It’s no secret that 2025 was the golden age of budget phones. A year where you could get fast performance and capable cameras all for under ₹20k. Unfortunately, 2026 isn’t shaping up to be the year we all hoped it would be. It’s the year we’re starting to feel the consequences of AI in the form of sky-high RAM and storage prices. As you may have guessed, budget phones have fared the worst, given their already thin margins. OPPO has historically done well with its K-series, and this year the Chinese smartphone maker is back with the all-new K14 5G.
The K14 is an interesting phone, to say the least. It packs the Dimensity 6300 processor, a 50MP main camera, and a new design. The first point of comparison for many would be its predecessor, the K13. It was the favourite of many and still comes out as a better phone than the K14. But to me, that’s not the correct way to judge. Sure, the K13 launched at the same price of ₹17,999, but it now costs over ₹20k, so the two devices simply cannot be compared. This had me wondering: How does the new OPPO K14 justify its price tag? To answer this question, I asked OPPO to send the K14. This review sums up my experience with the device over the last two weeks, highlighting its pros and cons to help you make an informed decision.
OPPO K14 Review
Summary
The new OPPO K14 is a good phone with a pretty design that’s more than capable of handling everyday tasks and even gaming, for that matter. However, it’s not perfect. I’d love to see better nighttime camera performance and a higher-resolution display, but neither is a deal-breaker.
Design & Hardware
Design has always been OPPO’s bread and butter, with some handsome-looking phones throughout its history. I can pretty much say the same things about the K14 as well. It’s a tried-and-tested design that just works for everyone. The white variant I received has geometric patterns on the back that catch the light in different ways. This adds a bit of style without being overly flashy. I handed the phone to some of my family and friends, and they all had the same opinion. The matte finish picks up no fingerprints, so the phone stays pristine at all times.
The sides are plastic, of course, but that’s not a problem. The silver finish matches the white frame well, and the in-hand feel is good, too. Don’t get me wrong, the K14 is a big phone, but with a slight curve to the frame, it’s manageable enough to use with one hand for someone with average-sized fingers. The back also includes the dual camera setup tucked inside an island. The design is fairly straightforward, but what I do love is that the camera lenses don’t protrude much, so the K14 doesn’t wobble on a table. The weight can range from 209–216g, depending on your color, and it’s distributed pretty well for a phone with a 7,000 mAh battery pack.
Security is handled by a side-mounted fingerprint scanner. It’s plenty fast and works with both wet and greasy fingers, unlike the optical ones. The K14 also gets the myriad of IP ratings, including IP68 and IP69, meaning you can go swimming with the K14 if desired. Though I would always be against that since water damage isn’t covered under warranty. Also, OPPO is heavily advertising the K14’s durability, which I put to the test when I accidentally dropped it from waist height. There was no damage whatsoever.
Display & Speakers
The OPPO K14 features a 6.75-inch HD+ LCD display with a 120Hz refresh rate. I’ll say it straight: the display isn’t a selling point for the K14. The 120Hz refresh rate is great, but the HD+ resolution simply limits everyday usability, and the text does feel noticeably less sharp. However, if you haven’t been testing flagship phones every month, then the K14 would feel right at home. The 1,125-nit peak brightness makes the screen visible outdoors without me having to squint much. The content experience is also fine, but nothing special.
The stereo speakers, on the other hand, are really good. There’s ample separation between instruments, and mids stay decently clear along the spectrum.
Performance
Performance is what makes or breaks the budget smartphone experience. The K14 features the Dimensity 6300 processor, featuring 2 Cortex-A76 cores running at 2400 MHz and 6 Cortex-A55 cores at 2000 MHz, along with the Mali-G57 MP2. In addition, my review unit came with 8GB of LPDDR4x RAM and 256GB of UFS 2.1 internal storage.
The Dimensity 6300 has been around for a long time and has proven to be plenty capable. The K14’s everyday performance is actually really good. ColorOS is my favourite Android skin, and that pays enough dividends. Both light apps and heavier ones like the camera open quickly, switching between tasks is smooth, and the RAM is enough to keep multiple tasks running at the same time.
The animations, while not as pretty on my Find X8, are still fluid enough to make the experience feel premium. The phone also gets a dose of my favourite AI features, including the likes of AI Portrait Retouching, Recompose, and Perfect Shot. All of them help you tweak the camera’s output for a better-looking photo. All that being said, there are many pre-installed apps, including the annoying “Hot Apps” folder, which you’ll need to remove manually.
Since this is a review, I also put the Dimensity 6300 through its paces with a series of benchmarks. The K14 scored 814 in Geekbench’s single-core and 1,981 in the multi-core test. In AnTuTu, the phone achieved 688,325 points. Moving on to gaming, I installed BGMI and played it at Smooth and Extreme settings. Overall, the experience was decent for the price, with stable 60 FPS gameplay and no dropped frames, even in intense situations.
Battery Life & Charging
If you ask me for just one reason to consider the K14, I’ll probably say it’s the 7,000 mAh battery. I couldn’t push the phone hard enough to drain it in a day, and that’s big praise. For context, I started my day at around 9 AM with 100% charge remaining. After my morning cup of coffee, I decided to run benchmarks on the K14. Once that was in order, I watched a few YouTube videos and hopped into a long BGMI gaming session with my friends. The evening was the usual struggle at the gym with the OPPO Enco Air 3 Pro+ connected to the phone. Lastly, I went shopping with my friends and took a few sample photos.
I ended that day with roughly 40% charge remaining. When I did eventually run out of juice the next day, the 45W fast charging came to the rescue. It can charge the battery from 0% to full in around 90 minutes. You can also use the K14 as a power bank to charge other phones with a cable.
Cameras
The K14’s cameras are headlined by a 50MP OV50D sensor paired with a 2MP depth sensor. Selfies are handled by an 8MP shooter. I didn’t expect much from the K14’s cameras, but they are better than expected. Give the main sensor enough light, and it captures some pretty photos, with ample sharpness and decent HDR. The same was true of daytime portraits, where edge detection was on point, and the shallow depth of field looked natural. Skin tones are also managed well. There were a few situations where highlights were slightly blown out, but that isn’t a big issue.
Nighttime is where the OmniVision sensor struggles. Don’t get me wrong, the images are decent, but they just lack details, and there’s noticeable noise. You can also expect to wait before the camera captures the image, since there’s a shutter delay at night, which can make it difficult to capture moving subjects. That said, the 8MP selfie shooter is more than enough to preserve detail while keeping skin tones natural. Videos being capped at just 1080p at 60FPS is a bummer, though.
Verdict
At ₹17,999, the OPPO K14 is the new reality of budget phones in India, and it’s something buyers will have to adjust to. The K14 is a good phone with a pretty design that’s more than capable of handling everyday tasks and even gaming, for that matter. However, it’s not perfect. I’d love to see better nighttime camera performance and a higher-resolution display, but neither is a deal-breaker.
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![Scientists Say Some Black Holes Are Born From Other Black Holes
Since LIGO’s Nobel-winning discovery of gravitational waves—ripples in spacetime—the U.S.-based detector has been picking up on hundreds of signals from black hole mergers. And, after a decade of studying gravitational waves, researchers believe a significant fraction of black holes may come from cosmic chain reactions. A recent paper published in Physical Review Letters describes an analysis of 155 pairs of binary black holes, identified by LIGO and its sisters, Virgo and KAGRA, in Italy and Japan, respectively. According to the study, about 14% of merging black holes may be what’s called “second-generation black holes,” or black holes that form from previous mergers of two smaller black holes. This “hierarchical” backstory is vastly different from the textbook version of how black holes emerge from the explosive death of a star. “Overall in the universe, black holes are merging all the time,” Cailin Plunkett, the study’s first author and a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told MIT News. “Now we’re seeing a relatively consistent picture where there’s a decent percentage of black holes that are coming from this repeated pathway.”
Tracking the invisible Gravitational waves that reach Earth’s detectors typically come from extremely intense events. Over the years, LIGO has picked up some truly perplexing signals. For example, last summer it found the most colossal black hole merger ever—and if that wasn’t wild enough, the black holes that took part in the merger lie within a cosmic “dead zone” for black holes.
This zone refers to a range of black hole masses in which, physically speaking, black holes can’t form through ordinary stellar collapse. From these discoveries, astronomers realized just how little we knew about black holes, which are challenging to investigate directly. In that sense, it was a no-brainer that the ever-growing catalog of LIGO’s gravitational signals would turn up entirely new insights about black holes. “It is increasingly clear, both from individual events and population analyses, that massive black holes exist in [this] range,” the researchers wrote in the latest paper. “These observations have spurred further investigation into mechanisms that can populate this gap.”
A wobbly imprint The latest research represents one such investigation. During mergers, the two black holes spiral toward each other along an orbital plane. When one or both black hole spins are misaligned, the orbital plane can wobble, or “precess,” the researchers explained to MIT News. The degree to which the disk wobbles acts as a parameter from which researchers can measure the masses and spins of the merging black holes. One telling sign of hierarchical mergers is that they’re “lopsided,” meaning one of the pair has a much higher spin and mass than the other. For the study, the team created an analytic model to capture the kind of wobble that would have emerged from second-generation black holes. Around 14% of merging black holes followed this pattern, and the second-generation black holes identified had a very specific range of masses, at around 20 solar masses or 40 solar masses and above. Of mysterious origins To be fair, that might not sound like a whole lot. But it demonstrates that a sizeable portion of known black holes indeed follow this pattern. As for why, the team suspects hierarchical mergers emerge from dense stellar environments. Simply, when multiple neighboring stars die and collapse into black holes, the dense environment can make it easier for those black holes to find each other and merge. That could further lead to the formation of second-generation black holes. Theoretically, this could “repeat potentially ad infinitum, by virtue of the fact that you have a ton of stars and black holes in this really dense environment,” Plunkett said.
But an ensuing mystery concerns those black holes in the 40-and-above regime, which coincides with the aforementioned “death zones” for black hole masses. According to stellar evolution theory, black holes born of supernovas shouldn’t leave any black holes above roughly 45 solar masses, explained Plunkett. “Yet we have seen black holes that are that massive,” she mused. “And the question is: Where did they come from?” For now, it’s hard to say when we’ll get an answer to that question, if ever. But one thing seems to be clear: black holes are a lot weirder than we could ever imagine. #Scientists #Black #Holes #Born #Black #HolesBlack holes,Gravitational wave,LIGO](https://i0.wp.com/gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2026/07/black-hole-hierarchial-mergers-1280x853.jpg?ssl=1 "Scientists Say Some Black Holes Are Born From Other Black Holes
Since LIGO’s Nobel-winning discovery of gravitational waves—ripples in spacetime—the U.S.-based detector has been picking up on hundreds of signals from black hole mergers. And, after a decade of studying gravitational waves, researchers believe a significant fraction of black holes may come from cosmic chain reactions. A recent paper published in Physical Review Letters describes an analysis of 155 pairs of binary black holes, identified by LIGO and its sisters, Virgo and KAGRA, in Italy and Japan, respectively. According to the study, about 14% of merging black holes may be what’s called “second-generation black holes,” or black holes that form from previous mergers of two smaller black holes. This “hierarchical” backstory is vastly different from the textbook version of how black holes emerge from the explosive death of a star. “Overall in the universe, black holes are merging all the time,” Cailin Plunkett, the study’s first author and a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told MIT News. “Now we’re seeing a relatively consistent picture where there’s a decent percentage of black holes that are coming from this repeated pathway.”
Tracking the invisible Gravitational waves that reach Earth’s detectors typically come from extremely intense events. Over the years, LIGO has picked up some truly perplexing signals. For example, last summer it found the most colossal black hole merger ever—and if that wasn’t wild enough, the black holes that took part in the merger lie within a cosmic “dead zone” for black holes.
This zone refers to a range of black hole masses in which, physically speaking, black holes can’t form through ordinary stellar collapse. From these discoveries, astronomers realized just how little we knew about black holes, which are challenging to investigate directly. In that sense, it was a no-brainer that the ever-growing catalog of LIGO’s gravitational signals would turn up entirely new insights about black holes. “It is increasingly clear, both from individual events and population analyses, that massive black holes exist in [this] range,” the researchers wrote in the latest paper. “These observations have spurred further investigation into mechanisms that can populate this gap.”
A wobbly imprint The latest research represents one such investigation. During mergers, the two black holes spiral toward each other along an orbital plane. When one or both black hole spins are misaligned, the orbital plane can wobble, or “precess,” the researchers explained to MIT News. The degree to which the disk wobbles acts as a parameter from which researchers can measure the masses and spins of the merging black holes. One telling sign of hierarchical mergers is that they’re “lopsided,” meaning one of the pair has a much higher spin and mass than the other. For the study, the team created an analytic model to capture the kind of wobble that would have emerged from second-generation black holes. Around 14% of merging black holes followed this pattern, and the second-generation black holes identified had a very specific range of masses, at around 20 solar masses or 40 solar masses and above. Of mysterious origins To be fair, that might not sound like a whole lot. But it demonstrates that a sizeable portion of known black holes indeed follow this pattern. As for why, the team suspects hierarchical mergers emerge from dense stellar environments. Simply, when multiple neighboring stars die and collapse into black holes, the dense environment can make it easier for those black holes to find each other and merge. That could further lead to the formation of second-generation black holes. Theoretically, this could “repeat potentially ad infinitum, by virtue of the fact that you have a ton of stars and black holes in this really dense environment,” Plunkett said.
But an ensuing mystery concerns those black holes in the 40-and-above regime, which coincides with the aforementioned “death zones” for black hole masses. According to stellar evolution theory, black holes born of supernovas shouldn’t leave any black holes above roughly 45 solar masses, explained Plunkett. “Yet we have seen black holes that are that massive,” she mused. “And the question is: Where did they come from?” For now, it’s hard to say when we’ll get an answer to that question, if ever. But one thing seems to be clear: black holes are a lot weirder than we could ever imagine. #Scientists #Black #Holes #Born #Black #HolesBlack holes,Gravitational wave,LIGO")
![Scientists Say Some Black Holes Are Born From Other Black Holes
Since LIGO’s Nobel-winning discovery of gravitational waves—ripples in spacetime—the U.S.-based detector has been picking up on hundreds of signals from black hole mergers. And, after a decade of studying gravitational waves, researchers believe a significant fraction of black holes may come from cosmic chain reactions. A recent paper published in Physical Review Letters describes an analysis of 155 pairs of binary black holes, identified by LIGO and its sisters, Virgo and KAGRA, in Italy and Japan, respectively. According to the study, about 14% of merging black holes may be what’s called “second-generation black holes,” or black holes that form from previous mergers of two smaller black holes. This “hierarchical” backstory is vastly different from the textbook version of how black holes emerge from the explosive death of a star. “Overall in the universe, black holes are merging all the time,” Cailin Plunkett, the study’s first author and a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told MIT News. “Now we’re seeing a relatively consistent picture where there’s a decent percentage of black holes that are coming from this repeated pathway.”
Tracking the invisible Gravitational waves that reach Earth’s detectors typically come from extremely intense events. Over the years, LIGO has picked up some truly perplexing signals. For example, last summer it found the most colossal black hole merger ever—and if that wasn’t wild enough, the black holes that took part in the merger lie within a cosmic “dead zone” for black holes.
This zone refers to a range of black hole masses in which, physically speaking, black holes can’t form through ordinary stellar collapse. From these discoveries, astronomers realized just how little we knew about black holes, which are challenging to investigate directly. In that sense, it was a no-brainer that the ever-growing catalog of LIGO’s gravitational signals would turn up entirely new insights about black holes. “It is increasingly clear, both from individual events and population analyses, that massive black holes exist in [this] range,” the researchers wrote in the latest paper. “These observations have spurred further investigation into mechanisms that can populate this gap.”
A wobbly imprint The latest research represents one such investigation. During mergers, the two black holes spiral toward each other along an orbital plane. When one or both black hole spins are misaligned, the orbital plane can wobble, or “precess,” the researchers explained to MIT News. The degree to which the disk wobbles acts as a parameter from which researchers can measure the masses and spins of the merging black holes. One telling sign of hierarchical mergers is that they’re “lopsided,” meaning one of the pair has a much higher spin and mass than the other. For the study, the team created an analytic model to capture the kind of wobble that would have emerged from second-generation black holes. Around 14% of merging black holes followed this pattern, and the second-generation black holes identified had a very specific range of masses, at around 20 solar masses or 40 solar masses and above. Of mysterious origins To be fair, that might not sound like a whole lot. But it demonstrates that a sizeable portion of known black holes indeed follow this pattern. As for why, the team suspects hierarchical mergers emerge from dense stellar environments. Simply, when multiple neighboring stars die and collapse into black holes, the dense environment can make it easier for those black holes to find each other and merge. That could further lead to the formation of second-generation black holes. Theoretically, this could “repeat potentially ad infinitum, by virtue of the fact that you have a ton of stars and black holes in this really dense environment,” Plunkett said.
But an ensuing mystery concerns those black holes in the 40-and-above regime, which coincides with the aforementioned “death zones” for black hole masses. According to stellar evolution theory, black holes born of supernovas shouldn’t leave any black holes above roughly 45 solar masses, explained Plunkett. “Yet we have seen black holes that are that massive,” she mused. “And the question is: Where did they come from?” For now, it’s hard to say when we’ll get an answer to that question, if ever. But one thing seems to be clear: black holes are a lot weirder than we could ever imagine. #Scientists #Black #Holes #Born #Black #HolesBlack holes,Gravitational wave,LIGO](https://gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2026/07/black-hole-hierarchial-mergers-1280x853.jpg "Scientists Say Some Black Holes Are Born From Other Black Holes
Since LIGO’s Nobel-winning discovery of gravitational waves—ripples in spacetime—the U.S.-based detector has been picking up on hundreds of signals from black hole mergers. And, after a decade of studying gravitational waves, researchers believe a significant fraction of black holes may come from cosmic chain reactions. A recent paper published in Physical Review Letters describes an analysis of 155 pairs of binary black holes, identified by LIGO and its sisters, Virgo and KAGRA, in Italy and Japan, respectively. According to the study, about 14% of merging black holes may be what’s called “second-generation black holes,” or black holes that form from previous mergers of two smaller black holes. This “hierarchical” backstory is vastly different from the textbook version of how black holes emerge from the explosive death of a star. “Overall in the universe, black holes are merging all the time,” Cailin Plunkett, the study’s first author and a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told MIT News. “Now we’re seeing a relatively consistent picture where there’s a decent percentage of black holes that are coming from this repeated pathway.”
Tracking the invisible Gravitational waves that reach Earth’s detectors typically come from extremely intense events. Over the years, LIGO has picked up some truly perplexing signals. For example, last summer it found the most colossal black hole merger ever—and if that wasn’t wild enough, the black holes that took part in the merger lie within a cosmic “dead zone” for black holes.
This zone refers to a range of black hole masses in which, physically speaking, black holes can’t form through ordinary stellar collapse. From these discoveries, astronomers realized just how little we knew about black holes, which are challenging to investigate directly. In that sense, it was a no-brainer that the ever-growing catalog of LIGO’s gravitational signals would turn up entirely new insights about black holes. “It is increasingly clear, both from individual events and population analyses, that massive black holes exist in [this] range,” the researchers wrote in the latest paper. “These observations have spurred further investigation into mechanisms that can populate this gap.”
A wobbly imprint The latest research represents one such investigation. During mergers, the two black holes spiral toward each other along an orbital plane. When one or both black hole spins are misaligned, the orbital plane can wobble, or “precess,” the researchers explained to MIT News. The degree to which the disk wobbles acts as a parameter from which researchers can measure the masses and spins of the merging black holes. One telling sign of hierarchical mergers is that they’re “lopsided,” meaning one of the pair has a much higher spin and mass than the other. For the study, the team created an analytic model to capture the kind of wobble that would have emerged from second-generation black holes. Around 14% of merging black holes followed this pattern, and the second-generation black holes identified had a very specific range of masses, at around 20 solar masses or 40 solar masses and above. Of mysterious origins To be fair, that might not sound like a whole lot. But it demonstrates that a sizeable portion of known black holes indeed follow this pattern. As for why, the team suspects hierarchical mergers emerge from dense stellar environments. Simply, when multiple neighboring stars die and collapse into black holes, the dense environment can make it easier for those black holes to find each other and merge. That could further lead to the formation of second-generation black holes. Theoretically, this could “repeat potentially ad infinitum, by virtue of the fact that you have a ton of stars and black holes in this really dense environment,” Plunkett said.
But an ensuing mystery concerns those black holes in the 40-and-above regime, which coincides with the aforementioned “death zones” for black hole masses. According to stellar evolution theory, black holes born of supernovas shouldn’t leave any black holes above roughly 45 solar masses, explained Plunkett. “Yet we have seen black holes that are that massive,” she mused. “And the question is: Where did they come from?” For now, it’s hard to say when we’ll get an answer to that question, if ever. But one thing seems to be clear: black holes are a lot weirder than we could ever imagine. #Scientists #Black #Holes #Born #Black #HolesBlack holes,Gravitational wave,LIGO")
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