14 DAY TRIAL // Android fans in India, brace yourselves, as another Chinese handset maker plans to introduce a high-end smartphone in your country, Oppo. The company announced the N1 Mini a few months ago, but did not share any details on availability and specs.
Luckily, we recently spotted the Oppo N1 Mini in Malaysia where it’s now available for purchase for around $440 (€325) outright. Even though the Chinese company silently launched the smartphone in Malaysia, this will not be the case for India.
The folks over at BGR India have just been invited to an Oppo event in New Delhi, which is scheduled for August 11. Although there’s no mention of Oppo N1 Mini, we can safely assume that this is the smartphone that will be officially introduced in the country.
Unfortunately, we have no clue on what possibly could be the outright price of the Oppo N1 Mini in India, but we doubt it will be much higher than the Malaysian version.
Currently, the standard Oppo N1 smartphone is selling in India for Rs 32,990 ($535 / €400), so we can expect the Chinese company to price the Mini version much cheaper given the lower specs.
For example, the Oppo N1 Mini sports a much smaller 5-inch IPS LCD HD (720p) capacitive touchscreen display, whereas the N1 boasts a huge 5.9-inch full HD (1080p) display.
Unfortunately, Oppo previously announced that the N1 Mini would ship with Color OS 1.4, which is based on Android 4.3 Jelly Bean operating system. This a major downside for a high-end smartphone given the fact that KitKat is available for OEM since so long ago.
Hardware-wise, the Oppo N1 Mini is quite decent, but only if priced accordingly. The smartphone is equipped with a 1.6GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor, an Adreno 305 graphics processing unit and 2GB of RAM.
The handset packs only 16GB of internal memory and there’s no microSD card slot for storage expansion. On the positive side, the Oppo N1 Mini comes with an impressive 13-megapixel swivel camera that can shoot 24-megapixel ultra HD pictures. The phone’s camera features autofocus, LED flash, 1/3.2'' sensor, rotating lens, HDR and full HD (1080p) video recording.
It does not offer dual-SIM capability, but it comes with LTE support, as well as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, USB on-the-go and GPS with A-GPS.
Oppo N1 Mini lack FM Radio function as well, and it’s powered by a 2140 mAh battery, which has yet to be rated by the manufacturer.