Oppo Reno 5G
CUTTING EDGE, FUTURE-READY AND RELATIVELY AFFORDABLE.
EVER ONE FOR classy designs, Oppo’s latest handset is truly stunning. The Reno 5G sports an iridescent, yet predominantly matte finish on its rear – a welcome aesthetic and tactile change to all the high-gloss that arrived on flagship phones with the introduction of glass bodies. A clever addition to the phone’s back is a small bump (dubbed the ‘O-Dot’) that effectively raises your phone from a flat surface to avoid damaging the cameras and sensors that are flush with the handset’s rear.
Flip the phone over and you’ll immediately notice how dazzling the display is as well. Measuring 6.6-inches and fitting in an impressive 2,340 x 1,080 pixels, this AMOLED wonder offers plenty of vivid colours and detail. While there is a tiny bezel that surrounds all four edges (a slightly larger one for the chin), the lack of notch or pinhole camera makes for an impressively uninterrupted viewing and gaming experience, enabling it to achieve a stellar 93.1% screen-to-body ratio.
The reason this handset is able to maintain such a sleek facade is due to its novel and genius pop-up camera. Oppo isn’t new to this, with the Find X first debuting this flavour of wizardry, but the shark-fin design we see with this generation of smartphones is certainly a refinement on the feature. The selfie camera is quite a capable shooter, and paired with portrait modes and Oppo’s penchant for beautification, it’ll be more than enough. As for the main snapper, this version of Oppo’s flagship has inherited its non-5G counterpart’s star feature – 10x optical zoom – and when paired with all the powerful shooting modes, makes for a really deep and pretty camera.
Its powerful Snapdragon 855 and 8GB RAM combo is more than capable of breezing through the latest games and day-to-day tasks. Thanks to Oppo’s VOOC technology, the massive 4,065mAh battery charges up incredibly fast and comfortably manages more than a day’s worth of heavy usage. While Oppo’s ColorOS isn’t necessarily as appealing as some other major players’, it’s certainly improved over the years and is more than palatable by this stage.
While the 5G competition is thin at present, this flagship from Oppo is the most affordable 5G-enabled device on the Australian market, with its $1,499 asking price falling comfortably below the $1,729 of the LG V50 ThinQ 5G and the anticipated $2,000 ballpark for the Samsung Galaxy S10 5G. At the time of writing, 5G availability was rather patchy in Sydney, and when trying to get coverage on the fringe of the specified zones, the download speeds were significantly worse than the 4G speeds gained just a few streets over (around 50Mbps compared with 200Mbps). Conversely, download speeds of around 400Mbps were reached closer to the centre of the coverage area.
Although having 5G capabilities might prove itself useful over the course of the next year, by that point the number of compatible smartphones on the market will have also increased. You could spend $300 less and get an identical handset minus the 5G functionality – a compelling proposition for the majority of users – but if you’d like to ready yourself for the future, the Oppo Reno 5G is an excellent way to buy into all the latest smartphone features at a discount.