Oppo A7 with waterdrop notch design now in India, but is it worth the money?

Chinese smartphone maker Oppo has announced a new phone - Oppo A7 - in India. Oppo A7 originally unveiled earlier this month at its home turf. It comes at the price of Rs 16,990 and goes up on sale via Flipkart. On Flipkart, you can avail up to Rs 14,900 off upon exchanging the handset with your existing phone. But it depends on what phone are you exchanging it with. Apart from that, Axis bank users can avail an additional 5 per cent offer upon finalising the purchase using Buzz credit card. No cost EMI options starts at Rs 2,832 per month.

The key highlight of the handset, it flaunts a waterdrop notch design above the display. Over the last few months, ever since Oppo announced the F9 Pro, we have seen quite a few smartphones coming up with a new, waterdrop notch design in the market. This happens to be Oppo’s third smartphone to feature a similar notch after Oppo F9 and F9 Pro. In fact, Oppo has one more handset coming up next month - Oppo R17 Pro - featuring a waterdrop notch and in-display fingerprint reader.

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Its back flaunts what it calls mirrored texture casing for attractive design and premiumness. It weighs 168g and measures 8.1mm in thickness. Oppo A7 has two colour options: Glaze Blue, Glaring Gold. Inside is Qualcomm's Snapdragon 450 chip, 4GB RAM and 64GB expandable storage (up to 256GB via microSD). These kind of internal specs are highly surprising and certainly not expected given the price tag. The SD450 is a budget chip at the best. At Rs 7,999, Realme C1 packs the similar SD450 chip under the hood.

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But unlike Realme C1, you get twice the RAM and four times the internal storage. Whether it’s worth spending Rs 17,000 on the Oppo A7 is something we’ll find out once we put the handset to tests. For now, let’s quickly take a look at the rest of the features and hardware specs. Much like Realme C1, the Oppo A7 sports a 6.2-inch HD screen. It houses 13MP + 2MP dual rear cameras and a 16MP selfie camera. It packs a 4,230mAh battery under the hood.