In today’s increasingly saturated smartphone market, it is not surprising when news comes along that a major manufacturer in the marketplace is using underhanded ways to stay ahead of the competition. Oppo has just demonstrated, how strong the need is to stay ahead, once again…

The Chinese mobile phone manufacturer is in the news for the second time, related to tampering of benchmark scores of its phones. In this case particularly for the new Oppo F7, for the AnTuTu benchmark.

The Oppo F7 phone runs on MediaTek’s Helio P60 chipset and it was found that the phone had artificially increased performance which resulted by boosting all of its processor cores to the top speed of 2.0 Ghz, even though the phone app doesn’t require that much power.

Investigative actions

To confirm this rumor, a Vietnamese Blog called Genk ran the benchmark tests again on a dummy app, and again the results were the same, the phone’s performance was boosted with all the cores, running at max speed.

The advantages are quite clear, almost too perfectly. With this trick the Oppo F7 hits all of its main competitors out of the park, including the Redmi 5 Plus with Snapdragon 625 chipset, Redmi Note 5 Pro with Snapdragon 636 chipset, and even the Mi 6X which runs on Qualcomm’s best mid-range chip; the Snapdragon 660.

Oppo responded, in its defence, by saying that the boost was due to its phones having a new 12 Nanometer chipset and AI technology. This causes it to perform at peak performance under demanding conditions.

Partners in crime

Just last year, manufacturers OnePlus and Meizu were reportedly caught tampering with benchmark scores as well, by optimizing performance of their respective smartphones. Interestingly it must be noted that OnePlus, has the same parent company as Oppo.