Oppo F19 quick review: Stylish, long-lasting phone under ₹20,000

Oppo F19 is a balanced smartphone targeting budget shoppers who want a stylish-looking phone with a lasting battery. These are specific requirements but has many takers.

Oppo expanded its F-series with three new additions in 2021 and the F19 is the most affordable of the lot. Making sure Oppo has covered all corners of the popular price range, the F19 appeals to the budget shoppers who demand a stylish phone. Oppo F19 has a balanced set of features, playing mostly on Oppo's strengths. The smart pricing of the F19 is icing on the cake.

Oppo F19 is priced at Rs 18,990 for 6GB RAM and 128GB storage model, but consumers get two colour choices Prism Black and Midnight Blue. As you'll see from the images below, our review unit flaunts the gradient blue shade, which fades to silver towards the top.

Here's a quick review of F19 if you are considering buying the phone.

Design

Oppo F19 carries the signature Oppo design, akin to its premium siblings. But there are certain elements that set the F19 apart. The F19 features a glossy back panel with a rectangular camera module like the one we've seen on the F19 Pro series. The sides of the back panel are curved to offer better grip, but it does so with struggle as the smooth panel is slippery. Our strong recommendation is to put on the free silicon case, which doesn't hide that gradient finish on the back.

What's most interesting about the F19 is that it packs a 5,000mAh battery, but it is super slim to hold and the weight distribution is done excellently. Both in portrait and landscape orientation, the phone doesn't give away the feel of a heavy phone. Evidently, the phone offers a 3.5mm jack like its elder siblings and has a USB Type-C port for charging.

Oppo F19 borrows the strong design element from Oppo's stable, a gift for a smartphone even in the sub-Rs 20,000 price range.

Display

Oppo F19 packs a 6.43-inch Full HD+ AMOLED display, which renders rich colours. The brightness can be put to challenge under direct sunlight, but it didn't pose much of an issue as it did not affect readability as much as it did the colours.

Oppo F19 packs an in-display fingerprint scanner, which works efficiently and lands you in home screen in a fraction. With wet fingers, however, the fingerprint scanner is rendered useless, but that's the case with just about any phone. That is when the snappy face unlock comes in real handy.

The display also houses a punch-hole camera on the top left corner, which is mostly out of the way in any use case. The chin, however, can be bothersome at first, but you'll eventually get over it and its existence won't matter much.

Camera

Oppo F19 features a triple camera setup on the back, which combines a 48MP primary snapper, 2MP depth and 2MP macro sensors, which is an average setup. On the front is a 16MP snapper. From our preliminary tests, we found the colours to be natural, but skin tones had some softening even with AI and Beautification features turned off. The portraits are able to capture great depth with accurate edge detection, even in indoor light settings.

The macro lens often requires good lighting to capture decent shots in close-up range. There's also Night mode in the camera, but we found the primary lens to shoot better details of cityscape as the artificial light enhancing takes away the naturalness of the dark sky. Also, the camera app takes time in the night mode to process the image. The camera app itself didn't feel snappy enough, which is an indication of average performance.

Performance

Oppo F19 is powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 662 chipset and runs ColorOS 11.1 based on Android 11. This is paired with 6GB RAM, which based on our brief time with the phone can make day-to-day tasks lag-free. The UI, however, isn't as snappy as the stock Android and then there's the weight of some pre-loaded apps too, which you might not need.

If your usage is limited to regular use, multimedia consumption and social media browsing, sans, core gaming, the F19 might be sufficient.

Battery

Oppo F19's battery has a lot of responsibility to carry the weight of the USP. The massive 5,000mAh battery is supported by 33W Flash Charge, which makes charging the phone less painful. As for battery life, we are expecting a day and a half's use from the F19, which is yet to be ascertained.