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Having a 2.3GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor on board, accompanied by an Adreno 330 GPU and 2GB of RAM it's no real surprise that the Oppo N3 flies along in day-to-day usage. It's a similar combination of hardware found in the OnePlus One, Samsung Galaxy S5 and Sony Xperia Z2.
There was not a hint of slow-down, no matter which apps I was zipping in and out of, and top-end games that have started to show the age of my own HTC One worked flawlessly on the N3.
So now you may be wondering whether the N3's apparent speed translated well into a good set of benchmark scores, and happily the answer was yes. I ran the Geekbench 3 app, which tests a variety of performance aspects, to come up with two scores: one for single and one for multi-core processing.
The N3 scored an average of 963 in the single-core test, and 2763 in the multi-core test, putting it in the same realm as Samsung's S5 and the HTC One M8.
For making the most of the 3000mAh battery, Oppo has included a battery manager, which allows you to turn down the power, and in return get a little more longevity out of the N3. There is also a 'Super Power-saving' mode, similar to HTC's Extreme Power Saving mode, which limits the phone's functionality to give even longer battery life. It's a feature that many brands are now incorporating into Android in one form or another, and is gladly received here on the N3.
Although it doesn't have the latest Qualcomm processor onboard, and chooses to stick with 2GB of RAM rather than the 3GB you'll find in the Sony Xperia Z3, everything I could throw at the N3 was handled quite admirably, without a hint of slow-down.
Battery life
A 3000mAh battery is now par for the course on top-end Android handsets. Anything less and the phone would likely struggle to make it through the day.
I'm happy to report that the N3 made it through a long day full of music play back, the odd dabble in games, as well as regular checks of social media apps and my regularly-visited web sites of choice.
It's not inconceivable to think that the N3 could make it close to 48 hours of uptime with careful usage, and by employing the power-saving modes available.
As always, I put the phone under an intensive test by running our HD video of choice at full brightness with all the power-saving modes disabled and volume turned up.
After running the 90 minute video, the battery had dropped from fully charged down to 75% - a drop of 25% which betters the iPhone 6 Plus, puts it right alongside the LG G3, but doesn't manage to perform quite as well as the Nexus 6, which only dropped 17%.
