So if you are familiar with my channel, I have previously done the unboxing and first impressions of the OPPO A74 5G.

Link to OPPO A74 (5G variant): https://youtu.be/6tzPy2DJFSw

But instead of giving you a full review on that, I halted that because when I found out that there was a more affordable option, which is this OPPO A74 4G, coming at only RM899 compared to RM1099 that the 5G variant was priced at.

So in this video I will be unboxing and giving you my full in-depth review of the OPPO A74, the 4G variant, so keep watching.

Unboxing

Starting with the unboxing, of course, the box comes in white, with OPPO A74 on top, the visuals of the phone in the middle and the RAM and storage specs on the top left.

At the back, you will find the specs of the RAM and storage once again, the color variant that you have chosen, and some of the additional phone specs over the top.

Sliding the box cover, you will find another white box, opening that, reveals a smaller box which contains SIM ejector pin and of course, keeping it consistent on this A-series, it has the soft clear phone case.

Then, you will find the phone itself.

Underneath, you will find earphones (sweet!), a USB-A to USB-C cable, and finally, the 33-watts SuperVOOC 2.0 fast charger.

Specs

Next, looking at the specs, it comes with the Snapdragon 662 Chipset, with the Adreno 610 GPU. The variant that I have is the 6 gigabytes of RAM with 128 gigabytes of storage.

It comes shipped with Android 11 with the latest ColorOS version 11.1 skin.

Build Quality

From the phone’s design and build’s perspective, the overall design and finish was surely a quite surprising factor, as it didn’t really feel like it was a smartphone that was below the RM1000 mark.

The Prism Black variant had a bit of a lower profile look but if you would like to go for something that stands out a bit more, then the Midnight Blue would be a compelling option, as these are the two color options available.

The rear camera arrays are towards the top left, with a medium-sized camera bump, so expect a little wobble when you are typing the phone on a surface, especially towards the middle left of the phone. 

I have to say that I loved the thin form factor of the phone because it was really surprising how OPPO has managed to do that since it comes with 5000 milliamps of battery.

At the front, the screen looks pretty sleek with the camera hole punch towards the top left, with a 90.8 percent screen-to-body ratio with a fingerprint sensor on the screen. 

As for the phone’s ports and buttons, looking down below, other than the USB-C port, you will find the speaker grills over there and yes, the headphones jack as well.

On the right, there is the power button, then on the left, there is the volume rockers and the SIM and microSD card slot, with a dedicated microSD card slot expansion.

And using this phone daily felt great, where once again, you just couldn’t tell guess the phone’s price just by looking and feeling the phone in your hands so that for me is already a huge plus.

Display

Now one of the cool things that this 4G variant also has that is not on the 5G variant is that this 4G variant comes with an AMOLED screen at 6.43-inches with a resolution of 1080 x 2400 pixels.

One thing to note is that the screen doesn’t come with a high refresh rate of 90hz, but I would trade an AMOLED screen to a higher refresh rate, and if you are one of those who will complain about not having a high refresh rate, please calm your pants, even the iPhone until now doesn’t have a 90 hertz, and this phone is RM899, so yea……

And like I said, the AMOLED screen just made the phone’s screen very pleasant to look at daily, with quite a high 600 nits of peak brightness and watching videos on YouTube and Netflix also was really nice, with really nice and natural colors, without typically having any over-saturation which most smartphones within this price usually has, so I have absolutely no complaints about it here.

Cameras

Now on to the phone’s cameras, you will find:

• a 48 Megapixel f 1.7 aperture 26mm wide main lens
• a 2-megapixel f 2.4 macro lens, and
• a 2-megapixel depth sensor

So yes, there is no ultrawide camera on the phone.

Then as for the front camera, it has a 16-megapixel f 2.4 27mm wide lens.

So instead of me going through the photo samples taken on the phone, I will be collaborating and getting my buddy Umar from Product Nation to take the cameras on the phone for a spin, and let’s see what results did he get. Check out my YouTube video for the results!

Here’s a transcript of Umar’s review:

“Hey guys, Umar here from Product Nation. Adam, thank you so much for having us on here.

Today we’re taking a look at the camera system on the OPPO A74. Now, this is a budget mid-range device, so our expectations can’t be too high for the camera. But I was actually surprised by the performance of this. Let me show you exactly what I am talking about.

Coming down to the image performance. The HDR on this looks very nice. The colors are very over-saturated and punchy for my liking, but it looked pretty good.

Then you’ve got the depth of field, the f 1.7 gives you pretty nice background blur. Speaking of background blur, the Portrait Mode also has very good separation, much better than I expected. This does depend on good lighting though, you need pretty good lighting. 

When it comes to human Portrait Mode, it does pretty well. This is with the AI Beauty Mode turned off, and you can see it looks very nice on the skin tones. With the AI Beauty Mode turned on, it actually surprisingly does pretty well. Even zooming into the skin tones, it looks really good, almost like it is properly photoshopped and you don’t usually see that on this price point. 

Even the front camera performance for the Portrait Mode is quite nice, and separation isn’t the best, but in good lighting it is great.

Now moving onto the 48-megapixels, here is a shot taken at 48MP and cropped in at 400% crop, and you can see, it retains a fair bit of details, but if you use the extra HD mode, you get way more detail, definitely a huge difference.

Another automated feature built-in here, is the AI Scene Enhancement, and this works pretty interestingly. So the left is it turned off and the right is turned on. It basically just adds a bunch of vibrants and contrasts that it almost looks like you’ve edited your picture and color-corrected your picture. It is to some people’s liking.

It also has 10x digital zoom, which doesn’t look the best, but it is there if you need it.

For the night mode, interestingly enough, when you use it, you get more light, but also more noise.

This is the front camera recording test, recording at 1080p at 30FPS. As you can see from the skin tones and the colors, it does seem to be on the cooler end. The tones on my skin is quite cool, the tone on my shirt, overall the image seems to be a lot cooler.

In terms of stabilization, as I am walking, you can see it is quite shaky because we’re lacking image stabilization in the front camera.

Back camera is pretty much the same story, we’re at 1080p at 30FPS, we’re still lacking the image stabilization. In terms of the image quality, it does seem to be over-sharpened quite a bit and the contrast levels aren’t really the best.

So, as we saw from those tests, the performance of the camera is actually exceeding my expectations here. One thing we did notice is the video performance is definitely not as good as the image taking performance. I would rank the video performance at about a 6/7 out of 10, while the image taking performance, for the price, I’d rank it 8.5, or even a 9 out of 10. 

What would really knock this out of the park would be an ultrawide angle lens. Honestly, instead of this 2-megapixels macro lens that probably no one will ever use, an ultrawide angle lens would’ve been a much better choice. 

All right, this has been fun! Adam, once again, thank you for having us on. Guys, if you enjoyed our content, stop by Product Nation to say hi! And we will definitely be doing more videos like this with Adam, I’m going to pass it back to him now.”

Sound Quality

As for the phone’s sound quality, it comes with mono firing speakers towards the bottom. The volume was decent, not the loudest but considering the price range, it didn’t really affect me. The highs were pretty less apparent but it did sound nicer than the mid lows.

Software

In terms of software, backed by Android 11, with ColorOS version 11.1, the overall UI was as smooth as how they have known to be.

Not only the responsiveness is great but the overall navigation and multitasking was nice and because of the screen quality once again.

The phone was pretty nice to use and didn’t really make me feel like I missed a higher refresh rate and I am indeed happy to report that they were not buggy compared to the likes of….*cough* MiUI

Gaming

As for gaming, what’s nice is that the phone goes to a higher 180-hertz touch sampling rate during Game Focus Mode, instead of 135 hertz on normal mode.

And for a phone of this price, I first tested out PUBG Mobile, and the experience was pretty smooth at medium settings, with Balanced FPS settings, with no overheating issues, since it was capped at the settings, so you can’t go overboard anyways.

Then just for the sake of maximizing the phone gaming capabilities, I tried Genshin Impact. You can run the game, but I would say that it was not really playable, since the phone is not really built for high intensive games like this, especially how the battery drains very quickly during gameplay.

Battery

As for the phone’s battery, the phone comes with 5000 milliamps of battery as mentioned earlier.

Based on my test I got a total of 7 hours and 18 minutes of screen on time when I was at 10% battery, and of course this is with the dark mode turned off and with very heavy gameplay when I was testing out the phone daily, which to me, was a huge plus of the phone.

And since the phone comes with 33-watts SuperVOOC 2.0 flash charger inside of the box, so naturally it has a fast charge up to that, where it got me from 0 to 50% for about 26 minutes, so that was nice to know.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I have to say that the OPPO A74, is definitely a very appealing option for a phone within this price range.

Like I said before, while it is nice to have a 5G phone, but at this point in time, 5G is still not readily available in many countries, especially here in Malaysia, so that should not even be part of your purchase decision.

So if you are looking for a smartphone that has a great price, high quality screen, a very good battery life, and pretty decent camera, then yes, this should be a phone for you and with this, do let me know what you guys think of the OPPO A74 4G at the comments section below and let’s discuss over there!