A piece of news this week that isn’t related to CES, Oppo has a big new phone, and it’s big on saving money.
One of the obvious downsides with a big phone is they tend to come with a bigger price tag, especially if they have one of those big new full view screens that extend mostly from the top to mostly the bottom, but a new handset from Oppo appears to be changing things.
Announced this week and set for release shortly, Oppo’s first 4G handset for 2018 is called the A73, a smartphone that delivers a 6 inch screen offering Full HD+, the resolution that tells you you’re getting an 18:9 screen that stretches across the phone and cuts back on the bezels.
That’s a change for Oppo which has mostly been doing very, very, very good iPhone clones for some time, but is now killing the bezel and shifting design ever so slightly.
A big screen isn’t the entire package for the Oppo A73, with the big phone delivering 3GB RAM, 32GB storage, a microSD slot to expand this, and an eight-core processor with a variant of Android 7.1 on top.
Granted, that’s not the latest operating system, though it’s at least still quite good for Oppo, which has a tendency to release its iOS-inspired ColorOS Android with a slightly older version of Android. Barely a generation old (Android 8.0 hasn’t been out THAT long), Android 7.1 is actually a surprisingly good effort for the Oppo A73.
And the phone isn’t complete there, either, packing in a 16 megapixel front-facing selfie camera, a 13 megapixel rear camera, fingerprint unlock, a variant of facial recognition, a metal design, and a biggish 3200mAh battery, which should be good for at least a day of life.
The price is where it gets really interesting, however, with an outright price of $359 locally from JB HiFi, Officeworks, and The Good Guys this week, while a prepaid option will be available from Optus for $289.
Under $300 for a prepaid 6 inch phone is very compelling, as is the slightly over $300 for an unlock 6 inch phone, with the only obvious downsides here being no NFC (no Android Pay), no water resistance, and a slightly older version of Android.
But if you can live without those, you’ll find the Oppo A73 is available this week, and it has also been added to our comparison system so you can compare it to anything else you might have been considering.
