BAIDIYU Case for Oppo A15 Phone Case, Mirror-faced Smart Flip Protective Shell, Full Protection, Cover Case for Oppo A15.(Silver)

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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. 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. 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%).

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.. 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. The Oppo A15 comes with ColorOS 7.2 out of the box, which is a custom skin running on top of Android 10. It’s a reasonably clean and smooth take on Google’s OS, albeit one that suffers from garish icons and somewhat jumbled menus. Around the front are some fairly chunky bezels by late 2020 standards. The phone’s forehead and chin, in particular, are larger than we’ve grown accustomed to. Meanwhile, a teardrop notch makes the phone feel a little dated at a time when hole-punch notches have become more the norm in the budget sector. The culprit is the humble MediaTek MT6765 CPU, with a paltry 3GB of RAM supporting it. A Geekbench 5 multicore score of 930 is very low, even when compared to other budget phones.

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. While it’s tempting to consider such a cheap, solidly built phone from this dependable brand, it’s worth separating price from value. Put simply, there are far better phones available for the same – or just a little more – money, including the Moto G8 and the Oppo A5 2020. 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.

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. 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.

A super-cheap phone that comes with compromises

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.