Oppo caused quite a stir with its growing influence in the Pakistani smartphone market as has done by other Chinese manufacturers but Oppo have taken a different approach. Their devices are not as affordable as any other Chinese manufacturer but at the same time they are not trying to imitate other vendors’ designs and are being ambitious with their own ideas. The N1 tried something the year before with its rotating camera and the N3 is an improvement over the phablet predecessor.

Almost a year apart, both devices have a different look altogether right on the first glance. The N3 is much more compact and looks sexier, for lack of a better word, taking screen size to 5.5” from 5.9” of its predecessor. It’s the same IPS LCD panel and the same 1080 x 1920 pixels display which means a higher pixel density and crisper elements on the screen. It makes use of Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection. The N3 is a Dual SIM phone that is capable of going LTE and runs Color OS 2.0 UI over Android KitKat (v4.4.4).

The phone makes improvements in the hardware part as well, moving towards the newer Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 chipset compared to the Snapdragon 600 found on the N1. The N3 doesn’t improve on the number of cores but it certainly has a newer processor with Krait 400 and also a higher clock speed at 2.3 GHz of processing power. The graphics are supplied by the Adreno 330 unit while the RAM remains the same at 2 GB. Unlike the N1’s multiple options, N3 only offers a 32 GB option that can be expanded, however, with a microSD that makes use of the SIM 2 slot, going up to 128 GB.

The camera is bigger and better than the 13 megapixel sensor of its predecessor. The new 16 megapixel sensor doesn’t require manual rotation as it has a motor that helps with it and has dual-LED flash to go along with the Schneider Kreuznach optics. The rotating camera makes it the best selfie camera in the market with 16 megapixels of detail and is also capable of 1080p video at 60 frames per second. Moreover, it can go up to 120 frames per second at 720p resolution.

The battery has taken it down a notch with a 3000 mAh non-removable battery which is 610 mAh shorter of its predecessor but with Quick Charge it can go to 75% in just 30 minutes.