MANILA - The front facing camera used to be seen as a smartphone’s secondary camera. But today, more and more smartphone brands are shifting the focus, literally, to the front.

Like many other brands, China's Oppo is betting on consumers who care more about great selfies than taking good snapshots.

On its mid-tier F7, Oppo packed the front camera with a huge 25 megapixel sensor and loaded it with AI features, which it says will ensure that users always get the best self portrait.

• OPPO debuts F7, promises AI-enhanced selfies

DESIGN AND SPECS

The F7 is a pretty good looking phone. Like most new releases, the phone features a screen with a 19:9 ratio. The F7 also sports a notch at the top, which houses the phone’s selfie camera.

Unlike some midtier phones however, the F7’s body isn’t made of glass and metal but of coated plastic. Despite that, it can hold its own against other phones in this price range in terms of aesthetics.

Our black (diamond black according to Oppo) review unit looked almost as good as the glass-backed and metal-framed white Zenfone 5 we reviewed earlier. You wouldn’t know just by looking at it that the F7 was made of acrylic instead of polished glass.

That said, the shining shimmering back of the F7 is also an avid collector of fingerprints and smudges. Since it’s plastic, it’s also more susceptible to scratches, so you will definitely need a case or protector for this phone.

On the back is a 16MP camera with a bright f1.8 lens and the phone’s fingerprint sensor. Unlocking the phone with your index finger is easy and fast. The F7 also features “Facial Unlock” which I found to be equally fast even when the angle isn’t optimal.

With 4GB of RAM, you also won’t notice any lag with memory-hungry apps, and with 64GB of storage, you can pack the F7 with a lot of apps, photos, video, music and other files.

If you like playing demanding games like PUBG, this phone won’t let you down. The F7’s Mediatek Helio P60 chipset is more than capable of handling large apps and is a decent alternative to Qualcomm’s midrange offerings. The F7 also has a feature that accelerates games so

It would have been better though if the F7 came with a USB-Type C port which allows faster charging compared the older micro USB standard. Other midrange phones like the Zenfone 5 and the Huawei P20 Lite already use Type C connectors, after all.

CAMERAS

While other midrange smartphones like the P20 Lite and the Zenfone 5Q now feature dual cameras front and back (for a total of 4 cameras), Oppo has opted to keep it simple on the F7 by using just a single camera on each side.

Despite having just one camera up front, the F7 took pretty good selfies. As mentioned earlier, the Oppo F7’s front shooter packs 25MP under the hood, which so far is the biggest for any smartphone. The closest competitor would be the Vivo V9 released last year, which uses a 24MP sensor for selfies.

If you want a good profile pic but don't want to fiddle with image editing apps, you’ll be glad to know that Oppo put 6 levels of beautification on the F7’s selfie shooter.

But you can also just turn on its AI that lets algorithms determine how to make a user look his/her best. Video selfies also benefit from instant beautification if you want to go on video chats or do live feeds on social media.

The rear camera is no slouch either, at least for phones in this price range. Colors are more saturated than usual, which will probably appeal to a lot of millennials. But if you want even greater saturation, you can turn on the F7’s "Super Vivid" mode to really make the colors pop.

Be warned though that turning on Super Vivid will also cost you the finer details of your shot.

The Oppo F7 also takes good HDR photos. High contrast environments are not a problem for the phone. However, just like with the Super Vivid feature, details get lost in the image processing.

Which brings us to the the main issue with the F7’s rear camera. The pics look good on the phone, and even on an HD computer monitor. But zoom in 5x or so and you’ll see that it doesn’t capture a lot of the finer details.

But that’s probably asking too much for a phone in this price range, and which is obviously meant to cater to people who like taking photos of themselves. If you care about selfies more than anything else, this smartphone may just be the gadget you need.