Blackview Oscal S80 Review – Rugged Smartphone Under $180 With Helio G85 SoC, 13000mAh & 33W Fast Charge

OSCAL from Blackview is an new emerging tech brand that specializes in providing high-quality while budget smart devices with both strong performance and trendy design. After the great success of the Oscal S60 with a night vision camera, Oscal recently unveils its latest budget rugged phone, Oscal S80 with an attractive price.

This phone combines providing extreme use conditions with a very durable body, and a regular device like any Android phone, so the S80 has a number of outstanding specifications represented by a 6.5″ FHD+ display, a 12MP main rear camera, and 13000mAh Battery with 33W fast charging. On the other hand, it also rocks a MediaTek Helio G85 SoC and runs Android 12, and like every rugged phone, is IP68 and IP69K rated, it’s also MIL-STD-810H certified. This makes it good rugged smartphones with such specs in the low-cost segment. So, Let’s head over to our Blackview Oscal S80 review to know more details about this phone.

Blackview Oscal S80 Features

• Rugged Design & Premium Build
• Android 12 OS
• MediaTek Helio G85 Octa-Core
• 6GB+Up to 4GB Extended + 128GB ROM
• 6.58″ FHD+ Display
• AI Triple camera (12MP+8MP+2MP)
• 13000mAh Battery, 33W Fast Charging
• IP68, IP69K & MIL-STD-810H
• Dual 4G Network, GPS, NFC

Design & Build Quality

Oscal has improved the overall design aspect of the Oscal S80, it’s a durable smartphone that is built to survive no matter what you use or work, it’s extremely durable and not easy to break as tests have proven. The smartphone has a practical design with an interesting texture from high-quality rubber that fits comfortably in the hand and does not try to slip out, and the finish is extremely thorough. All of the parts have been superbly put together, and you get additional shade options from the black, green, orange.

As a result, the phone appears tough. All the elements fit perfectly, the materials feel reliable, and everything is fine in this regard. Despite its Metal and rubber frame, it feels super solid when you hold it in your hands. The edges, ports, buttons, and all the other exterior components have a precise finish, which further boosts the feel-good factor.

The design of the S80 is beautiful with some touches that make it look more eye-catching and more premium. it features a large screen on the front of 6.58 inches and a high-quality synthetic rubber body on the back, Although is a rugged phone, has a 18.9mm thin frame that gives a kind of wonderful feeling when held in your hand, despite its weight of 460g. If you ask me about the quality of the manufacturing, there is nothing to complain about it, because Oscal is always working to provide high-quality products to users all over the world at affordable prices. So, The design and build of the Blackview Oscal S80 are very satisfying.

On The Front

As we mentioned earlier, in front of the device, you have a full screen of 6.58 inches that takes 85% of the body, the bezels around the screen are neat, but with prominent edges. The notch for the front camera is classic Dot Drop with a 8MP camera on the middle of the top for taking selfies and video chats, which we will talk more about soon.

On The Back

But the back is radically different from any phone I’ve seen before with a premier look and came in three colors Black or Orange, Green and is made of a high-quality synthetic rubber layer, and reinforced with four thick cushions in the corners to handle the toughest collisions and for comfort when carried and also to prevent the screen from scratching. In the middle of the top, what catches your attention is an island with a bump and three cameras and flashlights. Also embossed the Oscal logo lowest cameras.

Ports And Buttons

The volume button and power button are integrated with a fingerprint scanner which is surprisingly good at this price, and there is a SIM card slot that holds two nano-SIM cards and a MicroSD card and has a customizable button, you can make a trigger to activate certain functions in the system settings. All buttons are made of durable metal, which gives them more solidity. In terms of ports, the S80 is equipped with a USB Type-C port that is covered with a waterproof port protector, keeping them safe from water and dust. If you notice the 3.5mm audio jack is missing, that means either you have to use wireless headphones or a USB-C to 3.5mm adapter.

Waterproof

The Oscal S80 is covered by high-quality synthetic rubber and rated with IP68 and IP69K, which means it is dust-resistant scratch-resistant shock and drop-resistant, and water-resistant up to 1.5 meters for up to 30 minutes. Moreover, it can withstand high pressure and high-temperature washing test, and withstand 100 bar (1450 psi) high water pressure and 80°C high water temperature. In addition, it also has MIL-STD-810H certification, a military standard certification that ensures the integrity of the device is maintained in almost any situation.

Oscal S80 – Display Quality

Now, let’s move on to why I fell in love with this phone. The display on the Blackview Oscal S80 is one of the best that you get in rugged phone under $180, with a 6.58-inch IPS with FHD+ resolution and aspect ratio of 20:9, and a modest screen resolution of 1080*2408. The display is definitely one of the strongest suits of the phone. It comes with excellent viewing angles, crisp content, and accurate color reproduction. The display’s contrast makes for an immersive viewing experience with deep blacks and vivid colors.  

The first thing that caught my eye was the colors on this display, which look more vibrant than you’d expect from a rugged phone. Even the black levels are pretty good for the price, and that very well explains why the screen has a good contrast ratio and vibrant colors, the content on the screen doesn’t look very sharp and the brightness levels are slightly lower. But that’s what you get for the price.

While on a sunny day, the screen does not fade and remains readable, Of course, this does not apply to direct sunlight. This type of screen is the best you can get on a budget phone and provides good color reproduction with no picture distortion and blue light protection for comfortable reading. Yes, this screen is not better than an AMOLED screen, but it remains better than other LCD screens and is suitable for this price range. In short, I find it perfectly adequate for web browsing and content consumption, you will get the best value for what you pay, a large and high-quality screen suitable for media consumption, whether you are watching the video, playing games or browsing the social media.

Blackview Oscal S80 – Cameras

So far, the overall rating of the Oscal S80 rugged phone is more than great, And this work continues through a triple camera system with a 12MP Sony IMX362 sensor with f/2.0, (wide), 1/2.55″, PDAF. Also, an 8MP Ultra-Wide Angle sensor 117˚ and 2MP Depth. To be capable of capturing the details, colors, or ranges to produce high-quality images.

This is with some great features most notably, allowing you to take great pictures. With this camera setup, the S80 manages to capture pictures with decent image quality, at least in daylight. The images look bright, vibrant, and quite detailed for the price. Speaking of low light, photos from the primary lens taken at night appear to be pretty soft and grainy. There’s a lot of noise in the pictures and the colors appear quite washed out as well. Plus, the main camera sensor helps you capture gorgeous memory for any moment with clear and sharp images.

Moving on to the ultrawide lens, the colors of the photos taken via this lens closely match the colors from the primary lens, which is a good thing. The dynamic range is decent enough, There is also minimal barrel distortion in ultrawide images, and in daylight, you can get some pretty social-media-worthy shots from this lens, however, the low-light performance is less than ideal.

It’s powered by advanced Arcsoft Tech 3.0 with Panorama Mode, HDR mode, Night Mode, AI Beauty Mode, and Portrait Mode, which is tailored for nearly any condition to photograph a full view of the mountain, grab a street shot at night, snap a selfie at home, or take a group photo in the crowd.

Video Recording

The Oscal S80 can record videos at up to 1440/1080P resolution at 30fps with the rear and 1080P at 30fps for the front. The quality of the videos is good at this resolution, and there is no stabilization but still, the results are not looking underwhelming according to the price range. If you want to reduce some of the shakes, you will have to shoot in Full HD with lower quality.

Front Camera

Thankfully, the S80 adopted a 8MP Smsoung S5K4H7 sensor for the front camera to make decent selfies with enhanced AI software support. The skin tone and details are good, just the exaggerated contrast and excessive noise in darker points compromise the quality a little. Night selfies lose sharpness but are still good enough to share on social media.

Blackview Oscal S80 – Overall Performance

Oscal is banking on its new chipset for this Oscal S80 release. This new model ticks with a powerful gaming chipset, the MediaTek Helio G85 chipset, compared with a Helio G70, the Helio G85 is almost 20% higher in GPU frequency. The new SoC is developed under 12nm process and packs up to 2GHz of octa-core CPU. So the processor is expected to give an excellent, fast, and smooth performance in various daily tasks, whether simple or hard. It is also widely used in budget smartphones such as Xiaomi Redmi 12C, Realme C25s , Infinix Note 10, Xiaomi Redmi Note 9, and many others. So, basic and day-to-day performance is fine and acceptable. You can browse social media, watch videos, take videos, and other basic tasks just fine. However, you’d start to notice occasional lags and stutters when you run multiple apps at once.

In Geekbench 5 benchmark test, the handset tallied 347 single-core and 1395 multi-core score and 246993 point at Antutu Benchmark, So its pretty comparable to Qualcomm’s more popular budget chip. It is nice that Oscal opted for an Helio G85 SoC instead of any underpowered processor. Note that G85 isn’t the best processor but it definitely falls in the best at this pricing.

This is reflected in smooth day-to-day performance. Navigating the interface is such a breeze. Pulling up and dismissing apps are seamless due to the 6GB of RAM and supports up to 4GB of virtual RAM for improved speed and performance, and there’s no significant lag or crashing of apps. You also don’t have to worry about running out of storage if you choose the 128GB ROM but if that’s not enough then the company has included a MicroSD slot for up to 1TB. This combination is a powerhouse when we talk about mid-range smartphones, particularly for system responsiveness.

The Oscal S80 is built for entry-level gaming. We have steered through several gaming apps from the likes of PUBG and Call of Duty Mobile, to name a few. surprisingly it can go HD graphics in PUBG but with 30fps only. Most lesser graphic games can go 60fps smoothly, but when it comes to graphic demanding games and esports, the frames are reduced to 30fps but gives higher visual graphics. Apparently, S80 is great in gaming.

In the Call of Duty Mobile, the phone managed to unlock the Medium Graphics quality and the High frame rate, the stuttering worsens when a ton of effects appears on the screen. It is a playable experience more than a smooth experience with medium graphics quality and High frame rate. So, for graphic-hungry apps like this games, it defaults to medium graphics; though we think that it’s still playable when you force it to high graphics, it may not be the best experience.

Software

One of the standout features of the Blackview Oscal S80 is that it will be an early adopter of Android 12 with new features like chat bubbles, conversation-prioritizing, screen recording, one-time permission, privacy dashboard, split screen mode, and some interesting customization additions with UI that has better gesture navigation controls, a dark theme, and contains most of the features that come with the system, the most important of which is the presence of all Google services, Making the tablet experience smoother and more personalized. Also, I like the large icons, animations, and overall responsiveness of the GUI.

Doke OS_P 3.0 system based on Android 12 renders its extreme fluency experience and elegant UI interface that amuse you and saves you time and it is well appraised by users. This operating system is the fruit of the persistent effort of the Blackview software team to design a more customized and fluent OS for a more intelligent user experience. For example, Doke OS_P 3.0 comes with a bunch of self-developed apps such as Cold Room, and System Manager.

As I always say, the stock Android system is best for these devices, with a simple and smooth launcher for better performance, especially since it does not contain pre-installed apps or games. However, it has a toolkit app which is the height meter, compass, gradienter, protractor, and more but does not burden the device and is without pop-up ads, bloatware, or third-party apps.

Playing Content

Playing the content on YouTube, was very smooth. You can play videos at a maximum of 1080p at 60 FPS without any problems or lag, And this is the highest quality you can get. Next, let’s take a look at the DMR information and Widevine security. I can tell you I’m a little disappointed with this because it’s only Level 3, so you won’t be able to get HD on Netflix or other streaming services. and this level maybe not be found on all Chinese smartphones without exaggeration. However, you can still enjoy Netflix and all other streaming services in 480p resolution.

Connectivity & Call Quality

Blackview Oscal S80 is a dual-SIM smartphone equipped with a SIM slot that accommodates two 4G nano-sim cards and a MicroSD card that support all bandwidth offerings of 4G and 3G and so on, so its expected that you will get wide coverage and good signal quality for making the phone calls and accessing the Internet easily.

To connect to WiFi networks, It supports dual bandwidths of 2.4GHz & 5GHz providing low latency and faster transmission speed, resulting in greater efficiency, reliability, and security. Of course, there is Bluetooth 5.0. That’s not all, there are also some basic sensors for a smartphone, including a gyroscope, accelerometers, and even an electronic compass. It’s worth mentioning that Oscal added the Multi-function NFC according to the feedback of users so that it’s easy to use Google pay as well as contactless cards.

Battery And Charging Time

As a rugged phone, the battery in the Oscal S80 is no less important than the rest of the requirements. Thanks to the 13000mAh battery it is enough to handle the daily demands and it will easily last for at least two days, if not more. This means you can go on weekend on a camping or fishing trip without having to worry about charging your phone every day. Of course, the time is less when playing games or using 4G and depending on your usage such as the times you open the screen, and the type of applications you run, it will stay with you for a whole 2 day on one charge it mostly takes about 2 hours to fully charge 13000mAh using Type-C with support wireless charging, and there is fast charging supports 33W. However, I can say that the battery was satisfying.

Oscal S80 supports reverse charging which comes in handy when another device is short of power such as a smartphone, smartwatch, earphones, etc, So you can make it as a power bank at any time.

Final verdict

If I had to choose one of the best-rugged phones in 2022 at $180, Blackview Oscal S80 would be one of the candidates, makes a good impression, and has got a rendition of the rugged phone design. And there is no doubt that the Oscal S80 holds all the ingredients to be a leading rugged smartphone in this price category.

And what really distinguishes it from any other phone is its large 6.58-inch FHD Display ensures an enjoyable viewing and good use of the latest Android 12 features and long-lasting battery with speedy charging support that you will not need to charge while you are on a safari or camping with friends, or just finding a gadget for your daily work, it will be a reliable companion, especially with the build quality and durability, and the best protection certificates for a smartphone against water, dust, and even shocks, And with good performance making it to perform for all tasks. And there are many attractive features, and most importantly, it is affordable.

Despite the many features that we mentioned, the Oscal S80 looks like a fairly balanced device and positioned itself as one of the top contenders for the title of the best affordable rugged phone on the market, with features perfect for anyone who needs a rugged phone at this time.

Oscal S80 Price And Where To Buy

Usually, better performance means a higher price, but not in the case of Blackview Oscal S80. The smartphone is now only priced at $180 on Aliexpress Store. So, if you are an armored phone fan, none is stopping you to purchase this phone. And to view its price or buy it, you can access the offer by clicking on the store icon.

What’s in the Box?

• Blackview Oscal S80 Rugged Smartphone
• AC Power Charger
• Data Cable
• Protective Film (Pre-installed)
• SIM Pick
• Multi-language User Manual