Oppo N1 goes official: rotating camera, touch panel on back, release date in October, flagship price

The big focus is of course on camera. The Oppo N1 features a 13-megapixel camera that you can rotate 206 degrees so it can serve as both a rear and front facing snapper. There’s a CMOS sensor inside and a wide f/2.0 aperture. It is powered by a dedicated and specially designed Fujitsu imaging chip. The camera also supports small plug-in lenses enabling zoom levels of up to 10 times and 15 times.

Next, there is a unique touch panel on the back. It does not stand out in any way - it looks as if you are simply touching the plastic on the back with your fingers. In reality, you can simply slide your finger up or down the back touch panel to navigate around in menus and the web browser.

5.9" display in a true phablet

The Oppo N1 is a large phone and fairly thin plastic device coming in black and white. If we had to compare it to a well known device, that would be the Galaxy Note series of phablets, but the N1 is even larger and wider. It also weighs heavier at 213 grams, or 0.47 pounds.

It features a 5.9-inch 1080 x 1920 pixel full HD IPS display that is very sharp. Pixel density stands at 377ppi, way above the ‘Retina’ threshold.

Software-wise, we’re looking at Android 4.2 with Color OS, a custom skin made by Oppo. The N1 should also be able to run stock Android thanks to Cyanogenmod.

Under the hood, the Oppo N1 runs on a quad-core Snapdragon 600 chip running at 1.7GHz. There’s Adreno 320 graphics and 2GB of RAM on board. The presence of a whopping 3610mAh battery is definitely reassuring.

In terms of connectivity, the N1 supports all standards like dual-band Wi-Fi 802.11ac, Bluetooth 4.0 and NFC.

The Oppo N1 price is set pretty steep at nearly 3500 yuan, or the equivalent of $570 off contract. The release date for the Oppo N1 is set somewhere in October, but pre-orders are already available in China. The phone is not expected to be immediately available internationally - it’s mostly targeting the world’s biggest Chinese market.