Google Now gives you a short overview of information it believes is relevant to you right now. Going to work in the morning? Google Now knows this and lets you know there's a big traffic jam on your usual way to the office, so it offers you a re-route.
It can interpret a lot of things from your search history as well. If you've been searching for, let's say, your favorite football team, Google Now will prepare a card showing you the next match the team is playing and will provide you score updates once the game begins.
Google has also integrated Voice Actions. They can handle stuff like sending messages (SMS or email), initiating a voice call, asking for directions, taking a note or opening a site. Google Now can also launch apps, check and manage your calendar and look for nearby places of interest and stuff like movie openings in theaters.
One problem Google Now has on the Oppo R819 is that there's no gesture shortcut to launch it, you can't long press a button for it, you have to use the Google Search widget or the shortcut in the custom app switcher.
One big advantage of Google's Jelly Bean is that the voice typing functionality doesn't require an internet connection to work. You can enter text by speaking anywhere you can use the on-screen keyboard - be it the Messaging app or a note taking app - without the need for a data connection as long as you have downloaded the needed language packs (and those only take about 20-25MB of your storage per pack).
Making voice typing available offline also made it faster as it's not dependent on your connection. What's even more impressive is that the transition hasn't cost it anything in terms of accuracy.
The Oppo R819 uses a Mediatek MT6589 chipset with a quad-core Cortex-A7 CPU (clocked at 1.2GHz), 1GB of RAM and a PowerVR SGX544 GPU. Those don't sound like killer specs, but should feel right at home in the midrange.
Single-core performance isn't great - it's comparable to that of the old Cortex-A9 core. That's typically no match for Krait cores, but at least Mediatek fits 4 of the A7s, which should compensate in the next couple of benchmarks.
Lower is better
Linpack puts the R819 very near the bottom of the chart, but there are last year's flagships like the Galaxy S III, One X and Optimus 4X HD keeping it company. Geekbench 2 meanwhile puts the former kings further up the chart, but the HTC One mini is barely faster than the Oppo here (while it was much faster in Linpack).
Higher is better
Higher is better
AnTuTu puts the whole system to the test (CPU, GPU, RAM and storage) and places the Oppo R819 close to the Samsung Galaxy S4 mini and ahead of the One mini. Those are some of the hottest midrangers from two of the biggest Android vendors, so well done Oppo.
Higher is better
Running GLBenchmark at 1080p offscreen proved to be fruitless - the single-core PowerVR SGX544 is clocked relatively low in the MT6589 chipset and just can't do 1080p.
Epic Citadel runs at screen resolution - 720p in this case - and we set it to High Quality. The Oppo R819 hit just under 51fps, which is very close to the Adreno 320-powered LG Optimus G and ahead of the Samsung Galaxy S III and Oppo Find 5. This means 3D games are more than playable on the R819 and there's always the option to move to High Performance (or equivalent) setting if a new game proves too heavy.
Higher is better
Relatively low single-core performance hurts the JavaScript speed, but the score is very close to decent performers in this category, so even JavaScript-intensive pages should render okay on the R819.
Lower is better
For overall HTML5 performance, the Oppo R819 comes within reach of the Galaxy S4 mini and the HTC One mini in BrowserMark 2, while Vellamo places it further down, sandwiched between the LG Optimus G and Nexus 4.
Higher is better
Higher is better
Mediatek set out to make a budget chipset and already have a solid portfolio of phones powered by the MT6589. This should mean better developer support. As for daily use, it offers good enough performance on all fronts.
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