The Oppo Reno 12 Pro has plenty of AI cameras to rival Google’s Pixel phones and more, with a wonderful zoom camera, fast charging, long battery life, and a beautiful display. It is also good value for money. Some drawbacks prevent us from giving it the best review, such as the huge amount of bloatware and a reasonable design.
Great for the money
Quick to load
Stunning zoom camera
Cheap design
Bloatware galore
Slow AI features
With its new medium-diversity Android phone, Oppo happens to be taking Google’s newest camera phone, the Pixel 8a, which comes with a similar diversity of AI-powered smart photography features. And it’s a great attempt, with faked magic eraser action and a few other cool tools, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
The Oppo Reno 12 Pro is the newest entry to Oppo’s mid-range smartphone, the Reno line, which sits below the high-end Find mobiles and above the A-line. The Reno family offers mid-priced phones with impressive features still. with shortcuts and only the even functions introduced in the West.
I tested the Oppo Reno 10 when it launched just under a year before the 12 series, and the newest member of the lineup makes leaps and bounds thanks to its advanced camera sensors and faster charging. It’s a shame Oppo abandoned the curved look. from the Reno 10 series, making the phones much more comfortable to hold.
Sitting just above the Oppo Reno 12, the Pro differentiates itself from its sibling and many mid-rangers in one key way: it has a telephoto lens for zoom photography.
This camera hardware brings tremendous benefits to the Reno’s photographic potential; You can take better portraits, macro and long-distance photographs than any price rival thanks to the presence of a zoom camera.
If you need a great camera phone that won’t charge as much as the iPhone 15 Pro, Samsung Galaxy S24, or OnePlus 12, the Reno 12 Pro will be a godsend. Even the Pixel 8a doesn’t have a telephoto lens.
However, the star promotion issues here are the AI photography features. While high-end phones have had them for a while, it takes time to get into the mid-ranges, but the Reno plays admirably in this department. Wonderful for removing the other people in the background of your photos, whether it’s a lone wanderer or a larger crowd, and replacing them with a background that’s so realistic that you’ll know which symbol is real.
It’s slower to use than the Pixel alternative, but it’s not the end of the world. And I would say that it is one of the best rivals to the Pixel 8a for those people who do not want a Google phone nor do they want a zoom camera on their mobile.
The Oppo charges quickly, lasts a long time, and feels pretty snappy to play with. Its screen is giant and attractive, while still being simple enough to use with one hand. Best of all, you get all those features at a really competitive price.
However, it is not the best phone, as some symptoms of its positioning in the mid-range appear. I’m frustrated by the number of pre-installed apps (bloatware) that clutter up your phone when you first turn it on, making your first 15 minutes a game. of “weird-imitation-app-hit-a-mole” while checking to remove them all. The design also looks a little cheap, even if it emulates the dual-textured Pixel in some colour options.
Even with those issues, I can present the Reno 12 Pro as one of the most productive phones at its price, especially if you are looking for an affordable camera phone that may not cost a lot of money. And with the option for software updates to bring AI improvements, the phone can become a real rival to the Pixel 8a in the future.
The Oppo Reno 12 Pro has had a few other editions in other parts of the world, as well as other phones. The Western edition of the phone, which I tested, was announced in mid-June 2024.
You can buy the telephone for £499 / AU$999 (around $640), cementing it firmly in the mid-range telephone bracket. Oppo does not sell its smartphones in the United States and this obviously remains unchanged with the Reno.
There is only one edition of the phone available in the UK, with 12GB of RAM and 512GB of storage, a smaller storage model is available in other regions. Oppo’s online page also sells one color, on Amazon it gives some other color.
At this price, you can understand why I compare this phone to the Google Pixel 8a, which costs $499 / £499 / AU$849, so it’s a very close rival. Other phones of this approximate price come with the iPhone SE, Samsung Galaxy A55 and Xiaomi 13T.
The Oppo Reno 12 Pro has more or less mid-range specs, and here’s what we’re betting on:
If you were to buy the Oppo Reno 12 Pro without knowing what it is, you might mistake it for a Moto or Nokia phone – it gives off some inexpensive “vibes. “This is basically due to the plastic frame and the back of the body, the latter of which has a dual-textured baffle that looks a lot like a Google Pixel, a phone of yesteryear.
Measuring 161. 5 x 74. 8 x 7. 4mm, it’s wider than a Pixel, it’s nice and thin, it might not weigh you down like a really big phone would. Speaking of which, it weighs 180g, which is rarely much for its length; The first time I picked it up I was surprised because I expected it to be heavier.
There’s not a 3. 5mm headphone jack in sight – there’s a USB-C port for all your connectivity needs. The power button and volume rocker are located on the right edge of the device, very close to the reach of other people with average-sized hands.
On the back of the phone, the camera bump protrudes from the panel; It doesn’t stick out so much that it gets stuck on the side of your pocket when you slide it in.
The display houses an under-display fingerprint scanner and it worked reliably; If you had last used the phone in an app that required landscape orientation (e. g. a game), the scanner would appear to be 90 degrees from where it deserves to be. Curiously.
The phone is available in Space Brown, Sunset Gold or Nebula Silver, depending on your region, not all features are available. I tried the first one, so I know it’s black and not brown.
An IP65 rating ensures that the phone is protected against dust and fine particles, as well as splashing water such as rain or an accidental bump with a hose. However, it may not withstand immersion in water, so don’t drop it, for example, in a bath.
The Oppo Reno 12 Pro’s display measures 6. 7 inches diagonally, making it a great big phone – a hand-held stretcher, of course, but also great for your Netflix or gaming needs.
The solution is 1080 x 2412, or FHD, the same thing you see on every single phone, unless it’s the cheapest or most expensive competitors. That’s the solution most apps generate in, so you don’t need more pixels anyway.
The screen refresh rate reaches 120Hz, which is pretty good for most smartphones nowadays. This ensures that the movement is great and elegant when you scroll through the menu, and in supported apps, it has the same effect.
A few extra specs ensure that the display presents colorful colors: it uses the AMOLED generation and supports HDR10, with a color gamut covering a billion colors and a maximum brightness of 1200 nits.
And then I imagined that the bloatware infestation on Chinese Android phones would disappear: when you boot up the Oppo Reno 12 Pro, it’s full of pre-installed apps. There are big names like Netflix, Facebook, and TikTok, games I’ve never heard of. in a “Must Play” feature, countless apps created through Oppo that have no apparent feature, and even apps titled in Chinese characters that I just don’t understand.
It’s hard to feel like a phone belongs to you when, on first boot, you come across this.
That’s a shame too, because beneath the layers of tacky bloatware, ColorOS (Oppo’s fork of Android) is decent. With the Reno 12 Pro, you get ColorOS 13. 1 by default, installed on Android 14, Oppo has been silent on how many updates to the Android phone it will receive.
There’s a wide variety of customization features for things like font, always-on display, quick settings menu layout (the one that slides down), and border when you get a notification.
This quick settings menu has an easy-to-understand layout, more so than most Android forks, so you can temporarily activate any feature you want. The phone also has an app drawer, so by default your phone’s main menu pages look relatively clean.
Oppo named one of its first Reno phones the “Reno 10x Zoom” before temporarily ditching the series’ telephoto lenses; Well, zoom is back and it’s bigger than ever on the Reno 12 Pro.
I’m getting ahead of myself; the main snapper is a 50MP f/1. 8 unit with some features like PDAF (for focusing) and OIS (which compensates for your shaky hands).
Photographs taken with the main camera are beautiful, ambitious, and brilliant. They may lose a little more detail in darker spaces than I’d like, but the vibrancy of the colors more than makes up for it. The focus was a bit more spread out than I’m used to with PDAF and I found myself jumping into the Pro app once or twice just to get over it. Overall, though, this is a great camera that produces nice, social media-ready photographs.
Its 50 MP partner is the f/2. 0 telephoto lens, which supports 2x optical zoom; It’s not the 5x optical zoom, but it’s still a breath of fresh air given that not many mid-range phones come with zoom cameras.
When analyzing my camera samples to write this section, I needed to refer to the metadata so I wouldn’t forget what zoomed-in shots they were, i. e. , they look great and lack many telltale symptoms of other phone cameras. zooms such as grain, faded colors, lack of dynamic range, or other color profile other than the comparable 1x image.
While 2x zoom is the optical limit, you can go all the way up to a 5x hybrid zoom or a 20x virtual zoom, and photos taken with the latter look good. You can seamlessly use some of the 20x snapshots I’ve taken on social media. I know this because I did.
The third rear camera significantly reduces the resolution. It’s an 8MP f/2. 2 ultrawide camera with a 112-degree field of view; As you can imagine, the photographs are a bit lower than the main camera, so you lack a bit of quality, and they’re a little less dynamic too. This lens can be used sparingly and on an ad hoc basis and can be ignored most of the time.
We’re back to 50MP for the f/2. 0 front camera, so you can expect high-resolution selfies.
Selfies are bright and detailed, with fairly realistic color reproduction. I switched to Portrait mode and the most common (but not totally) bokeh background looks sharp (sometimes I lost a few hairs). However, the default beautification is very enthusiastic about smoothing your skin, so I propose playing around with it a bit.
Oppo has put the Reno 12 Pro’s AI photography features at the forefront of its marketing, in a clear attempt to compete with the features Google offers with its Pixel phones. According to the marketing, it has equipment to remove unwanted background elements from photos. , save facets of a shot as stickers, open closed eyes in selfies, add clarity and scale to objects, or absolutely a selfie in another artistic style or location.
I say “as per marketing” because the existing edition of the software at the time of my cellular verification (July 2024) only includes the first two. . . at least, from what I have just located. Maybe they’re hidden deep in the menus, but I searched hard to locate them.
However, the smart features provided are quite clever, as long as you forgive them for being a little slow to use in certain circumstances. Magic Eraser is easy to use and you can choose individual items to delete or a “bulk erase” option that identifies all humans in the background. It’s exact too.
The replication component is equally accurate. So when you remove a user from your photo, the phone is wonderful at identifying what’s there and filling in the blanks. Even if a user comes from other backgrounds, that’s okay.
Beyond the smart features, you get the same features as most modern phones: Pro, Portrait, Night, Full resolution, Slow motion, Time lapse, everything you used to have.
In terms of video, you can record up to 4K at 30fps or 1080p at 60fps on the front or rear camera; Don’t expect 8K recording here.
The strength of the Oppo Reno 12 Pro comes from the MediaTek chipset it uses, called the Dimensity 7300 Energy, which, as the call suggests, focuses on force efficiency. Along with the non-Pro model, this is the first phone to use the chipset.
In the Geekbench 6 benchmark tests, the Reno achieved an average multi-core score of 2005, which is the kind of lower mid-range score you’d expect to see in a dual-core phone. This value point: It’s not exactly dazzling power. however, it is sufficient for general tasks.
This score is reflected in the phone’s gaming power: it may work well with most mainstream titles like Call of Duty: Mobile and PUBG Mobile, however, there have been occasional bouts of lag or slow loading that reveal that this is rarely very much of a high-strength phone.
The phone comes with 12GB of RAM that takes care of your daily tasks, and I’ve never found the phone to be slow when you’re using social media apps, playing with the camera app, or scrolling through menus. This is combined with 512GB of storage, which is a huge amount for a phone at this price. There’s no expandable storage, but with 512GB of space at your fingertips, you might not need it.
Audio-wise, there’s no 3. 5mm headphone jack, so you want to use the USB-C port and an adapter for stressed audio. Wirelessly, you can use Bluetooth 5. 4 connectivity to pair headphones or earbuds, and the stereo speakers are also located on the top and back of the phone. They’re well placed enough that I don’t position myself covering them when I hold the device’s horizontal position.
On paper, the Oppo Reno 12 Pro’s 5000 mAh is significant but also popular for phones at this price; It is rare to see mid-range mobile phones with another battery size.
However, out of the box (that is, in testing), I was surprised by the Reno’s lasting power. I’m used to phones like this having a battery life of about a day and a half, but the Reno comes closer than ever to turning that “half” into something like “two-thirds” through normal use.
In more practical terms, this meant that I could enjoy long gaming sessions without having to worry about the battery being too low to use the phone for the rest of the day.
Charging is also fast, at 80W, so you’ll be able to charge it up in no time. Oppo says the phone will be fully charged in just under 50 minutes, but I had enough speed to last a full day of use with about part of an hour of charging.
The Reno 12 Pro also offers reverse charging charging, so you can plug a cable into the phone’s USB-C port and then the device to charge it. It’s not fast, but it’s a useful way to keep your smartwatch or headphones charged. very active.
The Oppo Reno 12 Pro has some rough edges, but they’re all in spaces where it tries to push its limits. As for what you get for the price, the Reindeer offers the right price for your money.
For a separate price, you get a screen, camera array, battery, and charging service, as well as a design that feels better than you’d expect for the price.
None of the Reno 12 Pro’s weaker spaces are worse than you’d expect for the price; Bloatware is annoying, but the Oppo is far from the only phone to include it, and even if the design lacks inspiration, you have to pay twice as much for a beautiful phone.
If you’re on the fence about whether or not to buy the Oppo Reno 12 Pro, here are some other phones you might want to consider.
Testing the Oppo Reno 12 Pro lasted two weeks, starting with product testing (so there weren’t many of my apps).
During the testing era, I used the Reno as my go-to phone: I took pictures, streamed music and videos, communicated with other people on social media, and bet on a plethora of games. The testing era took place during the holidays, so I was able to take my phone on some trips.
I’ve been reviewing smartphones for TechRadar for over five years, adding the original Reno series of phones and many others since then, as well as the competition in the cellular market.
Learn more about how we test
First in July 2024
Tom Bedford, deputy editor of phones at TechRadar until the end of 2022, after rising through the ranks from the position of editor. Although it has specialized in phones and tablets, it has also ventured into other technologies such as electric scooters, smartwatches, fitness, mobile games. and much more. She was founded in London, United Kingdom and now works for the online entertainment site What To Watch.
She holds degrees in American Literature and Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. Prior to working at TechRadar, he freelanced in technology, gaming, and entertainment, and spent many years working as a mixologist.
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