The Oppo A76 is the latest budget smartphone offering from the Chinese manufacturer Oppo. Coming in at around AED 499, it aims to provide good value for money with its stylish design and decent specs. This review will examine the A76 to see how it stacks up in the competitive budget smartphone space.
Design and Build Quality
The Oppo A76 features an attractive design with a glossy plastic back panel with a gradient color effect. The model I reviewed was the Glowing Blue version, which shifts between shades of blue and purple depending on how the light hits it. The back panel curves smoothly to meet the metal frame, giving the phone a slim and seamless look.
Despite being plastic, the A76 feels solid and sturdy when held. The rear panel is a fingerprint magnet, though, quickly picking up smudges. The phone is relatively lightweight at 189g and easy to use one-handed. The buttons on the sides have a clicky, responsive feel. There’s a headphone jack and a USB-C port at the bottom.
The A76 lacks official dust or water resistance, but Oppo mobiles says it has some sealing to protect against light splashes. Overall, it’s a stylishly designed budget phone that looks far more expensive than its price tag suggests.
Display
The Oppo A76 has a 6.56-inch IPS LCD with a 720p resolution and a 90Hz refresh rate. While 720p resolution is lower than 1080p panels found on some competitors, it’s outstanding and sharp enough for a screen of this size. Text, images, and videos still look crisp and clear.
The display gets bright enough for comfortable outdoor visibility. Colors are vibrant, and contrast levels are good, thanks to the IPS panel. The 90Hz refresh rate gives a noticeable boost to the smoothness and fluidity of animations and scrolling compared to 60Hz displays.
It could be a better display on a budget smartphone but does well for everyday usage and media consumption. The lack of PWM flicker is also a plus for reduced eye strain.
Performance and Hardware
Powering the Oppo A76 is the Snapdragon 680 chip, one of Qualcomm’s newer budget-focused processors built on a 6nm process. It’s paired with 4GB of RAM, which is adequate for smooth multitasking. You also get 128GB of internal storage.
The oppo A76 handles all everyday tasks like web browsing, social media apps, messaging, etc., without hiccups. Apps open swiftly, and switching between multiple apps is lag-free thanks to the 90Hz display. Heavy games are playable at low to medium graphics settings, but you’ll notice occasional frame drops in more demanding titles.
The Snapdragon 680 isn’t a powerhouse chip but delivers a satisfactory everyday performance for a budget phone. The A76 scored 384 in single-core and 1675 in multi-core tests on Geekbench 5, which is decent for the price range.
On the connectivity front, the phone supports 4G VoLTE but lacks 5G support. It has dual-band WiFi 5 and Bluetooth 5.0 LE. Call quality is decent over the phone’s earpiece, and signal reception was solid on Airtel’s 4G network in my area. The under-display fingerprint sensor is snappy and accurate for unlocking the device. Face unlock works fast in good lighting but slows down in dim conditions.
Software and UI
The oppo A76 ships with Oppo’s ColorOS 11.1 skin based on Android 11. While not as clean as stock Android, ColorOS has significantly improved recently and is now one of the better Chinese UIs.
It doesn’t cram the interface with excessive bloatware anymore. The UI elements look refined with neat animations. Valuable additions include an always-on display, game mode, screen recording, and intelligent sidebar tools. Oppo also promises 2 major Android version updates for the phone, which is good to see.
Cameras
Optics have never been Oppo’s strong suit on its budget phones, and the oppo A76 is the same. You get a dual rear camera setup – a 13MP primary sensor and a 2MP depth camera for portrait shots. On the front is an 8MP selfie camera.
In the daytime, the 13MP sensor captures decent-looking shots with pleasing colors and fair detail when the lighting is favorable. HDR works well to balance out highlight and shadow regions. Close-up shots also come out nice and sharp with good color accuracy.
But as lighting gets dimmer, quality drops off significantly as noise creeps in while details get softened. Night mode tries to make it brighter but can’t recover lost details. The 2MP depth sensor struggles with accurate edge detection in portraits, too.
The 8MP selfie cam produces social media-worthy shots in daylight but falters as light levels drop. Overall, the A76’s cameras are strictly average and disappointing compared to some rivals, which offer triple or quad camera setups and superior low-light performance in this segment. Videos max out at 1080p 30fps and look shaky due to a lack of stabilization.
Battery Life
A bright spot for the oppo A76 is its battery life, thanks to the frugal Snapdragon 680 chip and 720p display. The phone packs a 5000mAh battery, which delivers excellent runtimes. With my moderate usage of social media, web browsing, streaming, and clicking some photos, I consistently got almost 2 days of usage per charge.
Even heavy users can expect over a day and a half of endurance from the phone. The 33W fast charging helps, too, allowing the oppo A76 to recharge fully in around 80 minutes. Battery life is undoubtedly one of the strong suits of this phone.
Conclusion
The Oppo A76 brings a stylish design, smooth 90Hz display, and excellent battery life to the table at an attractive price point. Performance is decent for everyday use despite some limitations in heavy gaming. The cameras could have been better, but they deliver passable shots in good lighting. The lack of 5G support may concern some buyers looking towards the future.
But overall, the A76 gets quite a lot right for its price. It looks way more premium than its specs suggest and nails the basics like display quality, battery life, and performance. Flashier alternatives like the Poco M4 Pro 5G or Redmi Note 11 are in this segment. But for those seeking a stylish, long-lasting phone for everyday use on a tight budget, the Oppo A76 is worth considering.
