ON THE INSIDE
Beware – if you love stock Android, you will probably not like the N1 Mini’s custom Android Color OS. People used to scrolling through a few screens will find themselves limited to three at launch and deal with stock widgets placed on the home screens. If you’re into Oppo’s redesign of Android, then you might get used to Color. People who have used the Nexus or Moto G on the other hand, might find themselves annoyed at having to relearn a new interface.
Oppo’s also included gesture support which can be accessed by swiping from the left side top. Accidentally swiping the gesture panel instead of the standard notification/settings panel was unfortunately a daily happening. If you like pre-defining gestures to get your work done, you’ll like the futuristic feel of doing it on an Oppo. For users who would like to just be able to turn off the gestures panel, it feels unnecessary and intrusive.
To Oppo’s credit, though, the OS does run smoothly and fast. Gestures et all do not bog the phone down and it zipped quickly through browsing, the odd casual game and handled multi-app sessions with ease. The 1.6GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor might have had something to do with it as well as the good 2GB of RAM. For games, there’s the Adreno 305 GPU.
Not so cool – no expandibility via microSD. You do get 16GB of flash memory but that’s it. So selfie-lovers, expect to save lots of photos to the cloud.
The 2,140mAH battery is pretty decent, though. On normal usage you can get a good full day without charging but if you’re the type who just uses it for the odd calls, texts and maybe a picture of your lunch, you could probably stretch it to 2 days or 1 and a half.
