Natural beauty of the starry night: OPPO R15 Starry Purple
At a media communication conference on March 19, OPPO officially showcased its first new product for 2018, the R15. It also shared the company’s development plan for this year.
SEE ALSO: Ideas and thoughts behind the new OPPO R15 colors
The saying that “fashion is a cycle” applies not only to the fashion industry but also to smartphones. Looking at smartphone designs for the last few years, polycarbonate has dominated smartphones priced within hundreds or one thousand yuan (up to $160), while aluminum alloy bodies were considered as “the best design” by brands for their flagship models. The glass side design that was once popular on the iPhone 4 is now employed by few brands in the industry.
However, in 2018, glass phone bodies became the major design for smartphones. “One-piece metal body” is almost an obsolete descriptor, becoming gradually replaced by “multi-color” and “wireless charging”. After achieving “extreme thinness”, smartphones are beginning to increase thickness and weight.
“Change with time” is what OPPO’s vice president Qiang Wu said about the company’s 2018 development plan during the media communication conference on March 19.
Unlike the OPPO R7, the hit R9/R9S, and the R11S of last year, the OPPO R15 comes with glass design on both sides of the phone. The R15’s body also features the gradient color effect, and a new color named Starry Purple.
OPPO has made some bold moves in its phone colors as seen its previous phone generations. The R15’s gradient color design is a technical extension of the starry night screen in the R11S, but this time, the design is also applied to the back of phone. Like Starry Purple, Dreamy Red also takes on the gradient color design and shows different color effects at different angles.
The transformation from black to purple is symbolic of a starry night born from the darkness, containing endless mysteries and depth. This design reflects the R15’s infinite possibilities in connectivity amid this digital era.
OPPO tapped “color master” Karim Rashid to design the R15 with the four designs, Starry Purple, Thermal Red, Snow White and Dreamy Red. Among them, only Dreamy Red and Starry Purple come with the gradient effect.
The OPPO R15 also comes in a Ceramic Black edition. According to OPPO, this edition has gone through 1,489°C forging, 19 processes and a 50-minute CNC, which also makes it the highest priced version of the R15 series.
The screen is a 6.28-inch, 19:9 Super-V Display OLED, with a screen-to-body ratio of 90 percent. The notch design at the top of the screen situates the front camera, speaker and optical distance sensor. According to OPPO, its system UI team has redesigned the visual presentation and navigation to offer a better immersive user experience.
The aluminum alloy frame is polished with a bright surface and is the same color as the phone body. The dual cameras are placed horizontally in the upper right at the back of phone next to the oval flashlight. A fingerprint detector is placed above the logo on the back. There is a 3.5 mm headphone jack at the bottom of phone, and the micro-USB connector is conserved.
The OPPO R15 offers two versions of the phone: the standard and the Dream Mirror editions, differing in the processors and the body processing method. The OPPO R15 standard version uses MediaTek’s Helio P60 launched this year, and the back side glass uses a 2.5D arc-edge transition. The Dream Mirror and Black Ceramic versions have the Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 and uses 3D curve design for the rear glass.
Both of the two versions are equipped with 6 GB RAM and 128 GB storage, and support VOOC flash charging. The Dream Mirror edition has a 3400mAh battery and the standard version has a 3450mAh battery.
The OPPO R15 standard version is priced at 2,999 yuan ($475); the Dream Mirror version (Dreamy Red) is priced at 3,299 yuan ($523), and the Black Ceramic version is priced at 3,499 yuan ($555). The R15 series will be officially launched on March 31, and will be available starting from April 1.
