After weeks of teasers and anticipation, OPPO has finally announced the new ColorOS 7 operating system. The OS builds on the existing ColorOS 6’s borderless concept but makes it a lot lighter and easy on the eyes by decluttering the UI and tweaking its overall colors.
There are a lot of new changes made to ColorOS 7, so let’s take a quick look at them down below.
ColorOS 7 Design
The ColorOS 7 isn’t a revamped UI. So if you have ever used the ColorOS 6, you should be familiar with the overall interface. However, OPPO has increased the white space in the UI and tweaked the UI colors to make it easy on the eyes. The ColorOS 7 tones down the saturation to reduce visual fatigue. At the conference, the company revealed that on average, a user spends around 4.7 hours on his smartphone. Therefore it was necessary for the company to work on a user interface that was light and didn’t wear out the user.
The ColorOS 7 brings four different icon designs, including a couple of minimalistic options.
The company also launched a new OPPO Sans font with the new OS. The Chinese characters of the font were developed by Zhu Zhiwei of Hanyi Fonts while the western characters were developed by the U.S. design company, Pentagram. What’s even more interesting is that the OPPO Sans font has been released free to use for everyone, even for commercial use.
The ColorOS 7 also brings a system-wide dark mode that covers third-party applications as well. You can also schedule the dark mode to apply at a specific time in the day. You can further reduce eye strain in the dark mode by applying the eye protection layer on top.
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ColorOS 7 Features
There are a bunch of new features in the new ColorOS 7 version. For example, there’s a new Focus mode, similar to the Zen mode on OxygenOS.
ColorOS 7 is smarter too. It can automatically switch to drive mode if it connects to the car Bluetooth and it can send a sleep mode reminder at night, depending on your smartphone usage patterns, which activates DND and dark mode on the device.
The ColorOS 7 also comes with a half screen feature which enables the UI to show small cards like contacts, calendar, and alarms on the bottom part of the screen. This is different from the traditional split-screen mode found in the previous version. Talking about split-screen, the new OS comes with a special Flashback (international name may be different) button that will come in handy when you have to quickly switch between two apps.
We don’t have exact details on how it works in each scenario but imagine if you are gaming and you get a text which you have to urgently reply to. The flashback button comes to your rescue by offering a one-click switch between your game and the messaging app. What’s more, the button will give you a quick snippet of what’s happening in the game.
This button can also come in handy for other scenarios where you want a live view of what’s happening in the other app. For example, if you are texting and if your Uber or in China’s case, DiDi driver has arrived, the button will show a message for the same.
There’s also a new password manager powered by Google. Camera centric features in ColorOs 7 include a tweaked camera UI, portrait mode 2.0, night mode, super stabilization, and Soloop video editor. The OS also supports three-finger long screenshot and cropping.
Another interesting new feature is the added support for the cross-brand file transfer protocol that was established recently. If you remember, we reported a couple of months back that Xiaomi, OPPO, Vivo and other big names came together to establish a cross-brand file transfer alliance. With the ColorOS 7, this transfer protocol goes live for some OPPO models.
ColorOS 7 Performance
In terms of performance enhancements, the new ColorOS 7 improves application startup speeds and fluency. The company says that app startup speeds have increased by 25% and system fluency and RAM utilization have improved by 30% and 40% respectively. Even gaming performance is reportedly improved, with touch response and game frame rates improving by 15% and 19% respectively in the new OS. These figures are likely with respect to ColorOS 6’s performance.
OPPO also said that there are more than 300 million ColorOS users worldwide today. The OS has been translated in over 40 countries and in more than 80 languages across the world.
The ColorOS 7 will first be available on the OPPO Reno3 model that will launch in December.
UP NEXT: OPPO to unveil ColorOS 7 in India on November 26
