14 DAY TRIAL // Chinese company Oppo confirmed late last month that it would launch the R1 smartphone in India sometime in April, but it did not offer additional details on the exact release date.
Oppo has already launched a few other Android smartphone models in India and they seem to be popular enough to make the Chinese handset maker want to bring the R1 on the market faster than it was initially planned.
According to GadgetsToUse, Oppo R1 has already arrived in India and will be officially introduced sometime next week. If the information proves to be accurate, the Oppo R1 might go on sale next week as well.
Although no official details on the R1’s price tag have been disclosed yet, previous rumors claim that the smartphone will be available for purchase for around Rs 25,000 outright, which is about $400 or €295.
Word has is that Oppo R1 might hit shelves “unofficially” this week, but that remains to be seen. What’s certain is that the smartphone has just been delivered to Oppo India, according to some shipping documents that have recently leaked online.
Unfortunately, Oppo will have a hard time selling the R1 on the Indian market if it does not cut the rumored outright price to a more reasonable amount. The competition on the Indian smartphone market is pretty fierce especially in the mid-range segment.
Oppo R1 can be considered a mid-range handset that packs good hardware, but also features some downsides. One of these downsides is the fact that the R1 lacks microSD card slot for memory expansion and comes with only 16GB of storage.
It is also worth mentioning that the device will ship with Android 4.2.1 Jelly Bean operating system out of the box, which is rather old even for a mid-range smartphone.
The 5-inch capacitive touchscreen display is of IPS LCD quality and supports HD (720p) resolution. The good news is that it comes with Corning Gorilla Glass 3 coating.
The smartphone is powered by a quad-core MediaTek MT6582 processor clocked at 1.3GHz, which is accompanied by 1GB of RAM.
The phone also packs dual cameras (8-megapixel rear photo snapper and 5-megapixel front-facing camera). Another selling point of the Oppo R1 might be the fact that is comes with dual-SIM support.