OPPO got everyone talking in 2018 when it launched its innovative and exciting Find X. Since then, OPPO has rolled out a handful of other phones and Reno series earlier this year. OPPO launched its Reno 2 series of smartphones globally at an event in India.
This smartphone comes with plenty of features to differentiate it from the competition: a bezel and notch-free display, quad-cameras on the back, the ‘shark-fin’ pop-up camera on the top edge and of course the 3.5mm audio jack.
Why should you buy it?
Impressive build and stunning looks
The OPPO Reno 2 is one of a classy looking phone at the market right that stands out from the crowded glasstick and gradient design. OPPO has upped the design and quality of the device. It does feel slightly on the heavier side, which contributes to the all-around solidness of the device. It measures 160×74.3×9.5mm and weighs around 189grams. The Reno 2 is much lighter (Reno 10X weighs 215grams) and manageable than its predecessor.
The back of the device is smooth; it is made of glass but doesn’t support wireless charging. It has a thin strip in the middle at the back of the phone. Depending on the angle the phone is being looked at, this strip reflects light to form a pattern that looks nothing like we’ve seen on the phones before. The unit we had is the Luminous Black variant.
The strip features OPPO branding and “Designed for Reno” in it. On the top of the strip, we have a tiny circular reflective element called O-dot a ‘ceramic gem’ designed to lift the handset ever so slightly when kept on the surface. Even though it doesn’t have any specific functionalities, it is there to look cool mainly. You can make the O-dot irrelevant by just slapping a bundled case on it. Also, the quad-camera setup is completely recessed into the phone along with the flash on the side.
The top edge is taken up by the shark-fin 16-megapixel selfie camera module with a soft LED flash. It’s worth mentioning that the shark-fin module houses the earpiece and the selfie camera on the front. Overall, we give full marks in this segment since OPPO has mastered the art of smartphone designing.
Snappy performance
The OPPO Reno 2 is powered by Octa-Core (2.2GHz Dual + 1.8GHz Hexa) Snapdragon 730G Mobile Platform with Adreno 618 GPU under the hood. On the storage front, we had 8GB LPDDR4x RAM and 256GB UFS 2.1 storage under the hood. The phone has a hybrid dual SIM slot.
To no surprise, the Snapdragon 730G ensures smooth sailing on the Reno 2, whether you’re browsing the web with dozens of apps open in the background, or playing a heavy game. Being gaming-centric chipset, we tried lots of games including PUBG, Shadow Fight, Riptide GT 2, Vector, and much more to test it. As we played games, we felt a bit of warmth in the back, due to the glass back. Overall the OPPO Reno 2 is an excellent performer. Check out the synthetic benchmark scores below.
Immersive panoramic display
The front side is occupied by a 6.55-inch Full HD+ 20:9 aspect ratio Dynamic AMOLED display with a 93.1% screen-to-body ratio. On top, it is protected by Corning Gorilla Glass 6 protection. There’s a tiny chin at the bottom left empty if you observe it.
The panoramic display on the OPPO Reno 2 offers an immersive viewing experience while watching videos. Apart from this, the screen on the smartphone offered punchy colors, sharp text, and 500nits brightness to be legible in the direct sunlight.
It also offers a couple of options under screen color mode — Vivid and Gentle. With ColorOS 6, the company has built a couple of features that aim to reduce eye strain when using the phone at minimum brightness in dimly-lit environments — Night shield and Low-Brightness Flicker-Free Eye Care. The phone also has an in-display fingerprint scanner.
Versatile camera that does its job perfectly
Coming to the optics, the OPPO Reno 2 comes with a quad-camera setup:
- 48MP rear camera featuring Sony IMX586 sensor with f/1.7, PDAF, OIS, EIS.
- 8MP 116-degree Ultra Wide Lens
- 13MP telephoto lens for 5x Hybrid Optical Zoom, 20X digital zoom
- 2MP macro lens.
The camera app interface is pretty standard with modes like night, panorama, expert, timelapse, slow motion, Dazzle color mode, HDR, AI scene recognition, and more.
During the right lighting conditions, the primary 48MP camera is capable of capturing nice images, with mostly accurate colors and good dynamic range, without going too heavy on the post-processing. It’s worth mentioning that the primary camera shoots at 12MP resolution by default.
For more details, you can switch to 48MP mode as well. Except for a few situations, both 12MP and 48MP result looks the same. If you want to add a bit of saturation on your photo Dazzle Color option similar to Chroma Boost option helps you. The macro output from the primary lens looks for better than dedicated lens. Having said that, we witnessed focus issues while shooting on macro lens half of the times.
The Portrait mode works well in most of the part but at times we got quite a bit of distortion in our images. The 13MP telephoto lens is capable of about 2x optical zoom, 5x hybrid zoom and up to 20x digital zoom (rather hybrid zoom like many had hoped). The Hybrid zoom offers excellent results as well.
During low-lighting conditions, the Reno 2 offers some good output as well with appropriately bright subjects. The dedicated night mode help users click images in really dark environments. In general, it uses a long exposure method to brightens up the subject and sharpens the image to a certain extent preserving the details. The Night mode produced some very good results.
The 16MP front-facing camera is housed in motorised shark fin along with LED Flash. The selfie camera takes some social media-worthy images with accurate color and skin tone, provided the AI beautify if off. The edge detection in the front-camera is not up to the mark. Nevertheless, it captures some satisfying images at the end.
Nightscape
Macro
Zooming capabilities
Indoor
Outdoor
Selfie
Good battery life
The OPPO Reno 2 is powered by a 4000mAh battery with VOOC 3.0 fast charging. As far as the battery goes, the phone manages to deliver an excellent one and half day usage on intensive usage and can easily last you a couple of days on a single charge. Having said that VOOC 3.O makes juicing the battery a quick process as well.
In our OneCharge Rating, the OPPO Reno 2 scores around 17 hours and 1 minute, which is good for a phone with a 4000mAh battery. It took about 30 minutes to charge from 0 to 50 and 1 hour and 23 minutes for 0 to 100% with the bundled 20W VOOC 3.0 charger.
Other mentions
The Reno 2 supports various connectivity options including Dual 4G VoLTE, WiFi 802.11ac dual-band (2×2 MU-MIMO ), Bluetooth 5, GPS/GLONASS/Beidou, and USB Type-C. The Reno 2 comes with a bottom-firing single speaker. It is loud and offers good details at a higher volume as well. The call quality through headsets and loudspeakers was good too.
Why should you reconsider buying it?
Pricey
At a price of Rs. 36,990, the OPPO Reno 2 looks costly even though it ticks all the boxes. Why? Well, there are lots of reasons to it, and we feel Snapdragon 730G is certainly a deal breaker here. Having said that, we are not against this move, but you get a Snapdragon 855-powered mobiles like OnePlus 7, Redmi K20 Pro and ASUS 6Z that are cheaper. Well, if you are lot into zoom photography, we would recommend you to buy the OPPO Reno 10x with extra Rs. 3000, which also equips Snapdragon 855.
The OPPO Reno 2 comes in Ocean Blue and Luminous Black colors, is priced at Rs. 36,990 and will be available from Amazon.in, Flipkart and other retailers online and offline.