Oppo’s recent smartphones have had a lot of emphasis on design, more specifically on slimness and lightness. We recently saw this with the Reno 4 Pro (Review), and now once again with the company’s brand new F17 series. Today we’ll be taking an early look at the Oppo F17 Pro, which is the higher end model in the series that also includes the Oppo F17.

Oppo claims that the F17 Pro is the slimmest phone in its segment, measuring just 7.48mm. It also features a total of six cameras and 30W fast charging. I’ve been using the phone for a few days, and here are my first impressions.

In the box, we have the standard set of accessories: a silicone case, a USB cable, a headset, and a 30W VOOC Flash Charge 4.0 charger. Oppo sent me the Magic Blue colour of the F17 Pro, which I think looks superb. The company calls this a ‘shiny matte’ finish, which is exactly what it looks like. You can also see hints of purple on the edges of the back panel, at certain angles. The finish doesn’t pick up fingerprints easily, which is a nice bonus. The phone is also available in Matte Black and Metallic White trims.

The Oppo F17 Pro has been very comfortable to use so far, thanks to its low weight of just 164g. The plastic frame and back panel blend together nicely, without creating any ugly bumps. It has a 6.4-inch full-HD+ Super AMOLED display with Gorilla Glass 3+ and a tall 20:9 aspect ratio. The refresh rate, unfortunately, is just 60Hz and not 90Hz or even 120Hz. There’s no HDR support either, which is a bit disappointing. On the bright side, the display produces very good colours and all content looks good on it. There’s an in-display fingerprint sensor too, which works as expected. I really like how narrow the dual hole-punch cutout for the two selfie cameras is.

The Oppo F17 Pro looks striking from the back, especially in this colour

While I’m yet to test how the Oppo F17 Pro handles heavy games, general performance has been quite snappy so far. This phone uses the MediaTek Helio P95 SoC, which we first saw in the Reno 3 Pro (Review) earlier this year. In India, the F17 Pro is only available with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. There’s a 4,000mAh battery, which is a good enough capacity. However we’ll know for sure how well it holds up in actual everyday use once we are finished with the full review. The F17 Pro runs on ColorOS 7.2, based on Android 10, similar to the Reno 4 Pro.

Cameras are one of the key selling points of the Oppo F17 Pro. Let’s begin with the selfie cameras, which are a main 16-megapixel sensor and a secondary 2-megapixel depth sensor. The rear cameras have a similar exposed-lens design as the Reno 4 Pro, only grouped together in a square instead of a vertical strip. These are a primary 48-megapixel camera, an 8-megapixel ultra wide-angle camera, a 2-megapixel portrait camera, and a 2-megapixel monochrome camera. Surprisingly, there’s no macro camera or any other way to take macro shots with this phone. I don’t think it’s a huge loss, considering most dedicated macro cameras we’ve seen so far haven’t been particularly impressive.

The Oppo F17 Pro has one of the slimmest hole-punch cutouts I’ve come across

It’s only been a couple of days since I’ve started using the Oppo F17 Pro, and so far I quite like the physical design. Despite it being this slim, Oppo has still kept the 3.5mm headphone jack. It’s not often that we see such slim and light smartphones, so it’s a refreshing change when something like this comes along. The main question though is, has Oppo done enough to make it worth buying?

The Oppo F17 Pro is priced at Rs. 22,990 and here, it competes with the Redmi K20 (Review). The 64GB variant of the OnePlus Nord (Review) should soon be available at Rs. 24,999 too, starting this month. 

I’ll be testing the cameras and seeing how the Oppo F17 Pro performs in games and other demanding tasks over the next couple of days, so do stay tuned for the full review coming up soon.

Is this the end of the Samsung Galaxy Note series as we know it? We discussed this on Orbital, our weekly technology podcast, which you can subscribe to via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or RSS, download the episode, or just hit the play button below.