OPPO F27 Pro+ 5G review: durability takes centre stage

Lately, the sub-Rs 30,000 smartphone segment has witnessed some of the most exciting product launches. Whether it is the performance-oriented POCO F6 (review) and the Infinix GT 20 Pro (review), or the design-focussed Samsung Galaxy F55 (review) and Infinix Note 40 Pro (review), this segment has been buzzing off late. Hence, it becomes a tad difficult for any new phone to stand out from the crowd. However, OPPO has decided to pull the rabbit out of the hat with the all-new F27 Pro+ 5G, which is India’s first handset with an IP69 rating. If you are wondering what an IP69 dust and water resistance rating implies, I will explain it in detail later. But for now, you just need to understand that the brand is pitching this as “India’s first super rugged monsoon-ready smartphone.” Does the phone live up to these claims? Does it fair well as a daily driver? Does it make sense for an average buyer? I’ve answered all these questions and more. 

Verdict

If we were to design an ideal phone for ourselves, most of us would choose for it to look premium but still offer top-notch durability. OPPO F27 Pro+ manages to cover both these aspects. It also offers decent cameras with better image quality than most other phones in its price range. However, it feels slightly underwhelming as far as the chipset is concerned. If you want a phone that can survive torrential weather and frequent drops, this is the phone for you. But if your priority is performance, you should look elsewhere.

Design

For a phone that has been described as rugged and one that can survive drops, extreme weather, and harsh conditions, the F27 Pro+ 5G surely doesn’t look like a traditional ‘rugged phone’. Don’t worry, this isn’t me foreshadowing! I’m just saying that the handset looks elegant with its dual-tone finish at the back with vegan leather and siloxane coating. So elegant in fact, that it looks like it might be delicate too (which is surely not the case). The phone is available in Midnight Navy and Dusk Pink colours (I received the former but both variants are eye candies). The smartphone features a ‘Cosmos Ring’ camera design with a large circular module in the middle upper half at the back of the phone with two camera sensors, assisting LED support, and a PDAF sensor.

Unlike some of the other phones where the protruding camera sensor makes the phone wobble when kept on a flat surface, the camera module on the F27 Pro+ 5G is quite subtle and blends into the phone’s aesthetics really well. The handset measures 162.7×74.3×7.9mm and weighs 177 grams. With curved sides, a slim profile, and a lightweight design, the F27 Pro+ 5G is comfortable to hold with one hand but reaching the top corners with your thumb requires some stretching. Thanks to the vegan leather, the phone doesn’t slip out of hand easily.

Durability

The USP of the F27 Pro+ is its durability. With the IP69, IP68, and IP66 dust and water resistance ratings, the handset flies through all the usual challenges it’s subjected to. The company has shared that the phone comes with SGS certification, which ensures durability against drops and impacts through rigorous testing. The handset has also gone through Military Standard Testing, which evaluates the phone across five parameters: Functional Shock, Transportation Shock, Fragility, Transit Drop, and Crash Hazard Shock. The phone features the extremely durable Corning Gorilla Glass Victus 2 for scratch resistance and high durability for the glass, and also has chemical resistance, high-temperature resistance, and resistance against abrasion and low temperature.

The handset features heat-resistant glue, a new waterproof circuit, and a silicone sealing ring for essential components. The brand says it has implemented 10 upgrades to safeguard exposed parts of the smartphone, including the screen, USB port, SIM card slot pinhole, and openings for the microphone, bottom speaker, and earpiece speaker.

So you might not be extremely impressed if I told you that I exposed the phone to rain, showered it with sand, or kept it in the same pocket as my keys and it still came out unscathed. But what if I tell you that I dropped it from a staircase, kept it in my fridge, kept it in a pool for around half an hour, and even tried to deliberately scratch it (both the rear and display panel) using my car keys, and even then, it still worked and looked as well as it did when I pulled it out of the box for the very first time?

Display

The F27 Pro+ 5G offers a 6.7-inch display with a screen-to-body ratio of 93 percent. The panel offers FHD+ (2,412 x 1,080 pixels) display resolution with an impressive pixel density of 394ppi and a maximum refresh rate of up to 120Hz. Despite this being a 3D curved display, it offers a surprising amount of durability. The company claims that the phone’s panel is capable of surviving drops, scratches, compression, twists, chemical resistance, abrasion, high-temperature resistance, and low-temperature resistance tests. While it is tough to test the handset in all of these situations, the F27 Pro+ 5G impressed me with its wear-and-tear resistance, to a point where I never felt like it could be damaged in my daily usage. Having used cases on most phones I have used, this was a breath of fresh air for me.

As far as the display quality is concerned, the AMOLED panel offered vibrant colours but due to a peak brightness of 950 nits, the handset struggled with legibility under direct sunlight. In the same price range, there are several handsets that offer much better peak brightness. The phone comes with an optical fingerprint sensor, which is both convenient and secure.

As far as the curved nature of the display is concerned, I personally prefer flat panels but there is no denying the fact that the curved panels do look better in terms of design. With thin bezels around the display, the viewing experience offered by the F27 Pro+ 5G is on par with any capable handset in this price range. With a high refresh rate, the transition animations look smooth and scrolling is a fluid experience too. No complaints in this department. One great monsoon-friendly feature that the brand has included with the phone is Splash Touch, which lets you use the phone’s display with your fingers even if it has water on it. As this is an issue I’ve faced with many other handsets, OPPO gets my thumbs up for this inclusion. The feature consistently works well and for Delhi-NCR monsoon, it is a godsend.

Cameras

The OPPO F27 Pro+ 5G features a 64MP primary shooter (6P lens) with an f/1.7 aperture, a field-of-view of 81 degrees, autofocus support, and an open-loop focus motor. This is assisted by a 2MP portrait camera (3P lens) with an f/2.4 aperture, a field-of-view of 89 degrees, and with fixed-focus.

The phone’s default camera app offers Pro, Video, Photo, Portrait, Night, Extra HD, Pano, Slow-Motion, Time-Lapse, Dual-View Video, Sticker, and Text Scanner modes. There is also an AI-assisted Flash Snapshot feature that allows the handset to click clearer and more detailed images of moving subjects. The brand claims that it excels at capturing high-quality portraits even in low-light conditions. This is not a dedicated mode as such and acts in the background to provide you with better images. In my experience, I didn’t find the feature to work that well with moving subjects. Shots clicked in the dark were decent but not particularly impressive.

The phone notably makes use of some AI features that help you make fixes/edits to the original photos with ease. The OPPO F27 Pro+ 5G offers AI Eraser and AI Smart Image Matting features. The former lets you get rid of unwanted subjects from your photos after you have already clicked them while the latter lets you crop out subjects from your photo for use elsewhere. I found the AI Eraser tool to be a hit-and-miss. While in certain photos this feature worked almost magically, in some others, it struggled to produce a decent shot.

However, this is a well-known issue with AI erasing tools available on most modern phones. The AI Smart Image Matting feature on the other hand worked really well and allowed me to pull out subjects from my photos effortlessly.

The front-facing 8MP camera sensor is also helped with the use of AI as there is a dedicated Portrait Retouching feature that helps you improve the quality of your selfies. This feature lets you retouch your facial features to make them look better, but I’m not a big fan of tinkering with original photos in such a substantial manner. However, those of you who like to look social-media ready at all times might appreciate this feature more. Check out the camera samples I clicked from the phone below.

Daylight

In the daylight shots, the handset managed to click pretty decent shots with a good amount of detail and colour accuracy. While many recent phones boost the colours to a point where the images look unnatural, the F27 Pro+ delivers precise and true-to-life colours and preserves details well. One issue that I noticed with the handset while capturing images in daylight was that it struggled with capturing outlines in certain cases. I compared the phone’s daylight shot with that of the Vivo V30e and the F27 Pro+ managed to deliver a more detailed and colour-accurate shot as you can see below.

In the portrait shot, both the F27 Pro+ and the V30e ended up blurring the backgrounds quite aggressively but here too, the OPPO handset consistently clicked more detailed shots and better skin tone than its Vivo counterpart.

Low light

In the low-light/night scenarios, the handset didn’t present any banding issues. As this issue plagues even some of the better camera phones, it is good to see that you don’t experience it with the OPPO handset. However, the downside here is that the phone struggles with capturing details in low-light scenarios (in comparison to some higher-priced handsets). As a result, some of the dark areas end up as dark patches in your pictures. However, in this price range, I compared the phone with the POCO F6 and the OPPO handset consistently produced better results in low-light situations. You can see the direct comparison below.

I even compared the phone with Galaxy F55 and V30e in low-light conditions and the OPPO handset’s pictures were more detailed each time.

Selfies

While the selfie camera can capture facial details well, it struggles in portrait shots. The edge detection offered by the OPPO handset was not particularly impressive in the portrait mode. While the F27 Pro+ does a good job at capturing skin tones, the edge detection was hit-and-miss. I compared the phone’s selfie camera with the one on Galaxy F55 and again, the skin tones and details were still better on the former’s camera sample.

Video

The F27 Pro+ is capable of recording videos in 4K resolution at 30fps and the video quality on offer is pretty good. My only gripe in this department was that despite the presence of OIS, the phone could not manage to record stable videos when shooting with hand. 

Performance and software

OPPO F27 Pro+ 5G is powered by an octa-core MediaTek Dimensity 7050 chipset with a maximum frequency of 2.6GHz, assisted by ARM Mali-G68 MC4 GPU. While this is a capable processor, it seems like an underpowered choice for the price segment as we already have Snapdragon 8s Gen 3-powered POCO F6, MediaTek Dimensity 8300-powered POCO X6 Pro 5G, and Snapdragon 7s Gen 2-powered Realme 12 Pro+ in the same price bracket. The OPPO F27 Pro+ 5G is available in two configurations – 8GB+128GB and 8GB+256GB. The handset also offers 8GB of extended RAM to help it deal with some of the more demanding tasks better. With UFS 3.1 storage, the handset offers good read and write speeds. In the benchmarks, as you might expect, the reliable MediaTek Dimensity 7050 did well but it could still not match the likes of the POCO F6.

As you can see, the POCO F6 dominates in any performance benchmark with its extremely capable Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 chipset. While the OPPO F27 Pro+ 5G puts up a decent fight against the Vivo V30e, the latter performs better in all key parameters. While this means that the Vivo and POCO handsets will handle more demanding tasks efficiently and offer you more horsepower, I can share that in my usage, the OPPO handset did really well. While playing games or multitasking, I didn’t face any stutter issues or random app crashes, which is always a good sign. The handset didn’t present any heating issues either.

As far as software is concerned, the OPPO F27 Pro+ 5G runs ColorOS 14 (Based on Android 14) out of the box. I would like to point out that the phone comes with a lot of pre-loaded apps (73 to be precise). Although some of these are essential apps, I personally prefer when a handset allows me to curate the apps I want to choose from scratch. The brand is offering 3 years of OS upgrades and 4 years of security features, which is fairly standard in this price range.

The F27 Pro+ offers an AI LinkBoost feature that intelligently identifies the scenarios and switches the network for stability, keeping you connected without disruption. Overall, the handset comes with a nice set of features that can help improve your user experience.

Battery life

The F27 Pro+ 5G ships with a 5,000mAh battery with 67W SuperVOOC Flash fast charging support. In the PCMark battery benchmark test, which evaluates the time it takes for a smartphone’s battery to drain from 100 percent to below 20 percent at 80 percent screen brightness level, the handset lasted 10 hours and 46 minutes.

In this price segment, it is towards the lower side. In our charging test, the phone took 48 minutes to charge from 20 percent to 100 percent. In comparison, the POCO F6 is considerably faster but the V30e is slower to refuel fully.

Final verdict

In some ways, the F27 Pro+ is quite an easy recommendation. The handset features a head-turning design, a slim body, a pretty good curved display, and durability features that make it the perfect companion for someone who lives an active lifestyle. It also offers impressive camera performance. However, on the other hand, at this price, you can get phones that offer better performance and battery backup.

OPPO F27 Pro+ changes the way you use your phone as you don’t need to slap a case or screen protector on it. If you accidentally leave the phone behind in the pocket of your jeans before it goes through a washing machine, you should still find your phone to be working just fine after the wash cycle. You can use it in the rain without wiping the droplets off your display and you can even wash it clean. These are things you can’t do with other phones. That’s why choosing the F27 Pro+ is either a very straightforward decision for you or it doesn’t make any sense. There is hardly any room for confusion.   

Editor’s rating: 7.5 / 10

Reasons to buy:

• Attractive lightweight design with vegan leather back
• The first phone in India to feature IP69 dust and water resistance rating
• Decent AMOLED display offers a good viewing experience

Reasons not to buy:

• The processor could have been better
• The phone comes with too many pre-installed apps

Tested by Ujjwal Sharma / Aditya Pandey