OPPO A91 Review — Could Do With A Bit Of Refinement

Previously, we reviewed the OPPO A9 2020, this time around we take a look at their latest offering, the OPPO A91. How will it perform? Let’s dive right into it.

Unboxing the OPPO A91

Okay before we start, we have to say this about the box of the OPPO A91. When I first received it, I was astonished as to how bulky it is. It’s probably one of the bigger smartphone boxes that we’ve unboxed here at Pokde.net.

Inside the box, you’ll find the following items:

• The OPPO A91 itself
• Soft TPU case
• Earphones
• USB Type-C cable
• Quick guide
• Warranty card
• SIM ejector
• VOOC 3.0 charger (20W)

Appearance

The OPPO A91 comes with a dewdrop display and as you can see, there’s a bit of bezels around the top and bottom of the display. It’s not thick, but definitely noticeable.

On the right side of the device lies the power button which resides in solitude.

On the opposite side, you have the volume rockers as well as the SIM card tray.

At the bottom, you’ll find the USB-Type C port, 3.5mm audio jack, a microphone hole, and speaker grill. Over at the top, there’s nothing except for the OPPO A91’s microphone hole.

Here in Malaysia there’s only the Lightening Black color variant for the device, which is the exact one that we received for this review. While it may not seem like it, the back here is plastic. It’s definitely a nice touch for improved aesthetics.

OPPO A91 Specifications

CPU	MediaTek Helio P70 Octa-core (4 x 2.1 GHz Cortex-A73 & 4 x 2.0 GHz Cortex-A53)
GPU	Mali-G72
RAM	8GB RAM
Display	6.4″ AMOLED (2400 x 1080) FHD+, Dewdrop display
Storage	128GB UFS 2.1
Camera	Main camera(s) 48MP f/1.8 main camera + 8MP f/2.2 ultrawide + 2MP B/W f/2.4 + 2MP f/2.4 depth sensor PDAF, EIS, LED flash, panorama, Night mode, Slow-mo Front camera 16MP f/2.0 HDR
OS	Android 9 (ColorOS 6.1)
Connectivity	LTE Band 1/3/5/7/8/38/40/41 Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac (2.4 GHz, 5GHz) Bluetooth 4.2 USB Type-C 3.5mm port
SIM	Dual SIM
Battery	Li-Po 4025mAh VOOC 3.0 fast charger (20W)
Dimensions	160.2 x 73.3 x 7.9 mm
Weight	172 gram
Ingress protection	N/A

Performance

The OPPO A91 sits right in the middle when it comes to Antutu’s benchmark test. It manages to beat some on the list and we can see the difference compared to higher mid-range chips.

It does decently in Geekbench 5 but the CPU scores themselves aren’t what we would describe as impressive.

Similarly in 3DMark, it didn’t top the list in terms of graphical performance. It did managed to beat the realme 5 however in Sling Shot Extreme, which uses a Snapdragon 665 SoC.

As for PCMark’s Work Performance test, the score is within acceptable levels as expected.

Despite the slightly larger battery capacity compared to the Nokia 7.2, the OPPO A91’s battery benchmark shows that the Helio P70 isn’t really efficient when it comes to battery consumption. Though it should be said that the phone does indeed come with an AMOLED display, thus draining more power.

As for real-life battery consumption, we cannot show the exact details unfortunately due to OPPO not showing the graph of consumption. I’d normally be left with 40-45% at the end of the day with my normal usage, which includes social media browsing, videos, and chatting.

The OPPO A91 comes with OPPO’s proprietary VOOC Charge 3.0 and after 30 minutes of charging, I found that it managed to replenish 45% of its juice. The charging speed is pretty fast.

User Experience

The OPPO A91 is light on the hands and it’s pretty thin as well. If you are the type who enjoy such smartphones, you’d definitely like it. For me personally, I prefer a more bulky design so it feels more secure when holding it.

Watching video content of the phone feels nice thanks to the AMOLED display, and like other devices that offers such a thing, you can see darker blacks and more vivid colors.

This is a personal preference, but I would’ve liked for them to offer a physical fingerprint scanner instead of the under-display sensor that they’ve got here. Don’t get me wrong, it does work pretty fast, it’s just that I would’ve preferred the physical version.

You’ve got the ColorOS 6.1 running on the phone, which runs on Android 9. You can expect some bloatware here with several apps pre-installed. I personally don’t find any use for the apps but this will differ between users. It’s worth noting that the experience on the OPPO A91 is a lot smoother compared to their previous OPPO A9 2020.

As for the camera UI, it doesn’t see any changes compared to their previous devices. It’s simple and straightforward, which I personally like. The settings menu on the left makes it easier to switch between shooting modes.

Before we get into the photos, I’d like to mention that due to the Control Movement Order here, I had limited movement, thus there’s little that I can take outdoors. That aside, the camera performance of the OPPO A91 is reasonable overall. Night mode works well enough.

As you’d expect, picture quality is pretty good when there’s an abundance of light. You can zoom in up to 5 times but you’ll start to notice the noise (which is expected).

I like that there’s focus when you switch to the macro lens. The selfie camera is a bit aggressive when it comes to smoothening pictures, so pictures may appear unnatural.

You can check out the full-sized images here.

OPPO A91 Verdict

There are things that make the OPPO A91 an attractive option such as the display and camera configuration. Personally, I can survive with a normal LCD display instead and have it save more on the battery. However, I can probably see why some would prefer AMOLED instead.

The Helio P70 isn’t a bad chipset but I felt that they could’ve provided a more recent SoC for the smartphone. This is especially considering that they are asking RM999 for the device, I feel that it’s a bit hard to justify the price. Overall the OPPO A91 is ‘OK’ in terms of what it offers but doesn’t exceed in much.

Our gratitude to OPPO Malaysia for providing us the OPPO A91 that was used in this review.