by Oppo Reno 8 Pro: key specifications
Chipset: MediaTek Dimension 8100-Max
RAM: 8 GB (12 GB version available)
Storage: 256GB
operating system: Android 12, ColorOS 12.1
Screen: AMOLED, 6.7 inches, 1080 x 2412 pixels
cameras: 50 MP, f/1.8, 23mm (main); 8 MP, f/2.2, 16mm (ultra-wide); 2MP, f/2.4, (macro); 32 MP, f/2.4, 22mm (front)
Connectivity: Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.3, USB Type-C
Dimensions: 161.2 x 74.2 x 7.3mm (6.35 x 2.92 x 0.29 inches)
Weight: 183g (6.46 oz)
Manufacturers continually release new phones, like the Oppo Reno 8 Pro, in the ‘around £600’ price segment with apparent glee. In general, this is fine, as it leads to a lot of options for users, but also a lot of questions and spec comparisons. Everyone wants to get the most for their money, but in a world where you can get a Google Pixel or an iPhone SE for a similar price, what do you do? We call these things mid-range phones, but a few years ago they would have been incredibly powerful.
The Oppo Reno 8 Pro clearly wants to get its measure. It looks amazing, has a decent chipset in the MediaTek Dimensity 8100-MAX, and is perfectly capable of taking a 50MP image or recording stabilized 4K video. But there’s a risk that, at this price, it’s too expensive to be considered one of the best budget camera phones. (opens in a new tab)and at the same time not ‘premium’ enough to be among the best camera phones (opens in a new tab) general. So which side of the fence does the Oppo Reno 8 Pro fall on?
Oppo Reno 8 Pro review: Design
What immediately strikes you about the Oppo Pro 8 is how reflective it is. If you’re in the habit of touching up your makeup on the train, you may no longer need to bring a mirror. The back of the phone is silver and covered in glass, and it’s also an absolute magnet for smudges and fingerprints. However, it’s great for taking selfies or asking for help when you’re stuck on a mountain in the desert.
Taking on the look of the tile-sided iPhone 4 that suddenly became popular again, the phone’s camera bump marks it out as much as the glossy back surface. Extending more than halfway down the back of the phone and featuring four circles, two of which are camera lenses (the actual glass is much smaller than the black disk that surrounds it), it’s an imposing addition to an already it is substantial. Fortunately the results are more than decent.
However, those slab sides lead to a minor problem with the phone. Like many phones that boast a keen approach to their own rectangular shape, it can be uncomfortable to hold. If you get a mirrored phone, you might not want to put it in a case and cover up all that glitter, so the rough angles of the edges will dig into your hand. Add to this that it’s the maximum size for one-handed operation, and it’s definitely worth a try first, to see if holding it to your ear for half an hour while talking to your mum becomes unbearable.
There’s no headphone jack, just a USB-C port and a small speaker grill to break up the phone’s smooth edge, with a SIM tray at the bottom, volume rocker on the left, and lock button on the right. This lock button glows green, even when the phone is turned off, something that can be difficult to do since, by default, holding the button for a period of time invokes the Google Assistant. A quick switch in the Settings app and you’ll be able to turn the phone off again.
Oppo 8 Pro review: Features
Running Android 12, the 8 Pro comes with Oppo’s ColorOS 12.1 on top, which is a generally nice environment for doing phone stuff with a bright, bold color scheme and some bigger than usual icons. We also particularly liked the way the lock screen image changed every time we woke up the phone, leading us to lock and unlock it multiple times in an attempt to detect it. We never did, though this surely adds to the data the phone downloads and affects battery life.
The fingerprint reader is under the display, which is a 6.7-inch AMOLED, 1080 x 2412 px, 120 Hz, 20:9 ratio, 394 PPI density covered with Gorilla Glass with a maximum brightness of 950 nits. It looks good, and we found the thumb-based unlocking to be quick and accurate.
You get 8GB of RAM and 256GB of internal storage, which is plenty these days of streaming everything, and the CPU comes with eight cores: four 2.85GHz Cortex-A78s and four 2.0GHz Cortex-A55s. The GPU is a Mali G610. While this combo may not reach the heights of some Snapdragon options, it’s perfectly respectable and enough to keep the phone responsive.
Most interesting is the presence of an NPU, a neural processing unit, MariSilicon X, which enables real-time and 4K night mode video processing and camera feed noise reduction with its fearsome approach to algorithms. . It was first seen on the top-end Oppo Find X5 from earlier this year, and the phone’s camera’s low-light shots look excellent, as we’ll see. It is not in the standard Oppo Reno 8, only in the Pro version.
Oppo Reno 8 Pro review: Camera
The Sony IMX766 sensor behind the main camera packs 50.3 million pixels, a resolution you can switch to (from 12.6 MP binned) with a simple tap of a button at the top of the camera app. It was considered a decent low-light sensor even before Oppo put its NPU on the back, but now it’s even better. Images don’t show much smearing from noise, even in shots taken at sunset or at ISOs above 4000, and the 24mm-equivalent lens is wide enough for everyday use.
It’s not a magic wand by any means, and it can’t salvage images marred by camera shake (that’s the job of image stabilization, which the main camera also has) or motion blur. But it helps with both by allowing for higher ISOs, and therefore shutter speeds, without fear of too much noise, and photos taken at night look remarkable when you consider these from a mid-range Android smartphone.
The other camera, an 8MP ultrawide with a 16mm-equivalent view and f/2.2 maximum aperture, is a bit disappointing by contrast. It’s fine, especially in daylight, but it doesn’t offer anything close to the same quality. There’s a 2MP macro camera that’s barely worth mentioning, and a 32MP selfie camera on the front that’s also better than it should be, being so small and poking through the screen like a single punch hole. It has autofocus, which many don’t, and it gives decent photos without much blemish. There’s also a telephoto setup, but it cuts back on the main camera feed rather than switching to a dedicated lens.
It’s a similar story with video, which benefits greatly from the NPU, especially if you want to shoot in less-than-perfect lighting. The resolution tops out at 4K/30, while if you drop down to 720p it’s capable of a very fast 960fps for great slow motion effects.
Oppo Reno 8 Pro review: Performance
The Dimensity chipset inside the 8 Pro isn’t quite up there with the Snapdragon 8s of this world, or anything recently produced by Apple, but it’s actually not that bad. It’s certainly powerful enough to play games, run apps, shoot 4K video, and just about anything else you want to do with a smartphone. The main thing that will slow the phone down is the amount of bloatware it ships with. Spend a few minutes getting rid of apps like Joom, a Latvian fashion company, Oppo’s relaxation app, and lots of games, and you’ll find that your app drawer is less cluttered. It’s also the first time we’ve seen a phone with TikTok pre-installed, possibly a clue to the expected demographic of users.
On the Geekbench 5 benchmark app, the phone scored 891 for single-core performance and 3695 for multi-core. This puts it above the OnePlus Nord 2 5G, but slightly below the Google Pixel 6 on a single core. Multi-core is a different story, with the Reno 8 Pro beating the Pixel 6 and sitting near the top of the table with the Snapdragon 888 and Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 devices.
The 4500 mAh battery can last around a day and a half of mixed use before you reach for the charger. Longer if you leave it in standby mode. 80W fast charging is on offer, capable of filling the battery in about half an hour, and Oppo is kind enough to include a charger in the box.
Should I buy the Oppo Reno 8 Pro?
If you don’t mind a big phone with fingerprints and low-light photos are important to you, you should definitely go for it. It’s powerful, has good specs, has a reasonable battery life, and is extremely fast to charge. A few small drawbacks aside, and the disappointment that the ultra-wide camera doesn’t quite measure up to the capabilities of the main camera, you’ve got a reasonably priced phone that does a lot of things right. The main problem is that you can say that about many phones in this sector of the market.
