Oppo recently launched its Reno12 series of smartphones, which includes the Reno12 5G that I have been using for a few days. The phone is priced at Rs 32,999 and comes as Oppo’s latest device from the series that often has photography at heart. Let’s try and see what the Reno12 brings to the table.
The first thing you might notice in Reno12 is the Sunset Peach colour on the back (also comes in Matte Brown and Astro Silver). It kind of looks like a painting drawn on the back with the Oppo logo engraved near the bottom and a double bordered rectangular cutout housing the triple camera system near the top left corner. Oppo definitely made the phone standout a bit from the crowd with this colour without making it appear too flashy or over the top.
The phone’s back has a smooth finish, the corners are also curved, with the narrow sides made of alloy. The front has a 6.7-inch curved display with 20:9 aspect ratio and with Corning’s Gorilla Glass 7i on top. The left side is left all plain; while the right side carries the volume buttons. The top houses the secondary mic, infrared port and one outlet for loudspeakers; and the bottom carries the dual SIM + microSD hybrid card slot. The phone is IP65 rated dust and water resistant, quite comfortable to carry around and doesn’t seem slippery either.
Coming to the display, the 6.7-inch full HD+ (2412×1080) AMOLED display supports up to 120Hz dynamic refresh rates. It is bright and has punchy colours, and I preferred to use it in the cinematic colour mode. It does a good job of handling high resolution videos and for viewing images with not too much colour loss due to the curves this time. HDR10 output isn’t bad either but it’s not the best that we’ve seen from Oppo in terms of handling scenes. The phone features a triple camera system on the back – a 50MP (f/1.8) main camera (with OIS), an 8MP (f/2.2) ultra-wide camera, and a 2MP macro camera. You can expect to take some vivid shots with the phone, some with punchy colours if your subject is still and you get decent enough lighting to go alongside.
The phone’s camera performance isn’t too great when it comes to low-light and portrait shots, it does seem a little stepped down from the previous two iterations. The front-facing 32MP (f/2.0) camera takes detailed and well stitched shots and isn’t too slow when used in low-light. There are a few AI features related to the camera where you can change somebody’s photo to an animated character or like a doodle, it works quite well, though not sure how much it adds up for the camera in general. AI Eraser is also there to remove people or an object from your photos.
The Reno12 is equipped with MediaTek’s Dimensity 7300 Energy chipset (up to 2.5Ghz octa core processor, Mali G615 GPU) and N55 NPU along with 8GB of LPDDRX RAM and 256GB UFS 3.1 internal storage. It runs on Oxygen OS 14.1 based on Android 14 with the July security patch. The phone’s general performance has been satisfactory most of the times in handling social media apps, YouTube videos, switching between messaging apps, or checking multiple photos. It isn’t the most well performing smartphone today around Rs 33,000 with a somewhat subpar chipset in place for the price tag.
Games such as Wuther Waves and CoD: Mobile cannot be played at their medium to highest settings. The phone doesn’t heat up while gaming, though, but it’s not exactly a gaming performer if that’s falls in your use case. There are quite a few third party apps pre-installed on the phone, as expected, but you can uninstall them and disable some notifications (or disable it completely) pushed from things like App Market if you like to use the Play Store only.
Sporting a 5,000mAh battery unit, the phone comes with an 80watt SuperVooc charger than can charge the phone in under an hour. The phone quite often lasted me a day and din’t show any drastic battery drainage issues.
The phone’s 5G network reception is really good, with good coverage for working on the go. Its dual stereo speakers do a good enough job for using with videos and a bit of gaming when indoors. Regarding WiFi and GPS, I didn’t notice any glitches during my usage of the device.
All in all, the Oppo Reno12 is a bit underwhelming Reno device – whether in the camera department or its performance in general. Though it has a really nice and unique colours option and good battery life, there aren’t too many other things going for it compared to the likes of the Realme GT6T.
