A Huawei Oppo-tunity
The Oppo Reno 10x Zoom could fill a Huawei-sized gap in the smartphone market, writes David Court.
Oppo has been steadily increasing its presence in the New Zealand smartphone market for several years now. And its latest flagship, the Oppo Reno 10x Zoom, is a device that will earn a lot of attention.
It boasts a world-class camera, a flawless 6.6-inch AMOLED display and a competitive NZ$1299 RRP, undercutting its main specs rival, the Huawei P30 Pro, by a couple of hundred dollars.
It also makes the Oppo Reno
10x Zoom very sensibly priced, as its hardware falls only just short of the Huawei.
Let’s kick things off with the smartphone’s most important feature, its camera. And before I get too deep in the detail, it’s important that you know that this camera is a good one. Verging on great.
It’s also important that you understand more about what the
10x Zoom feature actually is, before you rush out and buy one. And that’s because the 10x Zoom Camera isn’t a 10x zoom at all.
Confused? I was too. Here’s what’s going on.
The Oppo Reno 10x Zoom features a camera that only supports a 5x optical zoom. And this is achieved using periscope technology that we’ve already seen in the Huawei P30 Pro.
Like the Huawei, Oppo only achieves its advertised 10x zoom by employing a hybrid system that
uses the 5x optical zoom and makes up the difference using digital zoom. And digital zoom, as we all know, isn’t a true zoom.
To make things more confusing, the camera insists in staggering its ‘‘zoom’’ at intervals of 1x, 2x, 6x (for some reason), and 10x. Users can press a few buttons and take over the controls to manually zoom the camera, at decimal increments, all the way up to a massive 60x.
The 60x zoom, by the way, is a bit of a car crash. I haven’t managed to snap anything in focus with it yet.
The camera’s next major selling point is its low-light photography night mode. This works well too, marking a definite improvement in last year’s crop of smartphones. But once again, it’s beaten by the Huawei P30 Pro’s stunning lowlight performance.
Display
The Oppo Reno 10x Zoom’s 1080p screen is an area where it beats most of its rivals.
The first thing to note here is that this is a big phone. Its screen is 0.1-inches bigger than the iPhone XS Max, which is also massive.
The main selling point here is its lack of bezel, which makes the device so visually impressive.
Its fingerprint sensor is sunken into the phone’s screen, meaning you only have to place your thumb (or finger) in the vicinity of where fingerprint sensors used to be. The phone’s screen will do the rest. And it’s a quick affair too; the Reno 10x Zoom will unlock almost instantly.
The bezel-less screen has also pushed the selfie camera off the front of the phone. The front-facing camera now sits within the very top of the phone and is summoned into action when you press the selfie button from the phone’s camera app.
Cue a curious whirring and a pizza-slice shape emerging from the top of your phone. Inside the wedge is a 16 MP, f/2.0 HDR camera and LED flash. Press the camera flip button again, and the pizza slice disappears inside a second.
Other key features
The phone runs a home-brand ColorOS 6 operating system. It’s a stylish, quick and easy-to-use interface that Oppo has overlaid on top of Android 9.
There’s not a huge amount to note about this user interface (UI) – which is a good thing as phone manufacturers often ruin Android phones with their ‘‘improvements’’. The main differences ColorOS 6 offers is some unique background options, oversized app icons and a few vanilla native apps. All of which can be tweaked to your taste.
A Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 chip powers the phone. It’s the same chipset that drives the Samsung Galaxy S1, Sony Xperia 1 and OnePlus 7. In short, it’s the best processor you can ask for in a 2019 Android smartphone.
Verdict
The timing of the Reno 10x Zoom couldn’t be better. The storm that Huawei finds itself in leaves, for some people, a P30-sized gap in the market. This handset fills it neatly. And with a NZ$200 discount.