OPPO A96 Review 

About a month ago, Oppo launched the Oppo a96, and the tagline for this device is “a perfect choice”, signifying that it is a perfect device… but is it? In this video, we are going through everything there is to know about this device and all my observations from the few weeks that I have been using it. If you are new to the site, welcome, and if you are a returning viewer, welcome back. Be sure to bookmark my site and share, So more people can see this review and be informed about this device.

Alright, that is enough talk. Without further ado

OPPO A96 Unboxing

let us get into the Device unboxing, Starting with the unboxing, the items that come in the box are just about everything you would expect. Once you take out all the packaging and open the box, the first thing you see is the case that contains the sim ejector tool, the safety guide booklets, and, of course, the silicone phone case. The next thing in the box is the device itself in its pretty interesting design which we’ll get to in a bit. At the very bottom of the box is where you get the 33-watt fast-charging brick and type-c USB cord.

DESIGN/BUILD QUALITY

I have to say that when it comes to its physical appearance, the importance of a good-looking device was not lost on oppo at all. The oppo a96 comes in a very interesting design. This sunset blue color that I got the device in has a pretty nice twist to how it handles light with the nice blend of gold and blue colors on its back, and I was impressed by this design. Away from looks, I was also impressed by how this device felt in my hands. For a midrange device with a plastic frame and back, it feels pretty solid.

Oppo claims that the material used to design the a96 is scratch resistant and can handle whatever situation is thrown at it. – If you would like to see me test that out, leave your comments below and I’ll be doing that on Instagram. So, if I get enough comments below to test out the scratch resistance, we’ll be doing that over on Instagram. As for the durability of the device, while it might not be the most premium material on a smartphone, it does not feel like you are holding a cheap piece of plastic.

I really like the level of attention to detail that is paid to the build and design of this device to ensure that consumers get a relatively premium feel on their smartphone without necessarily overspending. Also, I think it is solid enough to withstand certain levels of impact and drop heights. On the body of the Oppo a96, you get all the standard features that you would expect.

Key Features

A 3.5mm headphone jack, a microphone, USB type C charging port, and speaker grills located at the bottom of the device. You also get a front facing speaker on top of the screen that offers you a dual speaker listening experience and the small punch hole selfie camera. On the left side, you get the sim tray and the volume rockers. On the right side, is where the power button sits and doubles as the fingerprint reader.

At the top of the device, you get another mic. On the back, you get the dual camera setup which we’ll get to in a bit, and of course, an LED flashlight, it’s also interesting to see how the camera bump looks like, it’s of course not too big but it’s not too small either. As the bow to tie all of these features together, the Oppo a96 has an IP5X dustproof rating, and an IPX4 water resistant rating. Couple this with its scratch resistant screen and durable build, and you have quite the rugged device on your hands.

Everything looks pretty well done on this device, however, I think the device was well-thought out and its a great addition to the already highly competitive market.

DISPLAY

The display of the Oppo A96 is an IPS LCD screen with a maximum refresh rate of 90 hertz and resolution of 1080 by 2412. At 6.59 inches, the screen comes with slim bezels, a screen to body ratio of 84% and 401 psi density. Considering the level of innovation and tech that has gone into smartphones in this midrange category, I think that having an LCD screen here is a bit of a let down. While the viewing and usage experience experience of the device is not bad, I did feel the difference between using the LCD display of the oppo A96 compared to other devices with AMOLED displays.

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Further, I also noticed that the device does not allow you to stream YouTube content in 4K. so, no matter the resolution of the video you are watching, you have it all capped at 1080p. On its own, however, the display is well-optimized for its LCD screen with how it handles contrast, colors, and everything in between. While we don’t get an AMOLED screen, oppo does offer pretty decent brightness on this device.

Naturally, the oppo A96 is designed to have a native max brightness of 480 nits, which is pretty bright, but you still get to set the brightness to be as high as possible, that reportedly extends the brightness to an even higher 600 nits. At this level of brightness, you do not have to worry much about not being able to use your phone in direct sunlight. After watching a couple of videos on this device, I’d say that it does a decent satisfactory job. But then again, we are in 2023.

AMOLED Display & PERFORMANCE

On paper, the oppo a96 offers a Qualcomm Snapdragon 680 4G chipset coupled with an Adreno 610 GPU that runs on Android 11 and Oppo’s ColorOS 11.1. it also comes with 8 gigabytes of RAM and internal storage of either 128 or 256 gigabytes. The unit that was sent to me came with internal storage of 256 gigabytes. These are pretty decent numbers for a midrange device, and also when you compare it to other devices in its price region.

While they are not the wildest performance specs you’ll see today, 8 gigs of RAM is quite a lot of RAM, and it is bound to give you just about everything you could need in terms of multitasking and high performance. The oppo a96 also comes with an expandable RAM that draws some power from the internal storage when needed. This is an interesting extra feature to have if you really intend to push the device to certain extremes. I put the oppo a96 to the test playing games and running different apps, and the phone held up really well. I was not sure what to expect with gaming on this device, but I definitely enjoyed playing games, and I never experienced any lag.

All the games ran smoothly through out the time I played the game. The one area I think suffered a tiny bit was graphics. For the graphics of the game, they were not as crystal clear as I would have wanted them to be. When I played call of duty with the device, it went straight to medium graphics by default. I did try to play at high graphics, and medium frame rate, and it still performed nicely. When I tried moving to the high frame rate on COD, the graphics automatically changed to low. That is to say that you can only use the high frame rate on low graphics with this device.

The Oppo A96 doesn’t have to be the fastest device, but if you are in the market for a device that will give you a satisfactory gaming experience without having to spend your life savings, the oppo a96 should definitely be on your list. As a sidenote, though, I can’t say how constant heavy usage would affect the performance of this device after a long time. I did notice that the device began to get a little warm after about an hour of constant heavy usage and gaming. I have to admit, though that I put the device through a lot of stress, going from one graphic intensive game to the next. Speaking of gaming, the oppo a96 also comes with a game assistant feature that helps you optimize your gaming experience to the fullest.

The feature is useful for both optimizing the processing power of the device for your games, and ensuring that you have an uninterrupted gaming session by muting calls if you have the feature turned on, and limiting background network usage. You can mute notifications and customize different options for what the game assistant does whenever you are gaming. The assistant is triggered automatically once you open again.

BATTERY & CHARGING

The battery capacity of the is device is the one feature that certainly gave me a huge shock. The battery on the oppo a96 is a 5000 milli-amp-hour battery. Generally, 5000AMH, -hours is already a lot of battery, but it is even more shocking how oppo managed to fit that into a device that is just 6.47 inches tall an 191 grams in weight. In reality, I have to say that this batter is definitely as big as oppo says it is. The battery of the oppo a96 lasted me more than a day on a full charge.

In fact, it was almost a challenge to kill its battery. I ran benchmark apps, played games, watched videos, and even eventually had to leave it playing one YouTube video after the other at full brightness, while the flashlight was on just to kill the battery. I don’t know how much of a heavy user you are, but I do think it is safe to say that you will be comfortable going about without your charger or worse, a power bank, with the battery performance of the oppo A96.

Unless you are always on your phone and using things like mobile data and hotspot, and running heavy applications, this phone should you an entire day and even more on a full charge. Maybe you can take your power bank if you’re going on 2 Days of only the A96’s battery usage. As for charging, oppo says that its 33-watt superpvooc fast charger that comes in the box should take the device from 0 to 50 percent in 26 minutes. Well, we did not fail to test it ourselves and the result was quite interesting. First off after the device died and I plugged it in, it started up by itself after a few minutes of charging. In the first 10 minutes of charging, the device went from 0 to 20 percent.

I had pretty high hopes for how it would perform, but it began to slow down after that getting to just 48% after about 30 minutes of charging. The device finally got to a full charge after just over an hour of charging with its 33-watt fast charger. Now, while you would expect it to charge faster, there are are a couple of things to consider. First off, this is a very big battery here, and for a 33-watt charger, it is a pretty decent charging speed. with the 48 percent that 30 minutes of charging gives you, you can be confident that it will last you long enough without dying with average usage. Also, normally charging speed depends on the current, voltage or power capability and where you are might be different and it may not always give you the same results like mine every single time so take this as an average.

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Camera Performance

Now, for those that are only or mostly concerned about the cameras on their smartphone I think the oppo A96 does a good job in terms of photography. The two cameras on the back of this device are designed to serve two different purposes. The main camera is a 50-megapixel camera, while the second is a 2-megapixel camera dedicated to the portrait mode of this device. The small hole punch on the top left edge of the phone screen houses a 16-megapixel camera. In order to access this 50MP setting, you actually need to go to the More section in the Camera Menu and click on Extra HD.

These days, the camera performance of a smartphone I more than just how many megapixels the brand has squeezed into the small sensors. Without proper attention to computational photography and processing, you’ll have a device with a 60-megapixel camera that cannot produce good photos. Thankfully, this is not the case with the oppo a96. Despite it being a midrange device, there is obvious effort in ensuring that the post processing done in-camera produces good-looking photos.

While it may not win an award as the best in the world, it does a very good job, especially when you compare it to other midrange devices that I have had the opportunity to test out. First things first, the selfie. I found selfie quality to be very sharp in good lighting. Good lighting being the operating word. Once it’s bright enough, you should get consistent results and in dimmer light, you may not retain some of that sharpness but it’s still sharp. Now, in comparison to portrait mode on the selfie side of things, I had no complaints.

It would simply blur the background and try to separate you from it as smoothly as possible, thanks to that extra 2MP camera. The A96 doesn’t necessarily have a macro mode but If you zoom in a lot, you should get decent magnified shots that can be creative looking. Taking portrait shots with the rear camera is nearly perfect, except for a few blur leaks around the subject which you may or may not be able to tell from afar, however, it’s still a smooth blur effect that it adds to the videos to separate you from the background You can go from 1X on the back camera up to 2X, 5X and a maximum of 10X. I did also like how it preserves text, for instance, here’s me going from 1X all the way to 10X and it can legibly read the font albeit a digital zoom.

Processing Power

You’ll have to appreciate the processing power on here. I also tested to see if I could explore macro with the zoom, just like I mentioned earlier. You can go really up close to capture as much detail and it would come out clearly with an almost natural saturation of color. The device does capture a lot of detail with its 50MP sensor as well in the clouds, in text and in texture and it’s also quite true to life which is something you’ll benefit from. For the night shots, I simply compared the normal shot to the night mode. These two images were shot at the same time. The one on the right side is night mode and it quite brightens the photo a lot. To a very considerable extent.

To some it might just be what they’re looking for in a night shot but some also want a more natural look. When it comes to the front video camera, I found that the same thing applies for pictures and videos. The brighter it is in your environment, the clearer the shots are and this sample also looked fair. The back camera does deliver the same amount of quality you’ll get with that sensor. First off, it can only shoot in 1080p and 720p and this 1080p footage on here looked quite good.

We tested it on the road, we tested it in areas with plants and it looked fair, we tested it with metal and just a random structure. One thing to also note is that you can zoom from 1X to 10X with video as well, the same way you can with pictures and I really like that the background blue is consistent and sharp. I guess that’s what you benefit from with a lens that helps with it. SECURITY As for securing your device, the oppo a96 comes with the standard three options of password or pattern, face unlock, and fingerprint unlock. All of these worked fine and I did not have any complaints at all. The fingerprint sensor is locked on the side of the device, directly on the power button.

I found the fingerprint unlock quite responsive than most that I have tried out. Usually, having your fingerprint reader on the power button is quite the gamble considering how thin the button is, and also with the many accidental touches that are bound to happen. Those aside, it performed very well. As for the face unlock, it is hard to decide which was more impressive, its reaction speed or just how quick it is to set up. It literally took me less than 30 seconds to set up the face unlock feature. I didn’t want to get my hopes up as a result of such a quick set up, but the face unlock feature did not fail at any time.

CONCLUSION

I believe that the oppo A96 is a good phone. It is not an overpriced device, and still, some of the features that have gone in here would easily compete with some flagship devices. While the device might have a couple of drawbacks, it manages to impress in other departments, and I think there is a good balance on both ends. One key thing that does it for me here is the battery life of the device. In fact, based on all you’ve seen, if that’s a deal maker for you, I’d recommend it based on the battery capability. Let me know your thoughts on the OPPO A96 Review , is there anything I’ve missed or you’ll like to know more about? Leave your comments below and I’ll be right there chatting with you guys.

you in the next one.