For the last few years, Oppo's Reno series is steadily gaining a good reputation in the premium mid-range phones in the Indian market.
Oppo's latest Reno7 Pro 5G series comes with a massive camera upgrade over the predecessor and also battery life improvement. It costs Rs 39,999.
Design, display and build quality:
Oppo Reno7 Pro carries forward the flat edge design language of the Reno6. It also features curved corners and the back shell, particularly our Startrails Blue review unit, looks lovely to the eyes. Though it is covered with frosted glass on the back, it creates a psychedelic light effect when viewed from different angles.
Also, as I said in the first impression copy earlier, the device does an excellent job of repelling the fingerprint smudges.
And, the aluminium rails around the phone are sturdy and of high quality, offering a premium hand-feel experience.
On the front, the display is protected by Gorilla Glass 5 shield and for the back, the Oppo has used Panda glass. They can take care of resisting the scratches caused by keys in the pocket. Users need not have to worry about any damages due to accidental drops, as the company offers a fine quality silicone back cover. It is quite thick enough to offer a cushion effect around the corners to sustain the drop on the hard surface.
As far as the display quality is concerned, it offers a peak brightness of 920 nits, good enough to view content outdoors and even under direct sunlight.
The device comes with a 6.55-inch full HD+ (1080 x 2400p) AMOLED display with 89.4% screen-to-body ratio. It features a small front camera in the top left corner and doesn't obstruct much while watching any content or reading on a website. The refresh rate is capped at 90hz, which doesn't make any noticeable difference compared to the normal 60hz we see in most phones. It would be great if the company had made the display support 120hz, which would have definitely improved the smooth user interface in terms of navigating within the phone and also browsing on the internet. It should be noted that there are very few games that support 120Hz. It should be noted that the display does support 180Hz touch sampling rate, which is more enough to have a good user experience while playing battle royale games.
The unique aspect of the Oppo Reno7 Pro 5G is the 3D 'breathing light' around the camera module. The company has incorporated the 1mm diameter fibre placed all around the frame of the camera module. Whenever you receive a call or notification and during the charging, it glows creating a visually appealing blue aura around the camera.
Also, the in-screen fingerprint sensor does an excellent job. It responds fast to the finger impression and unlocks the screen in no time.
Performance
Oppo Reno7 Pro comes with Android 11-based ColorOS 12, 12GB LPDDRX RAM, 256GB storage and MediaTek Dimensity 1200 Max, an advanced version of the Dimensity 1200. The new version is a custom chip jointly developed by MediaTek and Oppo. It is based on Arm Cortex-A78 microarchitecture and supports a peak CPU speed of 3GHz and the chipset is paired nine-core ARM G77 MC9 graphics engine, a powerful AI processor, an advanced 5G modem and Wi-Fi 6.
It also promises to offer a better gaming experience and also higher 5G internet download speeds up to 7Gbps. Oppo's device supports 11 5G bands: n1/3/5/7/8/38/41/28A/28B/77/78.
In terms of day-to-day activities, the phone worked smoothly without any lag-ness and even while playing the games, the Reno7 Pro fared well.
However, it is a bit sad that the company is not offering Android 12 OS on Reno7 Pro 5G. Maybe, Oppo is playing safe just like Xiaomi. There are reports of devices running Android 12 with a lot of glitches and ruining the user experience. But, I hope Oppo release a bug-free Android 12 update as early as possible.
With a 4,500mAh battery, the phone was able to consistently deliver a full day under normal usage. I love the 65W charger, the company offers with the retail box. Yes, it does live up to the hype of powering up the phone from zero to 100 per cent in around 32 minutes.
Photography
Oppo Reno7 Pro 5G main 50MP (1/1.56-inch Sony IMX766 sensor, f/1.8 aperture, 1.0um pixel size, 24mm wide lens) backed by 8MP (f/2.2) 118.9-degree ultra-wide lens and 2MP (f/2.4) macro camera with LED flash.
It takes pretty fine pictures in bright light. It retains the colours and details that are captured well worthy of sharing them on social media apps.
The ultra-wide-angle mode too does a good job in accomodating more area in the frame. The digital zoom work well until 5x, and beyond that the pictures begin to turn grainy.
During low-light conditions such as in the evening, early morning or in the shadow too, the photos come good.
In the night mode, the pictures are good. As you can see in the sample photo, it looks like decent oil paint-based art.
It supports video recording up to 4K at 30 fps (frames per second), 1080p at 30/60/120 fps. With gyro-EIS (Electronic Image Stabiliser), the Reno7 Pro was able to deliver stable videos and the quality in terms of colour matching real-world subjects such as flowers were decent.
On the front, it houses 32MP (1/2.74-inch Sony IMX709 sensor with f/2.4 aperture) with gyro-EIS. The Reno7 Pro 5G takes really good selfies (including portraits) and is very impressed with edge detection, particularly the hairs on the head. I have seen more expensive phones failing in this aspect. Thumbs up to the Oppo team for this feat.
The wide-angle view does a good job to accommodate more people for group selfies.
Also, the device like other brands offers an array of filters and retouch tools to alter the size of the eyes, nose, cheeks, chin, head shape and other facial attributes. I can't blame them, as they are just catering to the people's desire to come off good on social media platforms.
Final thoughts
Besides the good photography hardware, I loved the 3D breathing light effect around the camera and the beautiful shell cover of the startrail blue model. These kinds of unique value-addition make the Oppo Reno7 Pro stand out among the competition and a compelling buy.
Other aspects such as performance and battery life are on par with any of the rival brands in the sub-Rs 40,000 price segment.
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