The Oppo A53 is a solid budget offering, with a 90Hz display and strong battery. It’s probably no real surprise to know that the oppo a53 isn’t an exciting phone. But it doesn’t need to be. What it is instead can be an impressively competent phone – one that won’t wow you but will deliver everything required it to, regardless of the bargain-basement price.
The sole challenge for the A53 is that it’s up against the stiff competition, and spending even an additional £20 or £30 will deliver a good performance boost from rivals – but if you want to make every penny count, this does the task nicely.
First up, the A53 is one of many modern waves of budget phones that don’t look the part – by which I am talking about you could easily mistake this for a tool worth several times the RRP.
For sale in black or perhaps a mint green, the A53 has a polished plastic rear designed to look like glass. It almost pulls off the key, although the price you pay for that is that it’s a real fingerprint magnet, and the soft plastic has acquired quite a few micro-abrasions and scratches over 2-3 weeks with the phone.
The 6.5in the display is large, although not huge, and bordered by relatively slim bezels – though there is a small bigger chin at the bottom. A punch-hole selfie camera completes the quasi-flagship aesthetic in the top-left corner.
This display is one of many A53’s strengths because it comes with a high 90Hz refresh rate – still unusual in cheap phones, though getting more common. It’s not OLED, obviously, but the greater tradeoff is resolution: it’s only 720p. How much that matters on a screen this size continues to be up for debate, though, and I suspect many users will appreciate the smoothness of the refresh rate significantly more than they’d Full HD anyway.
The key design element that gives away the phone’s real price point is arguably exactly that at 8.4mm thick, it feels a touch chunky, though Oppo has been doing its better to curve the edges to help keep the phone comfortable to hold. At 186g, it’s not overweight either, though you wouldn’t call it lightweight.
There’s no waterproofing to speak of. However, the upside of that is that you still get a genuine headphone jack – increasingly rare even yet in budget devices, but vital for anyone who hasn’t yet made the upgrade to wireless headphones.
Inside the phone, the cost point becomes a bit more obvious. In the middle is the Qualcomm Snapdragon 460 chipset, which in the UK comes paired with 4GB of RAM and a measly 64GB storage – though other SKUs are available elsewhere.
Performance is fine. The phone runs well enough, and it’s never crashed or frozen in enough time I’ve been using it. Switching between apps may be sluggish, and with only 4GB RAM, it can only just hold 1 or 2 apps in memory at a time, slowing things down further.
I probably wouldn’t try using it for playing any games more advanced than Candy Crush either – as you will see in the benchmark results, it struggles to supply frame rates above 30fps even yet in the absolute most basic graphics benchmarks.