The next generation of Oppo’s mid-range and budget-friendly A-series is finally here. Meet the Oppo A8 – the second A-series member to have gone official after Oppo A91. You get a significant spec bump, but for an affordable price tag. The phone has already made a debut in China, and we expect other Asian markets to follow soon. Here’s everything you need to know.
We’ll kick things off with the design. Oppo A8 rocks a polycarbonate rear-shell – not a design we’ve seen on most mid-range smartphones this year, but it makes sense to go with plastic to keep the price tag low. You get a notched display that produces an HD+ resolution and offers a respectable 89% screen-to-body ratio.
The glossy plastic back sports a capacitive fingerprint reader, alongside a triple camera setup in a vertical arrangement. And you can pick between two eye-catching hues: Azure and Secret night black.
You’ll be hard-pressed to find an Oppo smartphone that isn’t camera-oriented, and Oppo A8 is no different. The three rear cameras are augmented with multifunctional AI, which lets you capture finer details and ‘hardware-level’ blur in the portrait mode. If you want numbers, you’re looking at a 12-megapixel primary shooter, rounded off by a pair of 2-megapixel depth and portrait lenses.
The native storage is an uncharacteristic 128 GB that can be expanded up to 256 GB thanks to a dedicated microSD card slot. An unidentified chipset with an octa-core processor sits at the heart of the A8, paired with 4 GB of RAM. Finally, a 4,230 mAh battery backs this hardware, but it doesn’t offer support for fast charging.
The software seems to be lagging behind the curve because you get an Android-10-based Color OS 6.1. So if you were expecting the A8 to run on ColorOS 7, you might have to wait for Oppo to roll out that update. We haven’t had word on the phone’s launch in Pakistan, but A8 is supposed to go on sale in China on December 26, and it is already available for pre-order at 1,199 yuan or just 26,500 Pakistani rupees, without taxes.
