Oppo Reno 6 Pro 5G review: Great design, good cameras and decent performance

Rating

3.75 out of 5

Price

INR 39,990/-

Product Name

Reno 6 Pro

Brand Name

Oppo

Pros

• Display quality
• Fantastic design
• Software optimisation
• Very rapid charging
• Camera performance

Cons

• No stereo speakers
• No wireless charging
• No water resistance
• Performance vs competition

Specifications

• Display

  6.55-inch FHD+ AMOLED @ 90Hz

• Processor

  MediaTek Dimensity 1200 5G

• Battery

  4500mAh

• Primary camera

  64MP Quad Camera

• Front facing camera

  32MP Selfie camera

• Connectivity

  Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.2, USB Type-C

• Memory

  8/12GB RAM

• Storage

  128GB/256GB UFS 2.1

Smartphone manufacturers are always working on ways to make their latest devices appeal to consumers, but when it comes to good looking, feature-packed smartphones, not many brands can match up to Oppo’s unique designs. The company launched one of its most attractive phones last year with a new design (Reno Glow) that featured on its Reno 5 Pro 5G smartphone, and Oppo is now back with a more powerful chipset and improved cameras on the new Oppo Reno 6 Pro 5G smartphone. With the release of this smartphone, Oppo has brought MediaTek’s most powerful chipset so far, and new camera features. We’ve spent a few weeks using the Oppo Reno 6 Pro 5G and here’s what we think about the device.

Design and display

Oppo’s phones are well known for two things, unique designs and good camera performance and the company’s latest addition to its midrange portfolio is no exception. The Oppo Reno 6 Pro 5G comes in two colours. Stellar Black and Aurora. We’ve been using the latter and it comes with the company’s Reno Glow design that came with its predecessor last year. 

The smartphone features a sleek glass surface that is shiny and has a sparkling finish, but with a smooth matte finish that doesn’t attract fingerprints. It looks attractive and definitely stands out from other designs you see on smartphones at this price segment.

The curved design of the Oppo Reno 6 Pro 5G sat comfortably in our hands, and the slim profile makes it very easy to use with one hand. The smartphone has a short bump for the quad-camera setup, which looks good with the gradient design on the rear of the device. The device doesn’t feel too heavy – in fact, the metallic sides and the glass body give it a premium feel. 

The Oppo logo at the back is small and barely noticeable and the matte finish on the back means it doesn’t slip out of your hands easily. You should probably use a protective case with this phone, however, and the Oppo Reno 6 Pro 5G comes with a clear case in the box.

On the front of the Oppo Reno 6 Pro 5G is a 6.5-inch FHD+ AMOLED display that curves into both sides of the phone. The screen is plenty bright, and there are no issues with visibility if you’re trying to use the phone outdoors, even in bright sunlight. The device has a small punch hole in the screen, but it’s tucked away in the corner and we could barely notice it while using the phone. 

Thanks to the curved display, the bezels on the phone are barely noticeable, but there were a couple of occasions that the device accidentally registered the ‘back’ gesture while using the new Android gestures. There are no stereo speakers on the phone, but the single speaker is loud and clear for most situations. All things considered, this is one of the best smartphone displays in this price bracket.

Camera

Cameras are an important selling point when it comes to Oppo devices, so its no surprise to see that the company has included photo and video features, coupled with capable camera hardware on the Oppo Reno 6 Pro 5G. The quad-camera setup on the back of the phone has a 64MP (f/1.7, 26mm) wide camera that supports 4K video recording at 30FPS, along with an 8MP (f/2.2, 120-degree) ultrawide angle camera and two 2MP sensors – one for macro and the other for monochrome photography. On the front is a 32MP (f/2.4, 26mm) wide camera with support for 1080p video recording.

When the Oppo Reno 6 Pro 5G was launched, one of the most touted features on the smartphone was the AI Bokeh Flare feature, which essentially works like a portrait mode for videos – much like the recently introduced ‘blur my background’ feature on video meeting apps like Microsoft Teams or Zoom. During our tests, the Oppo Reno 6 Pro 5G managed to do this very well when shooting at 1080p while indoors and outdoors. However, the results are a little unpredictable when you have a second subject nearby or a very busy background.

Photos taken from the primary camera are crisp and clear in bright daylight, and we didn’t find the need to take a second shot more than once. The phone captures images quickly, but users might want to turn off the AI optimisation features as it made photos a little warmer than usual.

Images taken from the phone’s ultrawide camera preserved a lot of detail and colour reproduction was quite accurate, but we did notice some warping at the edges and colours appeared a little washed out compared to the primary camera. The macro camera is decent given enough lighting, with a bit of adjustment required to get the camera to focus on the subject.

Night mode on the Oppo Reno 6 Pro 5G is decent if you’re able to hold still long enough, but it feels like the capturing and processing could have been faster to keep up with real-world scenarios. You get enough detail and light in many scenarios, but the processing time also feels a little delayed considering the chipset on this device. 

Selfies taken on the Oppo Reno 6 Pro 5G’s 32MP front-facing selfie shooter have skin smoothening enabled by default, but disabling it ensured the photos were clear and had enough detail.

Performance and battery life

The Oppo Reno 6 Pro 5G comes with the MediaTek Dimensity 1200 SoC with 5G support built-in, which is similar in performance to the Qualcomm Snapdragon 870 chipset. The device we tested had 12GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage, and the device’s 6nm chipset can handle anything you throw at it. 

We tested out a handful of games on the device, including Asphalt 9, Battlegrounds Mobile India, Call of Duty Mobile and Fortnite. The first three games were playable at the highest graphics settings with no issues, we did notice some stutters and frame drops while playing Fortnite.

We ran a few synthetic benchmarks on the Oppo Reno 6 Pro 5G and found that on Geekbench, the smartphone scored 814 on the single-core test and 2864 on the multi-core test. These scores are lower than its counterpart with the same processor, the Realme X7 Max 5G which scored 966 and 3229 on the single and multi-core tests. It also falls behind the comparable Mi 11X 5G which comes with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 870 chipset that scored 954 and 3220 in single and multi-core tests respectively. On 3DMark Wildlife, the Oppo Reno 6 Pro 5G scored 4190 on the Wild Life benchmark, which is very slightly behind the 4,197 score we got on the Realme X7 Max 5G – the Mi 11X clocked a 4,175 score here.

When it comes to daily tasks, however, the Oppo Reno 6 Pro 5G is zippy and you don’t run into any glitches or slowdowns, even with a large number of apps installed. The phone doesn’t heat up, even after extended gaming sessions. Editing and exporting a six-minute 4K/30FPS video recorded on the phone took five minutes and 20 seconds. 

Multitasking is no challenge either thanks to the ample memory on the device. The device also comes with a feature that lets you “expand” your RAM by utilising unused internal storage, much like the swap partition on Linux. In our tests, however, the device was nowhere near requiring the use of the extended memory feature.

Battery life on the Oppo Reno 6 Pro 5G is good enough to last an entire day with moderate usage, in our testing. This means about a couple of hours of social media, a lot of texting throughout the day, a couple of hours of gaming and streaming video. The 4,500mAh battery on board is good enough if you’re outdoors for most of the day with the screen at about 75 percent brightness and we didn’t have to reach for the charger till about 11PM.

Charging the Oppo Reno 6 Pro 5G is very quick thanks to the in-box 65W charger – the phone went from 0 to 100 percent in 42 minutes and 46 minutes in two separate tests. You might want to avoid the more extreme power saving features on the phone though – they’re useful in a pinch, but they can severely limit the functionality of apps like Messenger, Snapchat and other apps that rely on timely notifications.

Verdict

The Oppo Reno 6 Pro 5G is a camera oriented phone, and it does the job well, in most scenarios and comparably better than other devices with the same hardware specifications in the midrange segment. Performance on the phone is decent when it comes to day to day tasks, even though it lags behind comparable devices when it comes to synthetic performance benchmarks.

The Oppo Reno 6 Pro 5G is priced higher than similarly specced competitors like the Xiaomi Mi 11X 5G and the Realme X7 Max 5G, but the advantage here is clearly the camera and the new video features that were better than both these competitors, in our testing.

At ₹39,990, the Oppo Reno 6 Pro 5G feels a little overpriced, when the Mi 11X Pro is available at the same price, equipped with the top-of-the-line Snapdragon 888 chipset. However, if you’re looking for a well-designed smartphone that is good for day-to-day photography and offers unique video features, decent performance, optimised software, fast charging and good battery life then the Oppo Reno 6 Pro 5G is worth considering at this price point.