colors 5.9 "1080p IPS LCD screen, 377ppi;
MT6752 processor, eight core Cortex-A53, maximum frequency 1.7GHz, 2GB RAM, 16GB expandable storage (maximum 128GB);
156.8×81×8mm，195g；
IMX214 13 million pixel rear sensor, F2.0 aperture, with LED fill light;
5 megapixel front sensor with LED fill light;
3100mAh built-in battery;
ColorOS 2.0.1 based on Android 4.4
Support GSM/TD-SCDMA/TD-LTE;
Support dual card and dual standby (card 1 is MicroSIM, card 2 is NanoSIM);
Support VOOC flash charging technology;
AKM AK4961 codec。
appearance:
When I just got this dark blue U3, I searched around the fuselage for the card slot for a long time, and almost removed the volume key. Finally, I put on my glasses and found a small opening in a very inconspicuous place on the upper left side of the fuselage, and finally I took a lot of effort to remove the plastic back cover.
The plastic back case of U3 is combined with the frame. After fastening, the whole body looks very beautiful. The gap between the back cover and the middle frame can not be plugged into hair. Even the USB interface at the bottom of the body is handled very well. The gap between the camera and the removable back cover is also very small. In general, U3 is definitely worthy of the word Seiko.
I really appreciate OPPO's way of doing this. At least it can reduce the number of openings around. I don't need to worry about using a card taking pin to take out the card. It's easy to insert and pull out memory cards, but will it cause the buckle to loosen due to too much disassembly? This is not clear at the moment, but U3 does not remove the back cover to replace the battery, so the frequency of removing the back cover will be absolutely low. In addition, the back cover of your Note 3 has been removed countless times, and it is still firm. OPPO with better workmanship should not make such low-level mistakes.
The feel of the U3 is very solid. The 5.9-inch screen naturally brings a huge body. The width of the U3 is slightly wider than that of the Note 3, but the length is much longer. 195 grams is also an absolute heavyweight.
Like the previous R1C, U3 also has patterns on the back of the fuselage, but the patterns on the back of U3 are grid shaped. The depth of the patterns will change subtly when viewed from different angles under light or sunlight. The frosted plastic on the back feels good and fine enough, but after being eroded by oil, the feel will inevitably be reduced.
There is a transparent strip on the top and bottom of the phone, which should be of no practical significance. It is purely to make the phone look better.
There is a pile of things on the top of the front. The white one is the front LED fill light. It is used for self taking. The bar earpiece has a little taste of Samsung The three touch buttons on the lower front have backlights. Unfortunately, the backlights are very, very weak, and the positions are not easy to find (you can see them on the back screen).
Do you have any questions about the projection of the back camera? Put on the original OPPO protective hard case, and smooth the camera in one second (it's almost weak and explosive with a pan). The workmanship of the protective case is as good as that of the mobile phone, but the pattern on the back is covered.
Screen:
U3, a 5.9-inch 1080p IPS screen, has excellent brightness and contrast performance. The backlight is relatively uniform, and there is no problem with the viewing angle. Even at a 45 ° angle, there is no whitening. The delicacy of 377ppi is not disgraced at the same price (of course, there is a lot of "machine" in higher resolution screens).
The screen is slightly cold, and there is a slight light leak at the power button, but it can only be seen when the pure black screen is displayed at the maximum brightness.
This screen is very affordable, at least not just a large screen.
Performance:
In the current 64 bit era, Qualcomm's Snapdragon 615 processor is basically crushed by the MT6752. Therefore, in addition to telecom customized computers, many manufacturers have chosen the MT6752 processor. At one time, the existence of the 6752 processor was extremely strong.
The U3 uses the MT6752 processor, which is no stranger to us. The eight core 1.7GHz full open is a small idea. When one or two cores are turned on, it can automatically "overclock" to 1.85GHz. The Mali-T760MP2 graphics processor also has enough performance to cope with the daily 1080p screen.
For performance, our test items include:
Pi;
RAR
Sunspider 1.0.2；
GFXBench；
3DMark；
A1 SD Bench。
Among these tests, 1 and 2 are mainly for CPU performance, 3 for browser performance, 4 and 5 for GPU performance, and 6 for memory performance.
From various scores, it can be seen that the performance of U3 is not weak after using 6752, but the problem lies in the pricing. The price of 3499 is even in the same field as its flagship N3. The Snapdragon 801 processor of the latter is undoubtedly more powerful (especially the graphics performance, which is much stronger), and can deal with multitasking or large games more easily.
If the performance is reflected in the smoothness of daily use, The U3 is quite good. The UI is quick and responsive, and the delay of the touch screen is very low. Whether in the APP or in the system UI, it can basically ensure full frame sliding. The experience can be said to be very excellent. Unfortunately, this should be a basic quality for mobile phones at this price. I wanted to brag about it, but I still want to avoid it.
Here we continue to criticize some industry cancer level applications by name - if there is any stuck in these apps, it is really not the fault of mobile phones.
photograph:
OPPO's mobile phones have always paid attention to taking pictures. No matter the price, IMX214 is the standard configuration of the whole series (of course, N3 uses a sensor with higher OV pixels). U3 also provides manual mode, HDR and OPPO's brand ultra clear image quality mode as usual.
Under the condition of good light in the daytime, U3 shows excellent photographic quality. The white balance of the shot is accurate, the contrast of the picture is appropriate, and the color is very beautiful. A very good balance is achieved between accuracy and pleasing to the eye. The overall picture details are very rich, and there is no trace of excessive sharpening. The noise control is excellent, and the focusing speed and imaging speed are both good, It also slightly improved the problem of over sensitive light measurement that was common in OPPO mobile phones before. The light measurement in the daytime is more stable, and the brightness of the picture will not change significantly due to slight movement.
In the daytime, the macro samples also maintain the excellent quality of ordinary samples. The nearest focusing distance of U3 is about 4~5cm. The virtual effect of the camera is good, and the wide-angle is large enough. However, during macro shooting, U3 will prompt that the focusing is successful, but in fact, the focusing fails.
In addition, the HDR function has also been improved. On the premise of maintaining the overall contrast and sense of hierarchy of the picture, the samples taken with the HDR function can give consideration to the details of dark and bright areas, and the synthesis speed is fast enough. However, after the HDR mode is turned on, the white balance will be slightly warmer, which will not affect the overall appearance.
In the actual night scene photography, I prefer to use the manual mode of U3 for simple reasons: U3 can take better photos in the manual mode, because OPPO's mobile phone is not only U3, but also very sensitive to light measurement when taking photos, and can obtain more stable exposure when using the manual mode.
As a result, this time, the night scene photo shooting did not use the U3 night scene mode but switched to the manual mode. The exposure compensation was set to between - 0.7 and - 1.2, and the white balance, shutter speed, sensitivity, and focus were all set to automatic. In this way, the exposure of the photos taken would be more accurate (the exposure would be brighter when using the night scene mode), and the picture details would also be better.
In the night photos, The color performance of U3 has a good restoration to the actual situation. It can well represent the real environment color situation during shooting. The picture inevitably has noise, but the noise impact on the picture is still within an acceptable range. The details of the enlarged picture are OK. After all, in order to ensure the film rate in the handheld state, the shutter speed cannot be too slow, The U3 has no optical anti shake, so it is good to have this performance. The overall film rate and film quality will be higher than the Note 3 currently used by the user.
music:
U3 seems to be OPPO's first mobile phone to use a special audio chip for a long time. This time, AKM's AK4961 is used. The appearance rate of this audio chip seems to be slowly increasing (it was also available on Nubia Z7 before, but Nubia could boast about this chip at that time), The DA and AD of Sony's latest high-end recorder PCM-D100 use AKM chips, but the AKM chip in the D100 is not AK4961.
It's strange to say that some mobile phone manufacturers now use an audio chip and are eager to paste it on the packaging box and body and then call it "top class" when it is released (but the actual effect is far from good), while U3 just uses simple words on the official website to explain that U3 has put a chip in it, As for whether this is OPPO's lack of confidence or not, I am too lazy to explore it here.
This is the AK4961 product introduction PDF of AKM Company. For the full text, please click → 。
Back on the U3 itself, the AK4961 positioning is low-power. The CODEC with audio/voice DSP has a maximum signal to noise ratio of 110dB and a minimum noise level of - 119dBV. As a DAC, it supports a maximum sampling rate of 192kHz and a bit depth of 24Bit. It looks good, but how much strength can be exerted on mobile phones?
First of all, the thrust of U3 is not large, slightly larger than the average value of the mobile phone, but not much. The thrust of U3 is quite different from that of vivo X5 Max and Meizu MX4 Pro, so the specific auditions are mainly limited to small earphones, so here is another legitimate reason to let our own W4R play (laugh). In addition, there are also recent personal favorite Dayenko Titan 1.
The first impression of U3 is that the sound is very clean, the bottom noise control is excellent, the low-frequency diving and high-frequency extensibility are good for a mobile phone, the overall sound direction will not be modified too much, and the performance of voice and instruments has a great relationship with what earphones to match, for example, when using the W4R, the voice will be thicker and more stable, The instrument is relatively dark. When using Titan 1, the instrument is slightly brighter, but it will not be enchanting (this has much to do with the earphone). Like the previous evaluation of vivo Y29L, it has a relatively durable and pleasant sound. When listening to music, it has a good degree of separation, and has the attribute of "what earphone makes what sound". Of course, the earphone cannot be pushed hard.
In terms of analytical power, U3 is definitely inferior to Vivo's X series mobile phones and MX4 Pro. The analytical power of U3 is at a "just" level, which is more than enough to enjoy popular music, but it is not enough to appreciate the works of the Twelve Girls' Orchestra with more instrument ensembles. Compared with Nubia Z7, which uses the same chip, The quality of U3 should be better, and the overall sound maturity should be higher than that of Z7. In short, the sound quality of U3 is "good enough", not "particularly good".
System:
ColorOS 2.0.1 customized based on Android 4.4 is really familiar to us. After accepting the overall setting, the system is actually quite easy to use, with all the functions needed, fluency can also compete with HTC Sense, and the animation effect is very exquisite. It can be seen that OPPO really has a lot of thought on the system, The overall functionality is almost the same as that of previous OPPO mobile phones.
Because U3 is a large screen mobile phone, OPPO naturally adds the same screen multi task function to U3, which is similar to that on Samsung mobile phones. It divides the huge screen into two parts. Different programs are run at the top and bottom at the same time. In addition to the pleasant sense of operation of the large screen, it is quite natural to talk about WeChat or QQ while watching videos, but for supported applications, Not all apps support it. For example, the MX Player and Bilibili client installed separately cannot run in this mode. I hope OPPO can bring us more applications that support this mode. After all, this is a very good function.
Endurance:
The 3100 mAh battery is basically large enough for a 5.9 inch mobile phone, and the U3 and OPPO's VOOC flash charging technology make it easy to guarantee the endurance. With the flash charging charger, the U3 can charge the battery from 2% in about an hour and a half.
In the standard endurance test, when the flight mode is turned on, the screen brightness will remain the highest throughout the whole journey. First watch the 1080p video for one hour, then turn off the screen for one hour, play music at 50% volume with headphones, and finally play 30 minutes of large-scale 3D games with the highest screen brightness.
The power consumption is shown in the figure above.
The remaining power is 73%, which is a good performance. I am satisfied that despite the use of the AKM audio chip, only 3% of the power is used after playing music for an hour. That is to say, if the U3 is used as an MP4 in daily life (one of the important uses of large screen mobile phones), Listening to music for a long time and watching videos for an hour or two will not have a serious impact on the endurance. In addition, from the overall performance, a single charge of U3 can guarantee a 2-day endurance, and the power saving mode will also fight for a 3-day endurance. However, the specific endurance is also related to factors such as network conditions.
Summary:
Before knowing the price, combined with OPPO's usual pricing strategy, I estimated that the price of U3 might be around 2999. After playing around for a while, I thought, well, the price of 2999 should be pretty good. After all, if there is a discount in the later period, it would be a good choice to spend about 2500 to buy this machine out of liking the big screen, Because at least the screen performance and the whole machine workmanship are quite excellent, the system is also very smooth and easy to operate, and it is also very nice to match the 5.9 inch large screen with multiple tasks on the same screen. The unique back cover design and very good endurance are also worthy of praise. The excellent photo taking effect is a big highlight. On the whole, U3 has no shortcomings, and all aspects are fairly balanced.
Finally, the price came out, 3499 yuan.
When the dislocated chin is held back to its original position, the U3 is picked up again. In fact, if OPPO can insert a Snapdragon 801 processor into the U3, the 3499 is also acceptable. Unfortunately, the U3 processor is not 801, but only MT6752 at the middle end.
In general, the appearance, workmanship, photographing, system fluency, screen performance and music playing effect of the U3 are quite good, and the performance is just a drag on the GPU. However, the price of the 3499 really makes the U3 very, very awkward. With an additional 500 oceans, it is our flagship N3, which has better performance and a higher pixel camera; If you want to have both music playing effect and giant screen, the current price is 2998 yuan. The vivo Xplay 3S with 2K screen, Snapdragon 801 processor and even fingerprint recognition is an insurmountable mountain; In terms of international brands, this price is also just right for HTC ONE M8, Samsung Galaxy S5, LG G3 and other strong competitors. The new direction chosen by U3 seems really difficult to go.
So here comes the question: Is U3 a good mobile phone? Yes.
But it's just too expensive.
advantage:
Large screen with bright colors and excellent quality;
The system runs smoothly;
The machine body is of excellent workmanship and unique appearance design;
The photo taking effect is increasingly excellent, and the ultra clear picture quality function is quite practical;
Sound quality is good;
The split screen multitasking function has good practicability.
Disadvantages:
The split screen multitasking function supports too few APPs;
Performance is weak compared with competitors at the same price;
Too expensive.
