Rumors of OPPO's 5-megapixel front-facing camera smartphone, Ulike 2, have been surfacing for a while now and to put speculations to rest, the company has finally launched the smartphone in China with a price tag of around $370.

While competing smartphone makers have been busy beefing up the hardware of their smartphones, OPPO has taken a different approach and upgraded an often neglected feature, the front-facing camera. The Ulike 2 is the world's first smartphone equipped with a 5-megapixel front-facing camera and this feature may become the selling point for the handset.

Most of the current line of smartphones manufactured by known brands sport a front-facing snapper that is at best 2.1 megapixels. The high resolution optics on Ulike 2's secondary camera is bound to make consumers sit up and take notice.

The Ulike 2 is an elegant smartphone, which is primarily targeted at women. The front-facing camera's preview mode and the Ulike 2's 4.5-inch touchscreen can be doubled up as a mirror for potential women buyers, and they can use it for a quick, on-the-go make-up fix. The staggering 5 megapixels of the secondary camera would make the images crisp and good enough to focus on the smallest details.

OPPO claims that the Ulike 2's front-facing camera is ideal for taking self-portraits. The camera app packs in several different effects that can be applied in real time to the viewfinder, including dermabrasion, whitening, face-lift, and eye enhancement. These effects will help enhance a self-portrait and make them look perfect (or near perfect).

The Ulike 2 sports a 4.5-inch LCD screen with 960 x 540 pixels resolution. A dual-core 1GHz MTK6517 processor powers the smartphone. The Ulike 2 also features an 8-megapixel rear-facing camera.

It measures 5.0 x 2.51 x 0.35 inches and has small screen bezels (0.09 inch), which makes one-held operation quite easy. At 3.98 ounces the smartphone is also very lightweight.

The handset has 1GB of RAM, 16GB of on-board storage, and runs on Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS). The smartphone also has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 support and a 2020mAh battery fuels the device.

The Ulike 2 is sold for 2298 yuan ($370) in China and it is not known if the device will be rolled out globally. OPPO recenty revealed that its Find 5 will make its way to many other countries outside China, so it may not come as a surprise if Ulike 2 follows suit.