Skip to main content

Oppo announces the F11 Pro with pop-up selfie camera and no notch

Oppo announces the F11 Pro with pop-up selfie camera and no notch

/

Is this a clue to the OnePlus 7?

Share this story

oppo f11
Photo by Sam Byford / The Verge

The onslaught of 48-megapixel cameraphones continues today with Oppo’s announcement of the F11 Pro, a midrange phone with a 6.53-inch 1080p notch-less display and a pop-up selfie camera. It’s pretty similar in positioning to Vivo’s new V15 Pro, albeit with slightly lower-end specs.

The F11 Pro has a MediaTek Helio P70 processor, 4GB or 6GB of RAM, and a 4,000mAh battery that can be fast-charged with Oppo’s VOOC 3.0 tech. There’s a conventional capacitive fingerprint sensor on the back, which has a unique red-black-blue gradient effect going on. And yes, like the V15 Pro it has the distinctly retro I/O combination of a headphone jack and Micro USB port.

OnePlus fans should take a particular interest in this phone, as historically Oppo’s F-series has presaged the design of an upcoming OnePlus device to a certain degree due to the companies’ shared supply chain. The F7 featured the same notched display as the OnePlus 6, for example, while the F9 saw the debut of the “waterdrop” notch that made its way to the 6T. This F11, then, can be taken as strong corroboration of the rumors that the OnePlus 7 will have a pop-up selfie camera.

oppo f11
If history repeats itself, the OnePlus 7 should look something like this — at least from the front.

Unlike the alleged OnePlus 7 we’ve seen in leaks, however, the F11 Pro’s pop-up selfie camera is mounted directly in the center of the phone’s top edge. It’s housed in the rear-facing 48-megapixel camera array as on the Vivo V15 Pro, though the bump is a little smaller here.

That may be because the 16-megapixel sensor takes up less space than Vivo’s 32-megapixel component. The F11 Pro’s rising unit is actually transparent on the sides, which Oppo says was “inspired by amber” and makes the phone look “like a perfume bottle ready to be opened.” Which, cool.

This isn’t Oppo’s first pop-up selfie camera. That would be last year’s ambitious Find X. It is, however, the first to adopt Vivo’s style of a small module that rises out of the phone’s top edge rather than the Find X’s method of raising the entire top section of the phone. The Find X’s approach allowed for face unlock with an iPhone X-style 3D scanner, but the F11 Pro only offers less secure camera-based functionality. If you’re okay with that, you can still use it the same way as the Find X by swiping up on the lock screen to quickly raise and hide the camera.

Oppo hasn’t announced pricing information for the F11 Pro just yet, but it’ll be released in India first. Other regions like Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa will follow. There’s also likely to be a China-focused variant of this design called the R19, as the R17 was to the F9.