Oppo Reno12 Pro: the sweet spot for Instagram aficionados

Let’s begin with a simple piece of advice: don’t buy this phone in Nebula Black, the cheap-looking matte finish. Nebula Silver – which is actually pale lavender, despite its name – is the far superior option. It’s backed with a gorgeous natural-looking ripple pattern, which looks like it’s been carved from brushed metal (though I’m sure it hasn’t). There’s also a cute, jewelled pattern surrounding the camera enclosure.

The phone is remarkably thin – sadly, too thin to fit a headphone jack – and light. At about 180g, it weighs 20g less than the same-sized iPhone 15 or Galaxy S24. While heaviness can correlate with a perception of luxury, the sophisticated purple finish lends the phone a premium air to make up for it. It’s honestly the best external design I’ve seen in a phone all year – if you don’t pick the black version.

Oppo’s version of Android, ColorOS, comes with a disappointing number of pre-installed apps. A few are clearly sponsored, with prominent space for the LinkedIn and Booking.com apps being the most obvious ad spots.

The system tells me that 6GB of storage is used up by pre-installed apps. At least, with its generous 512GB storage capacity and microSD card support, you’re unlikely to run out of space anyway.

The basics get an unenthusiastic thumbs up

The phone’s display is stock standard for the 2024 market – a 6.7-inch AMOLED screen with a 1080p resolution, 120Hz maximum refresh rate and HDR10+ certification. You don’t need to know what those things mean, but they indicate a good-looking screen with plenty of detail, fluid scrolling and accurate colours. It’s nothing groundbreaking, but it’s good enough for 99% of people.

The screen’s also super durable for a mid-range phone, being made from one of the toughest ceramic glass products on the market. The phone will also handily survive rain and splashes with its IP65 rating.

Performance-wise, the phone’s processor (MediaTek Dimensity 7300) and 12GB of RAM do a great job on everyday tasks, but this is not a top-of-the-line phone. It can’t match a flagship phone when it comes to particularly demanding games or apps and is a few milliseconds slower to open apps or switch between them.

The battery is fine, but the charger is great

The Reno12 Pro’s battery capacity matches the current industry standard of 5000mAh, but the processor seems to burn through charge slower than many competitors, resulting in a 36 to 48 hour life, depending on how you use your phone.

The phone comes with an 80W fast charger. Just to be clear, 80W is very fast. It costs $70 to buy the charger separately, so including one in the box is a great bonus.

According to Oppo, it takes 46 minutes to charge the Reno12 Pro from 1% to 100% using the charger. Sounds great, right? But in my trials, it took 4 minutes less than that. Perhaps more importantly, it took just 31 minutes to get up to 80%. I’m a firm believer in keeping devices charged between 20% and 80% to preserve battery health, so I only need to charge this phone for 20 minutes per day.

A phone’s battery is considered degraded when it can only recharge to 80% of its original capacity. Often, this happens after just 2 or 3 years, but Oppo claims this phone will retain 80% total capacity after 4 years of use (assuming one charging cycle each day, which is very conservative). That goes a long way to assuring longevity into 2028, given that Oppo also guarantees 4 years of security support for this phone.

The reason we’re all here: cameras

Phones in the Reno series are often treated as “camera phones”. That is, photography is a key selling point for these devices over cheaper mid-range options.

Oppo has kept the camera specs easy to remember in this case – three 50-megapixel cameras, one in the front, and two in the back (a wide-angle and a telephoto). The telephoto lens greatly improves zoom performance and is one of the key advantages of the Pro model. Last year the entire Reno range included telephoto, but Oppo has now yanked the lens out of the $800 Reno12.

The telephoto camera provides optical zoom up to 2x. A hybrid setting then uses digital techniques to reach 5x zoom while maintaining detail and colour.

On the video front, the Reno12 Pro can record in 4K resolution at 30 frames per second, or in 1080p at 60 frames per second.

Add in the 8MP ultra-wide-angle lens, and optical image stabilisation to counteract your shaky hands, and it’s an impressive system overall. It should be a strong contender for any keen shutterbug who doesn’t want to break the bank – especially those looking for social-media-ready portraits or selfie videos for TikTok.

Oh yeah, there’s also AI

Artificial intelligence is the omnipresent buzzword in all tech marketing in 2024, and this phone is no different. In fact, it’s billed as an “AI phone” in some stores. Whatever that means.

Now, I like algorithms. Computers can do some cool maths. But Consumer staff can attest that I’m sceptical of the value of generative AI, the trendy flavour of algorithm that fabricates text and images. It’s energy-intensive, slow and gets stuff wrong. I can do without it.

This phone has one nifty AI camera tool that lets you delete objects from a photo. It’s the kind of trick you’ve been able to pull for over a decade in a full editing program like Photoshop, and in premium phones for a year or two, but it’s nice that it’s filtering down to reach more people. More generative AI stuff is supposedly coming in software updates, but it hasn’t arrived yet.

A niche audience, but an audience nonetheless

I’m impressed by this phone. At $1,100, it does enough to be a good deal for a certain type of customer – someone who’s probably (but not necessarily) under 40, uses their phone as a portal to visually engage with friends online, but is too sensible with money to drop two grand on a telephone. Many other buyers, however, could save even more by choosing a phone from Oppo’s A Series or Samsung’s Galaxy A series.

We’ll have full lab-based test results for the Reno12 Pro, along with the cheaper Reno12, later in August. For an objective comparison to other mid-range and flagship phones on the market, check back in a couple of weeks.

This phone was loaned to us by Oppo.