OPPO’s ColorOS operating system was first announced back in September 2013. Since then, the company had made major refinements that not only improve user experience, but also put forward a better productivity and entertainment experience on OPPO smartphones.
This year’s ColorOS 13 marks the tenth iteration of the operating system which I’d gotten a chance to test out for a couple of months courtesy of OPPO Singapore. So for those who wish to find out more about the latest ColorOS 13, here are some of it’s key highlights.
New Aquamorphic Design
OPPO introduce a new Aquamorphic Design for the user interface which is said to be inspired by the way water acts in nature. In practical terms, that basically means the UI is now more fluid, vibrant, and inclusive. Compared to last year’s ColorOS 12, the UI elements look slightly more refined while app launches and transition felt smoother – allowing users to enjoy a more comfortable visual experience in day-to-day usage.
Apart from the visual changes, OPPO also added new home screen widgets such as Large Folder which is able to store up to 9 different apps. Unlike traditional folder which takes up a 1 x 1 grid on the home screen, the new Large Folder widget takes up a 2 x 2 space (refer to the third photo of the above screenshots) which certainly makes it more legible.
Anyway you can head down to our coverage here to find more about the new Aquamorphic Design if you’re keen.
A Smarter Always-on Display
As usual, OPPO has introduced a series of new AOD animations known as ”Homeland” which depicts powerful scenes of wild animals in nature and the different homes they live in, based on daily temperature change. The idea of including these animations is to prompt users ”to pay closer attention to climate change and the impact it has on the earth we live in”.
However, the key highlight actually lies in the ability to add widgets such as Spotify player which provides user with the ease to play, pause, and shuffle the songs directly from the AOD screen. This is certainly one of the most innovative AOD feature till date which I’m sure is something most of us will find useful in our day-to-day usage.
Aside from that, the always-on display is also able to show food delivery information from Zomato and Swiggy which are sadly not available in the local market – but who knows if the company decides to integrate food delivery services like Grab Food or Deliveroo in the near future.
Industry’s First Meeting Assistant
The recent pandemic has led to more meetings being held online. OPPO understands that well and it’s precisely the reason why the company introduce a brand new Meeting Assistant feature in ColorOS 13.
What this feature does is that it automatically detects any ongoing meeting and subsequently optimize your conference call by allocating more network resources to the meeting apps be it Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet. This ensures you wouldn’t get distracted by any lag or disconnection when having an important meeting.
Better Productivity With Multi-Screen Connect
Another intuitive feature in ColorOS 13 is known as Multi-Screen Connect which allows you to connect your smartphone to your own PC in order to facilitate quicker file transfer between devices. In fact, this feature also works on the OPPO Pad Air if you happens to own one.
Besides offering a convenient drag-and-drop solution for file transfer, the new Multi-Screen Connect feature also allows user to leverage the larger screen estate of their PC by displaying multiple mobile apps simultaneously on the PC screen.
All The Privacy & Security Protection You Need
Finally, ColorOS 13 integrates all the latest privacy and security features of the new Android 13 OS. That means user will get to enjoy features such as the updated clipboard which automatically clears the clipboard history after a short period of time to percent malicious apps from potentially stealing it’s contents.
Aside from those features introduced by Android 13, ColorOS 13 also comes with it’s own privacy implementations such as Auto Pixelate which uses an on-device algorithm model to automatically blur out the profile photos and names in chat screenshots. Likewise, there’s also a new Private Safe feature which make use of industry-leading Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) to safeguard the files you’re storing.
Rollout Schedule
OPPO had already began the roll out of ColorOS 13 Beta Version starting with the OPPO Find X5 series smartphones back in September this year. The same update is expected to hit more than half of the models by the end of the year according to the rollout schedule published by the OPPO.
