Oppo Reno 10x Zoom

Superb camera phone puts you clearly in the picture

Most smartphone brands rely on Chinese manufacturing, which couldn’t ask for a better showcase than this eye-popping new phone from the market-leading Guangdong Oppo Mobile Telecommunications Corp. A huge AMOLED screen fills the whole front, with no notch. Want a selfie? The motorised camera flips up at a jaunty angle, only to retract when you’ve finished or, indeed, if you drop the phone. That’s a nice touch, but you’ll still want to avoid accidents considering this is an all-glass device, available in black or green. Although some of the detailing is a bit fussy, it’s a gorgeous piece of hardware.

On the back (pictured below) is a standard wide-angle camera with a bright f/1.7 aperture, an ultra-wide f/2.2 and an f/3 5x telephoto. These have, respectively, 48, 8 and 13-megapixel sensors, but all photos are stored at 12 megapixels (unless you switch to an awkward 48-megapixel mode). The ‘10x zoom’ in its name means 5x optical plus 2x digital telephoto. Still, we were very happy with the pictures, and even 5x zoom on a phone is very practical, even if image quality can’t quite match Huawei’s P30 or Google’s Pixel phones.

Oppo’s Coloros version of Android is cluttered, but everything runs smoothly on the top-end Snapdragon 855 chip. Considering this is a relatively big and heavy phone, we expected good battery life, but 22 hours 30 minutes in our video-playback test was exceptional. The screen, with built-in fingerprint scanner, isn’t the brightest or sharpest, and neither its regular nor HDR modes are particularly colour-accurate, but for most purposes, indoors, it looks amazing.

The Reno 10x Zoom is only officially available in the UK from Carphone Warehouse, at £700 or on contract. Amazon sellers are knocking around £50 off this and offering a version for £100 less with 128GB of storage and 6GB rather than 8GB of memory, which should still be plenty. This looks a good deal, especially with a microsd slot to add more storage. These imports should work fine in the UK, but we can’t vouch for them, although Oppo’s warranty is worldwide.