Capitalising on the new wave of 5G

We review the all-new OPPO Reno4 Pro 5G which was launched in the UAE on September 22

As OPPO gears up to celebrate its 16th anniversary this year, the global technology company has made major strides. Apart from internalising most of its production – reportedly over 85 per cent of OPPO products are manufactured in-house – it has also notched up over 19,300 patents while at it.

Importantly, the company has committed $7bn in R&D over a three-year period starting 2019 that’s resulted in a consistent stream of releases. One of the areas where the smartphone major has excelled is its 5G technology.

Europe’s very first commercially-available 5G smartphone was launched by OPPO – the Reno 5G – in 2019. Since then, it has built on its 5G advantage and launched other devices with this technology too.

Here in the UAE, the OPPO Find X2 Pro 5G, launched in June 2020, offered a high-end package that was priced at nearly Dhs5,000 at the time of its launch.

On September 22, OPPO launched its latest Reno4 Pro 5G – part of the new Reno4 Series – in the UAE at a retail price of Dhs2,499, around half what you’d typically pay for a 5G device with similar design and camera capabilities from a competitor.

We went hands-on with the device recently, along with the new OPPO Enco W51 wireless earphones.

Gripping the phone, it’s slim (7.6mm) and lightweight (172gm) with a narrow body that enables you to not only hold the phone firmly with one hand but also allows for your thumb to comfortably cover the breadth of the device. Featuring a Qualcomm Snapdragon 765G processor, it boasts a dual-mode 5G SA (Standalone Access) and 5G NSA (Non-Standalone Access). The difference between the two is that while the former is built to be compatible with dedicated 5G infrastructure, the reality is that we’re a fair bit away from seeing its ubiquitous use.

Hence the advantage of the 5G NSA which uses 4G network infrastructure to provide higher speed and access to the internet. The phone’s 6.5-inch AMOLED screen curves gently along the edges and has a

Shot on OPPO

The phone uses a 12MP Ultra Night Wide-angle Video Lens

Ultra Night Mode Off Ultra Night Mode On

refresh rate of 90Hz, which displays sharp distortion-free images.

With a competitive price tag, the new Reno4 Pro 5G isn’t angling for the position of a business device, but rather one that is aimed at a younger audience. That brings us to the camera, where OPPO has paid significant attention to boosting its night-photography and video capabilities.

The triple cameras at the rear are arranged in a linear format. It comprises a 48MP main camera, a 12MP Ultra Night Wide-angle Video Lens – a Sony IMX708 sensor – and a 13MP telephoto lens which supports 5x hybrid optical zoom and up to 20x digital zoom.

On the device, you can toggle through to the video mode where you’ll find the symbol of a crescent moon to activate the Ultra Night Mode. We tested it out in low-light conditions and the brightness of the images really did increase quite substantially.

OPPO says that its camera research team in Japan spent over a year honing the Ultra Night Video algorithm used for this device that bumped up video brightness in low-light conditions by nearly 75 per cent.

In those poor light conditions, a laser detection autofocus technology quickens the camera’s autofocus – reportedly by over 140 per cent over a standard camera. The Sony IMX708 ultra-wide-angle camera also allows for a panoramic shot with a wide field of vision.

But alternatively, from dark nights to bright lights, the phone’s camera has another trick up its sleeve. Typically, it’s notoriously difficult to shoot a subject against a bright backdrop – for example with a windowpane in the background. But with a Live HDR mode on this new phone, another smart algorithm kicks in to separate the shadow from highlight and allows the subject in the foreground to be lit up.

The Reno4 Pro 5G also features an Ultra Steady Video 3.0 that reduces blur around moving images, and this image stabilisation technology can even be used from the front 32MP camera, which is useful for video chatting while on the move.

The battery life can, rightly, be a key factor for several customers when deciding which device to purchase. OPPO has particularly excelled in this area. With a proprietary 65W SuperVOOC 2.0 flash charging technology, we managed to raise the charge on our Reno4 Pro 5G from 55 per cent to 99 per cent in around 16 minutes.

OPPO has also built in a safety mechanism into the device via circuit breakers at five points across the adapter, cable, phone and

Left: With the brand new “Reno Glow” processing technique, Reno4 achieves a matte finish with glittery details on the back cover which is also fingerprint resistant

Top: It takes 36 minutes to completely charge the battery on the Reno4 Pro 5G

battery which will cut the supply of current should it detect any power surge.

You can’t fully deal with the problem of low-battery anxiety without building a phone that doesn’t give up in the final moments of its battery life. OPPO has introduced a Super Power Saving Mode which, it says, will allow WhatsApp chats for over 1.5 hours or calls for over an hour or the ability to watch 100 short videos, take 100 selfies and text for 90 minutes – all of this when you’re down to the last 5 per cent of your battery charge.

The Reno4 Pro 5G uses OPPO’s ColorOS 7.2 UI. Built-in are OPPO developed apps such as video editing tool – Soloop as well as OPPO Labs that allows you to customise ringtones.

The 256GB device is shipped with 12GB of ROM, and is available in Galactic Blue and Space Black – the blue version features over a million crystal planes along the caseback that give it a high-gloss look though with a mattlike finish that doesn’t allow the caseback to become covered in fingerprints.

According to Counterpoint Technology Marker Research, OPPO was the fifth-highest selling smartphone manufacturer in Q2 2020, accounting for around 9 per cent of the market. For it to further accelerate in the last two quarters, it has to roll out a greater number of 5G devices – and at a competitive mid-range price bracket, without letting these feel midlevel in specs or design. The Reno4 Pro 5G is a good start.

Since mobile esports is relatively new, the starting point is more or less even globally. “If the skill level in the region is good enough, regional teams should be able to compete with any other team in the world,” says Lalit Vase, club director at Nasr eSports, a Dubaibased esports club.

This contrasts with established PC games like Counter-Strike, where European-based esports have been competing at a competitive level for at least 10 years. Nasr eSports only set up a Counter-Strike team three years ago. Teams in Europe therefore would have a clear advantage in terms of coaches available, the number of players, etc, Vase observes.

Mobile competitive gaming in the region still has some way to go, insiders agree. Most of the esports titles that have consistent participation in the region are all PC titles such as League of Legends, states Edward Kondrat, esports executive at Empire Entertainment.

But the general mobile gaming scene in the region is booming. Pandemic-imposed lockdowns led to a massive increase in mobile game downloads. “Whether that translates into comparable momentum for mobile esports remains to be seen,” Kondrat says.

Further, the huge mobile penetration rates in the Middle East, which hover well over 100 per cent, provides a potentially massive pool of gamers, both at the amateur and pro-level, observes Jamie Ryder, partner at DLA Piper Middle East, an international law firm with offices in the region.

Sam Cooke, managing director and cofounder, Esports Insider, says the growth on mobile esports is driven not just by the ease of access to smartphones but also by the sheer advances in the quality of mobile games in a relatively short time.

But for mobile esports, and esports in general to grow in the region will require extra efforts from all stakeholders.

Kondrat says localisation of games is crucial. “FIFA is a good example where publisher EA Sports invested in arabisation early on and that’s probably why the FIFA franchise is so popular in the region. Ubisoft has done the same with Rainbow 6 and that also explains their consistency in the region,” Kondrat explains.

GOVERNMENT SUPPORT

There is a real potential for esports in the region if the various governments were to engage with the community and roll out specific esports regulations and legislation, says Ryder. These rules should make clear how esports is governed, how to host competitions, etc.

“South Korea offers a great example of what government backing, clear rules and

Unlike the gaming PC or console, the smartphone is, well, more intimate. That means what is outside is almost as important as what is inside. And what is outside the OPPO Reno4 Pro 5G is a slim industrial design built on a new processing technique called ‘Reno Glow’. On the back of the device are more than a million crystal panes that shine like tiny diamonds, giving the phone an air of refinement that belies its mid-range mooring.

Games can run for hours, so a comfortable grip is more than a trivial item on a checklist – the Reno4 Pro 5G weighs just 172g and is 7.6mm thin, making those long spells hunting down zombies a less draining pursuit.

CHIPSET

Don’t be fooled by the slim silhouette of the Reno4 Pro 5G though. Under the hood is some serious muscle that would have even the most fanatical PC/console gamer take a double-take. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 765G chipset that powers the Reno4 Pro 5G combines 5G and AI to bring real gaming bona fides to the device.

Performance is revved up by the Qualcomm Kryo 475 CPU, while the Qualcomm Adreno 620 GPU provides 10 per cent faster graphics rendering compared to the standard Snapdragon 765G. Plus, select Snapdragon Elite Gaming features fuel smooth interactions and lag-free response.

DISPLAY

The Reno4 Pro 5G display is a 6.5-inch AMOLED screen with a 90Hz Refresh Rate. And AMOLED is not some empty marketing buzzword. The images produced by an AMOLED display do seem to pop out due to its deep blacks and high contrast, especially when compared to other display technologies such as IPS. The display is also more responsive due to a higher refresh rate making

The Reno4 Pro 5G weighs just 172g and is 7.6mm thin, making it perfect for gamers. images more fluid and less straining to the eyes. This feature would be merely charming for the average user but for a gamer in a fast-paced, action-packed environment, the superior graphics do provide a real edge.

The refresh rate (measured in Hertz {Hz}), counts the number of times the display updates every second it is on. Faster update times also mean lower latency, because the pixels are being refreshed more often.

The Reno4 Pro 5G refreshes 90 times per second, ideal for gaming performance where a millisecond lag is the difference between getting slain and living to fight another day.

BATTERY LIFE

Nothing is more of a buzzkill than a phone dying in the middle of a zombie-killing quest. The large 4000mAh battery capacity of the Reno4 Pro 5G should take the anxiety off.

And if the phone does indeed run out of juice, the world’s safest fast charging technology available commercially on the market, OPPO’s 65W SuperVOOC 2.0, will take the Reno4 Pro 5G from zero to full charge in only 36 minutes.

Just enough time to stretch your legs.

But if you must go back to the game quickly, the SuperVOOC 2.0 gets you to 48 per cent of the charge in a mere 10 minutes.

SOUND

Most smartphone speakers seem like an afterthought, with the belief that the average user will have their earphones plugged in. OPPO makes no such assumptions; the Reno4 Pro 5G is equipped with two super linear stereo speakers. The lower speaker’s sound cavity is filled with bass materials and as a result, the Reno4 Pro 5G speaker can create bass effects you would hardly expect from a smartphone. When gaming, every scene comes to life with immersive, surround-sound audio that synchronizes with all gaming action on-screen. A secondary effect of speaker construction is the prized tactile sensation.

5G CONNECTIVITY

The next chapter of mobile gaming is being written – in the cloud. GeForce by NVIDIA or xCloud by Microsoft bring graphicallydemanding games that would normally require a high-powered, expensive gaming PCs or consoles to the mobile sphere.

5G will complete the cloud gaming story by allowing gamers to play intensive multi-player games on their devices with no lag.

Perhaps it’s the “transformation” part of digital transformation that alarms a lot of business leaders. Transformation in its literal form imagines a wholesale shift in corporate strategy and processes, a daunting prospect for a business that wants to ensure business continuity while saving costs.

This anxiety is, in most cases, misplaced. With the right partner, digital transformation can and should be a relatively seamless process that will often leverage existing infrastructure.

Micro Focus has been helping organisations on their transformation journeys for over four decades. “Micro Focus and our partners are here to help. We offer an extensive range of planning and implementation services for every step of your journey,” says Gonzalo Usandizaga, vice president and general manager for Emerging and Growth Markets at Micro Focus. Micro Focus offers both professional (advisory) services and strategic portfolio management to guide customers through their transformation process.

The advisory services incorporate transformation and solution discovery workshops that are aligned with the IT4IT reference architecture to help organisations assess their current state and define their journey. Applied to cloud transformation, the agenda for a solution discovery workshop looks like this: capture and prioritise business requirements.

Through its project and portfolio management services, Micro Focus can help organisations optimise and streamline existing and cloud-based service portfolios; define business goals, set milestones, and track execution for each project; allocate planningto-release resources, calculate costs and ROI, and manage projects from a single set of data; and assess, align, and define their unique cloud transformation plan.

The company’s newly launched Cloud transformation platform is based on a five-step lifecycle: Plan, Build, Deliver, Run, Secure.

BUILD

As digital and physical worlds converge, a software-driven renaissance is disrupting existing business models in the same way that the cloud has disrupted traditional IT. There’s

Gonzalo Usandizaga, vice president and general manager for Emerging and Growth Markets at Micro Focus a trickle-down effect, and today’s applications must deliver new, higher levels of agility, performance, scalability, and security.

Micro Focus solutions address modern development needs – enabling businesses to transform and adapt in two critical ways: First, they strengthen stakeholder alignment, value delivery, and direction for wildly independent development teams – so businesses can build innovative solutions faster. Second, they liberate development resources to release faster – without compromising quality or performance.

Micro Focus’ solutions deliver speed and quality in other ways, too. They enable business leaders to view their landscape from a high level to inform strategic decisions or shift down to a granular project level to track, trace, and audit every artifact. They also help automate processes and tests to shift left– combining coding and testing without having to choose one at the cost of the other. And finally, Micro Focus employs AI, machine learning, and predictive analytics to simulate real-world conditions and focus testing resources.

“With these capabilities, you can shrink development times, reduce defects found in production, avoid unplanned downtime, and release with confidence”, says Usandizaga.

DELIVER

Public cloud services deliver infrastructure resources instantly and offer thousands of choices to users. Powered by automation and AI, Micro Focus solutions help organisations deliver freedom with guardrails.

For starters, IT teams can pre-select, aggregate, and automatically deploy cloud services from a single AI-powered portal. Preselection ensures that best-fit services with the right options are delivered without slowing users down.

A powerful provisioning engine automatically deploys environments – from bare-metal to virtual, private cloud, public cloud, and full hybrid systems (such as SAP instances)

As digital and physical worlds converge, a software-driven renaissance is disrupting existing business models in the same way that the cloud has disrupted traditional IT

– for all IT, development, and line-of-business users. And because services are built with flexible designs and automation, rather than with rigid templates, it’s easy to adapt to deployment changes in cloud target, provisioned software, scale, or target location.

“From the user perspective, there’s no going back; an AI-powered, self-service portal makes every IT service available to everyone,” says Usandizaga.

With features such as smart search, conversational virtual agents, and smart ticketing, users can easily find, request, and consume information and services from anywhere, at any time. Customer satisfaction and tool adoption rates will inevitably rise as resolution times and ticket volumes fall. Best of all, business workflows can be created, tuned, and fully automated without code – eliminating the need for slow, expensive, hard-coded customisations.

Finally, when workloads are ready to move to the cloud, extensive automation and step-by-step testing make it possible to migrate quickly, with few errors. The time saved can be allocated to other transformation tasks.

RUN

As more services are delivered via more cloud vendors, the ability to keep tabs on the overall health of corporate assets becomes more difficult. By making the shift to automated, insight-driven monitoring and management – powered by AIOps – IT teams can cut through the complexity and keep services running.

With automated end-to-end monitoring, Micro Focus solutions provide full visibility into services across multiple clouds, applications, data centres, and networks. Businesses can consolidate all monitored data into a singleview data lake to deliver faster fixes, valuable insights, and lower costs. Additionally, Micro Focus tools allow businesses to collect more detailed health and performance information than native, cloud vendor monitoring can provide.

With AI-based analytics, IT can spot red flags, uncover root causes, and resolve issues faster – allowing teams to focus on business impact. They can also restore service faster using automated remediation powered by a library of out-of-the-box runbooks.

Finally, a business’s ability to continuously present IT’s value to stakeholders cannot be underestimated. By quickly building custom dashboards, IT can display the real-time health and performance of cloud services in business terms, together with relevant IT metrics.

“Start monitoring applications, detecting anomalies, and fixing problems with new speed and insight-that is how you streamline Ops spending, satisfy users, and deliver real business value as you move to the cloud,” says Usandizaga.

SECURE

High-value assets – identities, applications, and data – require elevated levels of protection during times of transformation. Corporate budgets, brand, financial viability, and even shareholder value can all take a severe hit when bad things happen.

With Micro Focus solutions, organisations can strengthen their cyber resilience by intelligently adapting their security to protect identities, applications, and data. IT security teams can also detect advanced and insider threats – enabling them to evolve for future threats and regulations.

“This approach is critical,” says Usandizaga. “It closes the gaps that arise from complex use cases and provides a unified view of your environment.” When advanced threats inevitably get through, Micro Focus advanced analytics and automation will respond fast, so experts can act in near real-time before significant damage occurs.

But Micro Focus solutions do more than accelerate detection and response times. They also help ITSec evolve and sustain their security posture, says Usandizaga. “Employing all the data within your security ecosystem, they create a feedback loop with which you can continually analyse your protections against new threats – then adapt and revise your enforcement, governance, and policies accordingly,” he adds.

“In this way, you can intelligently adapt your cybersecurity to manage an increasing attack surface, which now includes an unprecedented number of home workers and external connections,” Usandizaga says.