Oppo A80 Review: Robust budget value

The Oppo A80 is relatively affordable, runs well and is surprisingly robust given its asking price.

Score: 3.5/5

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In this review

Oppo A80 Specifications
Oppo A80 Design
Oppo A80 Camera
Oppo A80 Performance
Oppo A80 Battery
Oppo A80 Conclusion

Design

The Oppo A80 is built around a 6.67 inch 120Hz capable display, which is very much in line with what you might expect at this price point.

There are a couple of interesting choices here, however.

Firstly, Oppo’s opted for an LCD rather than the pOLED displays that are becoming somewhat more common at these kinds of prices. That does have an impact on comparative colour clarity, but the upside there should be higher brightness, with Oppo claiming up to 1000 nits of typical brightness. Certainly I’ve had few issues with viewing the Oppo A80’s display in direct sunlight.

With a resolution of 1604x720, it’s an effective 720p display, which isn’t unusual at this price point, though it’s not out of contention to get a Full HD (1080p) screen for this kind of money.
Oppo only produces the Oppo A80 in two colour choices, and we do get both of them as options in Australia. If you’re more the more moderate type, opt for the simple “Starry Black”, while the extroverts can stand out quite a bit more with the “Moonlit Purple” colour.

It’s very nicely finished, with matching colour accents in the metallic band that rings around the phone, and while I typically say that my colour of preference for smartphones is blue, the Moonlit Purple Oppo A80 has me rethinking that stance. Maybe it’s my inner Prince fan preferences coming forth. Hmm.

Adding googly eyes makes the Oppo A80 look decidedly nervous.

Controls on the Oppo A80 encompass standard volume buttons above a combination fingerprint sensor and power button on the right hand side, all very expected at this price point right now. You do get a standard 3.5mm headphone jack at the base of the phone, next to the USB-C data/power port.

At 165.79x76.14x7.68mm with a carrying weight of 186g, the Oppo A80 feels solid in the hand. There's a reason for that.

One very pleasing aspect that’s quite rare in this price bracket is a genuine commitment to durability, with the Oppo A80 packing in an IP54 rating. While that doesn’t allow the Oppo A80 to swim – it’s basically saying that it’ll handle water splashes and stop insects climbing within its frame – for the most part at this kind of price you’re lucky to get much beyond the always-vague “water repellent”, so actual rated resistance is a big plus.

Also read:
Why your waterproof phone isn’t actually “waterproof” the way you think it is

Oppo further claims that the Oppo A80 has been tested to survive some rather extreme drop tests. While I’ve not been able to replicate them myself, what with the lack of test phones and for that matter a 48-seat bus(!), it’s certainly also a good sign in theory for the long term viability of the phone. As a reminder, I don’t do ad-hoc drop tests or the like.

The other way that I typically advise people to protect their phones is with a case, and unusually here the Oppo A80 comes in the box sans any kind of case – not even a cheap translucent one. I’m a big advocate for phone cases, and in the past Oppo’s phones have included them – but not the Oppo A80. They do exist, with both Oppo selling its own specific “Drop Shield” case (not tested) as well as a range of third party case options.

Camera

The Oppo A80 features dual lenses at the rear of the phone, comprising a 50MP wide and 2MP portrait lens, while the front selfie camera has an 8MP sensor. That’s about what you’d expect at this price point, but as always smartphone photography is more than just a game of counting megapixels. That’s especially true at this kind of price where you’re out of the low-end budget phones – where smartphone photography can often be challenging – and you can start to expect a certain level of quality.

Here, mostly, the Oppo A80 did not disappoint. The obvious limitations here sit with more challenging shot situations such as pushing any level of zoom or low light, but you’d expect that at this price point.

It’s 2024, and that means that AI also has to make an appearance, by way of Oppo’s take on an AI-led eraser facility for photos, a la the “Magic Eraser” that Google offers on its Pixel phones. Only the Oppo A80 is way cheaper, so can AI really work that well?

It’s not as weird a question as you might think when you realise that the erasing part absolutely requires an internet connection, which means it’s not leaning all that hard on the Oppo A80’s processor. But does it work?

Sort of. To give an example, I snapped this shot while walking through Hyde Park in Sydney.

Note the group of three to the left. They’re (from what I gathered) nurses on the way to a protest.

I 100% support nurses – they’re underpaid, overworked and massively underappreciated for doing an incredibly difficult and stressful job – but what if I didn’t want them in the shot? Time to put the Oppo A80’s AI Eraser into action.

Here the Oppo A80 did something I did not expect. I’m used to AI removal apps typically just replicating a floor pattern, sometimes well, and sometimes less so.
Instead, the Oppo A80 did… this:

IT CREATED A FAKE WEIRD AI PERSON INSTEAD

I’ll just zoom in and crop on the original photo here so you can “appreciate” this.

 Kind of looks like Joe Camel. 

Outside of AI Eraser’s odd approach to reality though, the Oppo A80’s camera prowess is fine within its price bracket and for what you should expect -- but don't expect much from the AI eraser feature beyond maybe jump scares.

Oppo A80 Sample Photos

Performance

The Oppo A80 is built around Mediatek’s Dimensity 6300 processor with 8GB of RAM and a pleasing 256GB of onboard storage, plus microSD expansion (ALEX CHECK?). It’s great to see phone makers in the higher budget price range step up to offering a decent quantity of onboard storage plus actual RAM rather than fiddly figures that conflate actual RAM with virtual “RAM Boost” RAM, because they’re not the same in true performance terms.

The battle in the budget space is rather solidly between Qualcomm and Mediatek, with rather obvious competitors to the Oppo A80 including Motorola’s recently reviewed Motorola Moto G85. So how does the Oppo A80 compare? Here’s how it stacks up using Geekbench 6’s CPU test:

The Moto G85 has a slight edge there, but honestly not at a level where you’d automatically pick it with day to day app usage. It’s a slightly less even battle if we look at GPU performance, using 3DMark:

While the Motorola has an edge there, the Oppo is still nicely competitive, and this translates into a phone that’s generally responsive within what you can reasonably expect at this price. No, you won’t see the highest frame rates in intensive Android games or anything like that, becuase’you're only paying $369 in the first place, but everyday usage for moderate users should be just fine.

One area where the Oppo A80 rather outdoes the Motorola is in terms of updates. Both phones offer three years of security updates, but where the Moto G85 will only see Android 15 (at some point), Oppo’s offering two full OS upgrades for the Oppo A80, which should see it through to Android 16. More again would naturally be even better, but double the support is still a step in the right direction.

Like every other Oppo phone, you’re not talking stock Android, but instead Oppo’s own “ColorOS” launcher. It’s not entirely to my taste, to be sure, but it’s at least not as directly iOS-clone like as it was in its early years. I guess folks switching from iPhones might find still find it a touch more familiar. It’s still an Android phone at heart so you can at least tweak the visual presentation to suit you.

Oppo does rather fall into the trap of installing a lot of additional apps onto the Oppo A80, taking up space. Predictably Booking.com is one of them – at this point not finding it on an Android phone would feel more shocking – along with a range of games and Oppo’s own app store. I do prefer a clean Android install, and you can at least uninstall them at will.

On the network side, the Oppo A80 is 5G capable, though predictably that's just sub-6Ghz 5G at this price point. Network speeds testing in Sydney fell neatly into my typical 200-400Mbps down band using the Telstra network, which suggests it should be just as capable (but no better) than any other 5G phone right now.

Battery

The vast majority of Android phones you can buy right now – irrespective of price – have 5,000mAh batteries in them.

The Oppo A80 does it a little different, with a 5,100mAh battery pack lurking within its frame. Does that extra 100mAh of power add up to all that much in battery use terms?

As always, that’s a variable matter, so to give it some comparative weight, I turn to my standard YouTube battery test, streaming a 1080p video (or 720p in the case of the A80) at maximum brightness and moderate volume for an hour from a fully charged battery.

This test serves two purposes. Firstly, phones that drop below 90% (and these days that’s rare, though not unheard of) will typically struggle to last through a single full day’s usage. Secondly, it lets me compare phones like for like, even if everyone’s other usage can be quite variable.

Here’s how the Oppo A80 compares:

The Oppo A80 does well here, and that should lead to generally good battery performance for most users except the most demanding. There's no phone you can't run flat if you're determined enough, but the Oppo A80 should be sufficient in most cases.

If you do run the Oppo A80’s battery down, you can recharge it at up to 45W with a SuperVOOC charger.. but there isn’t one of those in the box.

If you’re an existing Oppo customer you might of course have a SuperVOOC charger handy, and it’s USB-C in any case, so relatively fast charging with other plugs is certainly a viable proposition.

Oppo A80: Alex’s Verdict

Oppo's strength in my view has long been around affordable phones. It's had some interesting takes on premium flagship phones, but few that ever really set my pulse pumping relative to their price points.

In the mid-range and budget area, however, it's a serious competitor, and the Oppo A80 shows just how serious it is. While I would put the Motorola Moto G85 just ahead of it in the budget phone stakes right now, the line there is marginal, and the Oppo A80 benefits from being marginally less expensive and having a longer OS support scheme in place. Its battery life is solid, it's going to be enough phone in processing terms for a lot of people -- basically, there's quite a lot to like here!

Oppo A80: Pricing and availability

The Oppo A80 retails in Australia for $369 outright.

	Buy The Oppo A80!	Buy On Amazon

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