Oppo A60 5G Review: Tougher Than You’d Expect

The Oppo A60 5G stands out in the budget phone space thanks to greater than typical durability, but as with most budget phones, you’ve got to carefully consider what features matter most to you.

Pros	Cons
Attractive and durable design	Middling app performance
Decent battery life	Oppo installs a lot of third-party apps you probably don’t want
Supports very fast charging…	…but you’ll have to supply your own very fast charger.

Score: 3.5/5

	Buy The Oppo A60 5G!	Buy On Amazon

In this review

Specifications
Design
Camera
Performance
Battery
Conclusion

Oppo has been selling phones in Australia for a decade now, and over that time, some of its best offerings have been in the budget space.

Following on from the already budget-priced Oppo A80, the Oppo A60 5G pushes Oppo’s 5G-capable price points below $300 price barrier – just – with the promise of greater durability, a better display and improved battery endurance.

One quick but vital note of clarification needs to go here. Oppo also sells a phone just called the Oppo A60, but that’s not just an Oppo A60 5G with the 5G radios stripped out; it has slightly more RAM, a different processor and a smaller battery. Also, rather obviously, it’s not 5G capable.

I’m yet to be able to test out that model, but if you’re shopping for the Oppo A60 5G, make sure that’s what a retailer is actually selling to you, not the slightly cheaper, slightly different Oppo A60.

Design

The Oppo A60 5G is built around a 6.67 inch 120Hz-capable LCD display with support for up to 120Hz refresh rates, keeping it nicely competitive with other phones at its $299 price point.

The display has a resolution of 1604x720, so it’s only 720p capable, but that’s not entirely unusual at this kind of price point either. If you’re the type to dislike bezels, they are present, especially at the base of the display.

In terms of colours, locally Oppo sells the Oppo A60 5G in either Nebula Red or Ocean Blue finishes; it’s the latter that Oppo sent my way.

I do like a blue phone (and that’s 100% subjective, naturally), and the embossed pattern on the rear of the phone is certainly eye catching, though I could see some folks thinking that it’s also perhaps a touch too blinged out. Tastes, as always can vary.

The Oppo A60 5G’s controls are about as standard as you can get, with volume controls on the right hands side sitting beneath a combination power button and fingerprint reader.

I’ve had no real issues with getting the Oppo A60 5G to unlock using biometrics during my review period. Pleasingly – and largely in line with a lot of budget competitors – you still get a 3.5mm headphone jack, located on the base of the phone next to the USB-C charging and data port.

Adding googly eyes (optional) to the Oppo A60 5G makes it look slightly startled.

The Oppo A60 5G feels a little heavier in the hand, and that’s undoubtedly because it’s somewhat more rugged than many of the phones you’ll find at this price point, with claimed military-grade shock resistance and what Oppo refers to as “multiple liquid resistance”.

What that equates to in IP rating terms is that it’s an IP54 phone, capable of surviving splashes of water, but not full immersion.

To be clear I’ve not tested the Oppo A60 5G to the point of destruction, because I don’t have the full lab setup to do so in a meaningful way. More on that below:

However, the point here is more that the Oppo A60 5G should be able to take a few more of life’s knocks and bumps than competing phones at this price point.

I would still suggest that a phone case would be a wise investment – there isn’t one in the case though that’s been a hallmark of many Oppo phones I’ve tested over the years – to maximise that protection.

Camera

The single biggest way you can tell you’re using a budget phone is by looking at the camera specifications, because that’s where you’ll typically see the compromises that come with meeting a price point flying towards you, sometimes quite rapidly.

The Oppo A60 5G features dual rear lenses, but you’ll only be shooting with the primary 50MP lens; the secondary lens is purely there for focusing. At the front, selfies are taken via a 5MP sensor built into a holepunch array.

Photos from the Oppo A60 5G are much what you should and could expect from a budget phone in 2024. If you’re shooting in regular daylight and have time to let the phone find its focus, you can get decent results:

Some wool fiends I know would drool over this. They know who they are.

But if you push it with faster action or low light, it will struggle to cope:

The Oppo A60 5G's camera did not cope well with this Sydney train tunnel.

There’s no dedicated zoom lens, with Oppo’s default camera app having a 2x digital zoom mode – a crop, in other words – which you can then push up to 10x zoom. Except that you shouldn’t.

If I find myself at a racecourse, I’m not going to bet on the nags… but I will take photos. Here’s a shot with the Oppo A60’s regular wide camera.

2x zoom gets a little closer to the signage without sacrificing too much quality

10x zoom is… oh dear.

At the front, the portrait camera is functional but not terribly quick:

Oh look, it’s me.

Oppo does also offer beauty modes within portrait mode if you fancy a little skin smoothing – or if you want to take it too far:

Oh look, it’s me (alien potato edition)

Oppo A60 5G Sample Photos

Sydney isn't that pretty in the rain... but the Oppo A60 5G handles that ok in regular daylight.

It is raining on me -- but the Oppo A60 5G isn't fussed; IP54 water resistance should see it survive.

Performance

The Oppo A60 5G is built around a Mediatek Dimensity 6300 processor with 4GB of RAM and 128GB of onboard storage. At its $299 price point that’s not exceptional, though it is nice to see microSD card support in play via the SIM card slot.

4GB of RAM just isn’t much in 2024 even for a budget phone, and while it does support “Virtual” RAM by sacrificing a little storage space, that’s not the same as having proper onboard RAM to aid speedier operation.

You can see this in the Oppo A60 5G’s benchmark scores pretty clearly. Here’s how it compares against a range of similarly priced budget phones using Geekbench 6’s CPU test:

It would be interesting to see how the Oppo A60 5G stacks up against the regular Oppo A60, because that’s a cheaper phone with a Qualcomm processor and more RAM – but it is worth noting that at the time of writing I could find the Oppo A80 for only around $20-$30 more than the Oppo A60 5G.

The Oppo A60 5G fares slightly better in GPU terms; here’s how it compares against those same phones using 3DMark’s GPU benchmarks:

At $299 you certainly can’t expect fast, and there were points where I did hit a little lag switching between apps on the Oppo A60 5G. Within its price space it’s got fair performance, but you rather obviously can do a little better with some competing phones.

The Oppo A60 5G is built around Android 14, but being an Oppo phone, that’s with Oppo’s own ColorOS 14.1 layered on top of it. ColorOS does change up a lot of how Android works, and you will have to be comfortable agreeing to a lot of terms and conditions to use some of its features – even simple functions like App search. It’s not to my personal taste, but I do know some like its particular style.

Updated from original copy: Oppo Australia informs me that the Oppo A60 5G will receive two OS updates and three years of security updates, delivered quarterly.

Oppo also promises 36 months of “fluency” for the phone – meaning, in Oppo’s precise terms that:

Extensive and rigorous 36-Month Fluency testing at OPPO labs has proven that this phone delivers a "like new" fluent and smooth-running experience, even after 3 years of everyday use.

Ppresuming that holds true it’s at least a sign that you should see about the same performance out of the Oppo A60 5G for some time. Also I now want to know if Oppo has secretly somehow invented time travel in order to tell how well a phone will run three years from now...

Along with ColorOS, Oppo also installs a lot of additional apps as part of the standard setup of the Oppo A60 5G – and I do mean a lot. Booking.com is present (because of course it is), as is Temu, plus some 13 different game installs… and that’s not even counting Oppo’s own home-grown apps that I’d expect out of a manufacturer’s install process!

I do get why these app deals are made (it’s all about the money, folks), but that doesn’t mean that I like having phones stuffed full of apps. You can of course uninstall them, and that’s what I’d advise you to do.

Oppo has its own app store, called App Market also installed on the Oppo A60 5G to compete with Google Play.

I do like having more competition in the app store space in a theoretical way, but I could wish that the competing app stores offered up a better experience less stuffed with awful-looking apps.

It says a lot when (according to Oppo’s App Market at the time of writing) the editor's choice for games includes a cryptocurrency trading app and a sportswear shopping app. No, I’m not making that up…

Oppo: If you want an editor who will actually, you know, edit... I know a guy.

The Oppo A60 5G is, as the suffix suggests, a 5G capable phone, though it’s predictably only sub-6Ghz capable. Network conditions play more of a role than anything else in terms of data reception, but in testing in Sydney I typically saw between 200-300Mbps down on the Telstra network during my review period.

Battery

The Oppo A60 5G ever so slightly bucks the trend of Android phones that have 5,000mAh batteries by instead shipping with a 5,100mAh battery under its display.

Battery life is always dependent on how you use a phone, and everyone’s usage is a little different, but to give it some comparative weight, I turn to my standard YouTube battery test. This pits phones against each other with a 1 hour 1080p video (or 720p for phones that don’t have 1080p support, including the Oppo A60 5G) run for one hour at maximum brightness and moderate volume.

This test serves two purposes; firstly, if a phone drops below 90% in that test it’s likely to struggle to last a full day’s moderate usage. Secondly, it can be quite instructive to see how a phone compares, because every percentage point above 90% can equate to solid gains in battery life.

Here’s how the Oppo A60 5G compares against similarly priced phones at the time of writing:

While it’s not a world beater, the gaps there are on the smaller side, and this does still point to a phone that should last most users through a day without too many worries.

I’ve recently expanded my use of this test to run it over 3 hours to give a picture of ongoing battery usage, because many people will do the same kinds of tasks on a phone for longer. While I don’t have comparative figures for other budget phones as yet, here’s how the Oppo A60 5G managed in that test:

Like so many Oppo phones, the Oppo A60 5G has support for Oppo’s SUPERVOOC charging standard at up to 45W, but if you want to hit that kind of speed high, you’ll need to supply your own charger to do so, as it’s notably absent from the retail box.

Oppo A60 5G: Alex’s Verdict

Every budget phone involves some level of compromise, but every good budget phone should balance those compromises against features that you would want.

For the Oppo A60 5G, that’s mostly around its enhanced drop durability and IP-rated water resistance. If you’re after a stylish looking and generally robust phone, this could be a good match for your needs at its sub-$300 price point.

However, if your budget can stretch a little higher, consider other options such as the Oppo A80 or Motorola Moto G85.