Can the Oppo A15 pull off this delicate balancing act, or has it trimmed too much of the fat? Design It can be a little annoying, too, such as with the inability to uninstall apps directly from the home screen. Having to go into the Settings menu to show your remaining battery percentage is a persistent bugbear of ours, too. It gets relatively bright (for the price) at 480nits, and the colors are reasonably balanced too. But the screen’s level of sharpness doesn’t do media content any favors. Still, ColorOS is a suitably customisable UI, so you can tweak things to a reasonable degree of satisfaction. There isn’t much in the way of bloatware either, and Google’s Chrome, Calendar and Gmail apps handle their respective duties in place of inferior alternatives. Battery life

Oppo Mobile UK managing director Kevin Cho claims that the Oppo A15 has been “designed with users’ social networking and entertainment needs in mind”, which explains the presence of a large 6.52-inch IPS LCD screen. Our phone cases are moulded for your phone so you know it will fit like a glove. There are cut-outs in all the right places, so you won’t have to take the cover off when it’s time to charge it up or you want to snap a selfie. Made from high-quality materials, they’re durable to stand up to daily use. Just below this is a physical fingerprint sensor, which is another sign that this isn’t a premium phone. It is both reasonably fast and reliable, however, which is important. The Oppo A15 comes with an ostensible triple camera setup, featuring a primary 13-megapixel lens supported by a 2-megapixel macro and a 2-megapixel depth sensor. An hour of Netflix streaming with the screen set to full brightness sapped between 5% and 8% in our tests – which is weirdly variable, but generally pretty strong. The Sony Xperia L4 lost 12% under the same circumstances, while the A15 also pips the likes of the Honor 9A (which lost 8%) and the Realme 5 (on 9%).The Oppo A15 is powered by a 4,230mAh battery, which is ample for a phone at this end of the market. You’re unlikely to be indulging in hours of gaming given that humble processor, and even if you’re a total video-streaming hound, the 720p output shouldn’t prove too taxing. Either way, the onus here is wholly for that main sensor to come good. In general, evenly lit conditions, the results are just about acceptable given the low price tag. There’s a reasonable balance to shots, with Oppo’s customary natural color science. It’s worth noting that the Nokia 3.4 and the Alcatel 3L both squeeze in an ultra-wide lens – although it’s fair to say that cheap ultra-wides are never particularly great. With that in mind, the argument for a single, decent wide lens is strong at this end of the market. The rear of the device is a largely featureless expanse of plastic, shiny right up to the point at which it will be covered with greasy fingerprints. Your eye will probably be drawn to the square camera module in the top-left corner, which is framed by a faux-metal surround.

One of the areas in which the Oppo A15 does deliver is battery life. A fairly large 4,230mAh unit serves those modest components well, happily taking you into a second day of use before needing a top up..

Reviews

Consider the older Oppo A5 2020 with its Snapdragon 665, which scored 1,301. Or, to use a contemporary of the Oppo A15’s, the Nokia 3.4, which managed to hit 1,188. It just pips the Alcatel 3L on 847, as a result of that phone’s even less capable MediaTek MT6762. This is a familiar set up for the budget class – and, once again, the presence of that low-megapixel macro is hard to justify. Extreme close-ups look so grainy and ugly that we doubt many will use the Macro mode after their initial attempt. In moderate use, you’ll comfortably get through a full day on a single charge, and quite possibly through to a second. Media will take an extra chunk out of your battery life, but not as much as you might expect.