With a dedicated camera setup with a “shark fin” mechanism for the selfie camera, innovative features, and a sleek design, Oppo Reno is absolutely an excellent smartphone with an affordable price tag. If you’re looking for a device that has not only a good-looking appearance but also good performance, the Oppo Reno is truly worth considering.
Design and Display
At a quick glance, the design of Oppo Reno appears to be highly synonymous with some flagship handsets today – it gets a metal frame surrounding an asymmetric glass set up on both sides. Although Oppo Reno feels absolutely premium thanks to the glass, it also turns the whole device into a slippery piece. To ensure the phone won’t be out of physical control, it’s evident that users should make use of a phone case as soon as possible.
Not having a huge screen, Oppo Reno still widens the frame for display by keeping the bezel parts at a very minimum level of width, so users will have more display to stream content when looking at the screen.
One of the most unique designs you can get from Oppo Reno is that the manufacturer has mixed things up with volume rockers set on the left-hand side and a power button located on the right-hand side. On the contrary, most smartphones have their control buttons on right. The whole design of Oppo Reno even looks more pleasing as the power button twinkles with a green accent. The manufacturer also stumbled upon a thoughtful idea that puts all the buttons closer to the middle, enabling users to approach them more easily.
The SIM tray just sits above two volume rockers. There’re two slots but both of them are designed for putting SIM cards, and users won’t have any option to expand the original memory. However, it doesn’t turn out to be a big problem if we’ve got used to using cloud storage.
The Oppo Reno is made available to several markets in two color options, Jet Black and Ocean Green. You might be a little bit concerned because neither Black nor Green variant does support IP68 waterproof rating, so please keep in mind that you’ll keep it away from water.
Speaking of the screen, Oppo Reno comes equipped with a 6.4-inch OLED FHD+ display, which can accurately represent colors with a natural look. The screen-to-body ratio has seen an increase in percentage, and the Oppo Reno is claimed to hit a screen-to-body ratio of 92%. The bezels on both sides are seemingly non-existent while the bottom chin is also virtually minimalized, resulting in a larger area for display. Users can turn on the Night Shield mode to mitigate the blue light emitted by the screen without having to reduce the accuracy of colors. Interestingly, such a feature is mostly found in more-pricey smartphones. For those who usually use the phone around the clock, this is no doubt a great choice.
Camera
Oppo has been famous for making “camera” phones, so many people have reached out to the brand when they need to find a super classy yet affordable camera setup. In fact, Oppo Reno and other handsets in the Reno lineup still live up to the expectations and thus keep the run going. Of course, you may be impressed by the fancy 10x zoom feature on the higher-end Oppo Reno 10X Zoom, but the original Oppo Reno still has its own attractive specs.
Despite that the phone only gets a dual-camera setup at the back, the 48MP primary camera lens with an f/1.7 aperture becomes a plus when it comes to photography. To support the main sensor, there’s a 5MP secondary camera lens that helps it work a lot, improving the capabilities of light-sensing and especially the Portrait mode.
The Oppo Reno was ahead of many products in a similar price bracket as it can make use of AI algorithms to better the photo quality. Along with multi-frame noise reduction or HDR, photos taken under low light conditions are quite awesome. This concept can be something understandable – low light environments usually result in grainy and shaky photos, so the Oppo Reno does a bit of magic by keeping things stable on the image. In comparison, premium handsets like Huawei P30 Pro heavily depend on the artificial process of brightening to make the photograph better-looking. The Oppo Reno meanwhile brings the lighting closer to the object and simultaneously enhances the colors.
In terms of selfie camera, Oppo Reno even deserves more praises as the “shark fin” mechanism has taken place on a smartphone model for the first time, which is regarded as something “unorthodox and super innovative”. The pop-up part of Oppo Reno houses a 16MP f/2.0 camera lenses alongside a 26mm wide-angle lens, which caters to group selfie.
In a nutshell, the camera setup of Oppo Reno really bangs for the buck, especially when people want to own powerful cameras but still remain stylish even at such an affordable price.
Battery
Smartphones these days are sporting bigger batteries which support the plethora of features and sensors, and the Oppo Reno is no exception. We have a more than capable 3765 mAh battery which also supports Oppo’s proprietary Super VOOC 3.0, that’s around 50% of battery charged in under 20 minutes.
Performance and Memory
The Oppo Reno sports the mid-range Snapdragon 710 chipset which is paired with Adreno 616 GPU and 6GB RAM/ 8GB RAM, give you a sort of complete package in terms of performance. The software out-of-the-box is Oppo’s ColorOS which is based on the latest Android Pie (9.0). The benchmark tests will be run on the Oppo Reno which will feature the single-core performance as well as the compound AnTuTu. The same will be updated here.
Coming to the storage, the Oppo Reno contains 256GB of onboard storage for both, the 6GB and 8GB variants. There is no provision for microSD expansion, but considering the 256GB, it is a lot of storage even for a heavy user, so it shouldn’t be a real problem.