OPPO Reno8 Pro review – Outshines Flagship Designs

With true flagship pro devices having sailed past the €1,000 a few years ago now, a huge market for near-premium smartphones has emerged. Fresh off the back of their well-received flagships Find X5 and X5 Pro, Chinese hardware giant OPPO bring us their 2022 sub-premium effort, Reno8 Pro.

Priced at €749, OPPO Reno8 Pro undercuts premium pro models but absolutely aims at a flagship feel and upmarket exterior.

Elegant Siblings

OPPO Reno4 Pro, the last Reno released in this region, looked entirely different to the minimal and carefully formed look of its upmarket Find X3 series siblings.

OPPO Reno8 Pro is far closer in aesthetic design to its brand brother Find X5 Pro. Both devices feature tight, intricate machining of premium materials that offer visual intrigue at various distances. All set in an elegant and minimal macro-detailed design to enhance the models’ details where they lay.

OPPO Reno 8 Pro offers greater contrast than Find X5 Pro. The softness and tendency to curve of Find X5 series is curtailed with Reno8 Pro offering well-appointed straight lines and defined edges.

Read more: OPPO Find X5 Pro 5G review – Divine Design Meets Charging Wizardry

The overall form is a glass sandwich with the sharper corners of the box shape gently chamfered to soften the monolithic design.

Masterpiece Centrepiece

The way that OPPO Reno8 Pro’s lens island morphs into that chamfer on that top edge is incredible attention to detail. As is the choice to counter the glassy front and rear with a frosted aluminium edge frame.

The rear features a large camera island whose moulded micro-arc offers a piece of pop-art as a visual centrepiece as it joins the rear glass. This island also features two round corners and two sharp corners, the matching cuts sitting opposite each other on the arrangement.

This arc defines the lens island along two edges with the sharp edges of the micro-arc’s lip seamlessly blended into the rear. The thoughtful use of 90-degree angles and straight lines also balances the large twin lens that dominate the lens island.

Reno8 Pro offers a delicate visual balance of shapes, macro and micro detail, and materials to deliver the most interesting looking smartphone in years. The visual harmony in the design of OPPO Reno8 Pro is breath-taking.

Quality Build

OPPO Reno8 Pro feels as good as it looks. A waif at around 7.4mm, the device feels dense and solid. The aluminium frame is lightly frosted to aid in gripping the sometimes-slippery glass rear.

Read more: OPPO ColorOS 13 Launches with Rollout Plan for 60+ Devices

In spite of that flat glass rear, the device is easy to hold on to. The chamfered edges and aforementioned frosted metal edge counter the glass. OPPO Reno8 Pro is also well-weighted and balanced for one-handed use.

The volume and power buttons sit one opposite sides of the device. Device volume is adjusted with two separate buttons rather than a rocker. The volume and power controls are flat with rounded ends matching the overall look of the device while being easy to locate.

An IP54 rating is a nice inclusion. Water and dust resistance often omitted in faux-flagship devices and a little splash protection is always welcome.

Front Colour

The display of OPPO Reno8 Pro features a 10-bit mode that offers 1 billion colours. The 6.7″ AMOLED screen offers a 120Hz refresh rate and beams a bright 500 nits typically.

HDR content has a pleasing depth on OPPO Reno8 Pro that only helps the vibrant 10-bit colour pop all the more.

The device offers three refresh modes, at 60, 90 and 120Hz. This less variable refresh rate is about the only feature missing from the otherwise premium display.

The flat form of the front of the device is refreshing after years of overflows and active-screen bevelled edges. The edge colour distortion brought by waterfall-type displays is absent. Content near the edges of the screen is easier to drag-and-drop.

Common Camera Class

Reno8 Pro features hardware similar to the well-received Find X5 Series, including a Sony IMX766 and OPPO’s inhouse MariSilicon X AI image enhancement.

As such, OPPO Reno8 Pro offers exceptional low-light imaging capabilities like OPPO Find X5 Pro. The AI NPU does an excellent job of scene selection adjustment in a wide range of scenarios just like the premium line.

Generally speaking, Reno8 Pro snaps the most common scenes perfectly with one shot. Day light shots are bright, balanced and detailed; colours are life-like.

Very high-contrast shots push the dynamic range of the lenses and is one of the few areas where you might notice a gap between the Reno8 Pro and a true flagship device.

Competent Video

Like its still, OPPO Reno8 Pro offers detailed and bright video across its formats. The lack of 4K video at 60 frames per second is worth mentioning. Also worth, mentioning is that 1080p video can be captured at up to 120fps.

OPPO Reno8 Pro’s bag of premium capture features also include a 4K Ultra night video mode. This is a neat party trick that can deliver surprisingly clear and toned video to a point. Once the scene gets just dark enough, the video quickly degrades with noisy surfaces and softening edges.

The device is capable of shooting at 960 frames per second for ultra slow-motion capture as well as impressive time-lapse video. These flagship niceties round off a varied and populist camera suite.

Selfie Improvement

OPPO Reno8 Pro leverages a large front-facing 32MP Sony IMX709 RGBW sensor and some AI trickery to deliver a strong selfie suite.

The device uses its imaging software and AI to manage selfie capture. Adjusting settings for the number of participants and even differentiating between male and female subjects. Different beautification levels and styles can then be automatically applied to each.

In practice, the AI support streamlines the selfie experience and offers excellent first-time results. Night-time selfies, in particular, are excellent. The screenflash is surprisingly bright and fills in valiantly when the lights are truly down.

Premium Driver

The MT-Dimensity 8100-Max and 8GB of RAM of Reno8 Pro is competitive at its price. Everyday performance is flawless. Multitasking and opening large apps are smooth operations.

As a work companion, it has more than enough juice to get the job done. Naturally, OPPO Reno8 Pro falls a little short of premium offerings on raw power and on efficiency at demanding tasks. The device can become quite warm under load and the normally robust stamina sometimes shows the extra strain.

High-end 3D gaming regularly hits 60 frames per second on ‘Max’ settings. However, higher framerates and more raw power are available at this price.

OPPO Reno8 Pro Battery and Charging

Reno8 and Reno8 Pro both feature OPPO’s innovative Battery Health Engine which they say allows the device to reach 1,600 charging cycles with 80% of its battery capacity intact. This is double the current average and a huge leap for device longevity.

Obviously, we haven’t charged/discharged 1,600 times but, at once-per-day, OPPO are effectively promising a four-year practical battery life for Reno8 Pro.

OPPO Reno8 Pro features the company 80W SuperVOOC 2.0 wired charging as seen on OPPO Find X5 and Find X5 Pro. With the supplied charger, users can charge from 0 to 50% in around 10 minutes, and from 0-100% in around 40 minutes.

The device does not include wireless charging. In our opinion, the choice of omitting the feature to save money was a savvy one.

Read more: OPPO Watch Free review – Light on Weight, Not on Function

Wired charging speeds, in general, have greatly eroded the inconvenience of tethering. And with a maximum downtime of 40 minutes with OPPO Reno8 Pro, setting the device on a mat for two hours just sounds less convenient to me.

Specifications – OPPO Reno8 Pro

Reno 8 Pro is available from €49 upfront once you switch to Eir billpay . OPPO Reno 8 Pro is available on Eir Prepay at €679.99

Review unit provided by OPPO