OPPO Reno10 Pro 5G Review

Oppo has done some special things since hitting the scene. From their early days of including premium features on low-end phones to now, where they have a spread of devices for each budget. I got the chance to check out the midrange OPPO Reno10 Pro to see if it was worth the $1100 price tag.

Are you sure this isn’t a premium phone?

Seriously, there is nothing about this phone that feels mid-range. It’s so thin, it’s so light, and it’s a beast. The screen quality isn’t the highest in terms of resolution, but it is bloody high. Brightness cranked up or down; I was stoked with anything I was playing on it. It also does the quirky curved edge thing, which actually feels fantastic and is snazzy as.

The back of the phone has a really nice matte finish.  It looks slick as hell and feels really nice in the hand. Seriously, I can’t emphasize how good the OPPO Reno10 Pro 5G is to hold. Under the hood, it has 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, which is really solid for the price. And then there are the cameras.

The battery life is also exceptional.  Hotspotting from a phone drains the guts out of the battery, and I put this one to a serious test.  After bluetoothing to the car for an hour, then having my boy hotspot his Chromebook to the phone all day, and then back bluetoothed to the car for an hour got the battery to about half.  Thanks teacher only day for that test, and that performance was great.

What about the cameras?

There are two things I will say here. The first is that the cameras and photo quality are bananas. The rear cameras are a big 50MP alongside a 32MP and an 8MP wide-angle lens. In the front, you have a slick 32MP camera. You can video in 4K, but if you have shaky hands like me, you can use the super steady shot at 60FPS in 1080p.

The raw numbers are pretty impressive, but Oppo has spent some serious time making the smarts in their phones make your photography look so much better. Seriously, I don’t get how, but I have gotten some seriously amazing photos.

The other thing I will say, though, is that the camera array is kind of ugly. Because the phone has been made super thin, they stick out the back, and the prominent shape of the array is weird. Having said that, you stop caring pretty quickly, as the majority of your time is spent  looking at the front of the phone. Also, if you pick up the official Oppo case for the phone, it doesn’t stick out as much and actually looks a lot nicer.

Any negatives?

A couple of nits are to be picked.

One is that Oppo, for ages, has included a jelly case in their phones. It was nice just to have out of the box a case for your phone right away, but this appears to have stopped. To be fair, the official case for the phone that I bought is really nice. It looks and feels way better than a jelly case, so it isn’t a major issue. It just surprised me.

The phone also comes with a bunch of games preloaded. I thought this was cool, except they weren’t premium games. They were just preloaded ones filled with really intrusive ads. Also, holy hell, game ads are so much more intrusive than they used to be. You can just delete them, but I hate opening a new phone and going through the process of deleting stuff.

The last thing is that, for some reason, the phone doesn’t have an IPX rating. Everything about the build seems to be of the highest quality, so I’m sure it will be fine through the Te Whanganui-a-Tara winter, but I don’t know for sure.

Should you get one?

Absolutely. At this price point, the OPPO Reno10 Pro 5G is a banger. $1k used to be a premium phone, but nowadays that is firmly in the middle. Yet somehow, Oppo has released a phone that feels premium but sits at a nice mid-range price.

You can spend a few bucks more to get an OPPO Reno10 Pro+ 5G, or spend heaps more for the awesome Find N3 which we haven’t played with just yet.

8 Yeah!

This isn't going to be the snazzy phone that shows everyone that you are rolling in it.

What it will do is look way fancier and be more powerful than what you spent on it, and isn't that what life is all about?