OPPO A94 Review | Geek Lifestyle

Released about a week before the Holy Week holidays, the OPPO A94 comes at a great time when entry-level to low mid-tier smartphones are getting the limelight, especially in terms of specs and proper promotion.

Initially thought to be a gaming smartphone, it seems OPPO changed it up a bit on their official launch to portray the OPPO A94 to what we feel it more closely represents – an entry level smartphone that has a little bit of something for everybody.

Is it worth getting though? Find out here in our OPPO A94 Review!

Geek-sthetics

As an A-series smartphone from OPPO, we’re thoroughly pleased with how the Shenzhen-based tech giant approached the overall design for this smartphone. For a low mid-tier smartphone (comfortably sitting at Php 13,990), the OPPO A94 looks absolutely stunning! Sleek, thin and have all the sexy curves, this A-series feels it can go toe-to-toe with some of the more expensive mid-tier smartphones – heck even flagship level ones at that.

Utilizing a Liquid Crystal Coating, our OPPO A94 review unit is rendered in Fantastic Purple, a phone that subtly refracts light to Aurora Hues shifting from deep purple, lilac to eerie night-sky green. The paint gives this phone an amazing handfeel as well as it is not exactly super lustrous, but it’s not necessarily totally matte either.

Aside from this, the 7.8mm think phone has smooth 3D curved edges to make it far more sexy than it should be. This is one of the best-looking low mid-rangers out there in our opinion.

Binge-Watching Factor

The OPPO A94 has a large 6.43-inch Full HD AMOLED display. Yes, this one sports an AMOLED giving you better viewing experience versus other smartphones in this price point. Once upon a time, AMOLEDs were reserved for mid to flagship-level phones. It’s great to see the trickling down of technology so that a lot of people can get to experience better visuals and clarity when they watch their favorite shows.

The OPPO A94 has a max brightness of up to 800 nits, which gives is ideal especially when you need to use your phone outdoors. Audio wise, the device can get pretty loud despite it having only one speaker output.

This combo proves great especially for gaming.

Gaming Prowess

The OPPO A94 is powered by a very decent MediaTek Helio P95, a chipset that we’ve seen first with the OPPO Reno 3 Pro. While it’s not necessarily a new chipset, this 12nm SoC can support most mobile games and play them quite decently. The large 8GB of RAM and 128GB of Storage also helps support the otherwise dated SoC.

We’ve tried it on a couple of today’s most popular mobile games like Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, League of Legends Wild Rift, Call of Duty Mobile, Asphalt 9 and even on more demanding titles like Genshin Impact.

For mobile MOBA’s, the OPPO A94 works like a charm. Able to put out consistent framerates at high graphical settings while keeping temperatures to a very manageable range. This smooth gameplay experience extends to Call of Duty Mobile and Asphalt 9. The only game that faced quite a bit of a challenge to run would be Genshin Impact. On default, the phone clocks the game graphics to its low setting. We suggest going a bit further and putting everything at lowest settings possible just to get a better gameplay experience.

Geek Photo Capabilities

For a low mid-tier smartphone, the OPPO A94 has some killer optics. This is the reason why we felt that even softly branding the OPPO A94 as a “gaming phone” is somewhat of a misnomer. To us, the OPPO A94 is a far more well-rounded smartphone for the budget-conscious person and the camera setup, filters and programs are the reason why.

First off, the OPPO A94 utilizes 48MP Quad Ai camera module with a 48MP wide camera, an 8MP Ultrawide camera, a 2MP depth sensor and a 2MP Macro being able to shoot up to 4K videos at 30fps. On the flipside, the phone has a 32MP selfie camera that can shoot 1080p videos at 30fps.

For a low-mid-tier phone, this setup is quite impressive as it gives you enough power to take surprisingly amazing photos and videos especially if you have decent lighting.

The OPPO A94 also has a couple of new photo filters that really pushes the creative potential of your photos and some of these filters extend to video as well. Take the Ai Color Portrait mode as an example, this mode renders the background of the subject in black and white and only retains either specified color tones (in Red, Green, blue) or in full color mode. You can use this on the video front, as well. There’s also this mode called Dynamic Bokeh which creates memorable focal points for your photos (available in rear camera only) where the phone intelligently determines the background and renders it in a motion-blur kind of effect. This can add drama to an otherwise normal occasion – sometimes to funny degrees but that’s where your creativity comes in.

All in all, the photo and video capabilities of the OPPO A94 in our review allows one to be as expressive as they possible can. It’s a great first phone as well if you want to venture in content creation as the range of tools presented to you out of the box allows you to really hone-in and discover what kooky creative idea you may want to execute.

Everyday Reliability

While the OPPO A94 doesn’t have a ginormous battery, it does have an above-standard one standing at 4310mAh. And sure, the additional 310mah may not be as ground-breaking as it seems on paper, the additional bit of power can get you out of a tight spot when you need it. If you do need to top-up, the unit comes with a 30W Super-fast charger so you can have uninterrupted power all throughout the day.

As the unit is running on Android 11 via Color OS 11, the OPPO A94 ensures that you get a more optimized experience than those from previous generations. The Game Space launcher of OPPO is also made more seamless and intuitive because of the updated OS. Floating menus to perfectly block off calls and notifications so you can game unhindered is made absolutely discrete and unobtrusive.

OPPO A94 Review – Final Geek Lifestyle Verdict

The OPPO A94 is a decent phone to consider if you’re looking for a phone upgrade if you’re an entry-level smartphone user. The official SRP of the phone is at PHP 13,990 which is quite a bit, however, you are getting a thoughtfully crafted smartphone with enough power and polish that should deliver most of today’s demands.

For more info on the OPPO A94, do check out OPPO Philippines’ official social media page and their website.