The Oppo R1C has a high-class sapphire glass screen, but without the luxury price tag

By Andy Boxall January 14, 2015

oppo r1c news front

Oppo has announced the R1C smartphone, which features a sapphire glass panel over the top of its screen. Around the back, Oppo has paid special attention to the design, and according to local reports, it catches the light in a very unusual way. It certainly looks different in the images.

Sapphire glass is very strong and scratch resistant. We’ve seen it used on luxury smartphones from Vertu for sometime, and heard many rumors Apple would adopt the same thing for a future iPhone. Oppo’s not the only mainstream manufacturer using sapphire though, just a few months ago Huawei released a special sapphire edition of the Ascend P7.

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Back to the R1C. Aside from the sapphire glass, the big news is the inclusion of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 615 processor. That’s an octa-core, 64-bit chip running at 1.5GHz, and has 2GB of RAM keeping it company. The screen measures 5-inches, but slightly disappoints with a 720p resolution. Just 16GB of internal storage space is available, but the MicroSD card slot can boost this by 128GB.

Android 4.4.1 is installed with Oppo’s Color OS 2.0.1 user interface over the top, which resembles Huawei’s efforts to tweak the Google operating system by doing away with the app drawer. A 2420mAh battery powers the 6.85mm thick phone, and it has 4G connectivity with support for two SIM cards. Finally, a Sony 13-megapixel camera is fitted to the back, and a 5-megapixel lens is found above the screen.

So far, the Oppo R1C has only been confirmed for launch in China, where it will cost the equivalent of about $450, and will go on sale January 20.

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Andy is a Senior Writer at Digital Trends, where he concentrates on mobile technology, a subject he has written about for…

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