Oppo A53 lands in the UK. Cheap as chips.


Smashing hard into the budget category, the Oppo A53 should be available on Carphone Warehouse (in a lovely Mint Cream and Black) or, in just Black, on Amazon, AO, Very and – a little later this month – on O2, EE and Virgin Media.

The handset has a SIM-free price of £159 and comes with a 90Hz refresh 1600×720 screen at 269ppi. There’s a couple of versions – one with 4GB RAM and 64GB storage plus another with 6GB RAM and 128GB storage. You’ll probably find the 4GB / 64GB model being more popular but you can stick a microSD card in too.

Just as an aside, I love the way they’ve written the specs on this one – the height is “about 16.39cm”, the width “about 7.51cm” and it’s “about 8.4mm” thick.

The handset has an admirable 5000mAh battery and comes with 18W fast charge. There’s a 13 megapixel main shooter at the back plus a 2 megapixel macro lens and a 2 megapixel depth camera too. Up front, in the display, an 8 megapixel selfie cam (on the UK model).

It uses the Snapdragon 460 CPU providing up to 1.8GHz and does 4G plus dual-band WiFi (that’s pretty decent at this price), plus Bluetooth 5.0, GPS and USB-C charging. No NFC for your contactless payments though, at least according to the specs. It runs ColorOS 7.2 based on Android 10.

Here in the UK you’ll probably be getting the 4GB / 64GB model, so grab yourself a microSD card if you fancy this phone. It also comes with a pair of “Super Dual Speakers” which add Dirac 2.0 – a state-of-the-art digital sound correction technology.

More info on the Oppo website but, to add to our confused mental state, Amazon is listing an Oppo A53 here with 4GB RAM and 128GB of storage for £159.

Update – We’ve checked into this and Amazon have it listed wrong, it is in fact 64GB.