OPPO loves to push tech to its edge, literally. The OPPO Reno 10x Zoom is another phone from OPPO that brings that all-screen display design its predecessor’s had and improves on it. OPPO Reno comes in two models, the base model and the Reno 10x Zoom which we have been playing around with. It also comes in two colours, Ocean Green and Jet Black. The Find X and the OPPO F11 Pro featured an almost bezel-less display with a slide-up camera mechanism.
The OPPO Reno now features a shark fin camera mechanism to give the phone a near bezel-less screen. That’s not the only interesting feature, the OPPO Reno packs other attention-grabbing specs. We’ve had the phone for a couple of days and here’s our first impressions review.
What you get in the box
The OPPO Reno comes in a neat and nice well-designed package. The box is a very tall white silverish box with a little gradient to it. The top part has an imprint of what the phone looks at the back, the three rear cameras and a slick OPPO stripe showing the company logo and an O dot that’s a tiny nubbing to protect the three lenses when placed on a flat surface to avoid scratches on it.
Removing the top part of the box reveals a smaller box that has a safety guide and a quick guide, a sim ejection tool and the OPPO Reno 10x Zoom in a plastic housing.
The phone is protected by another plastic covering. Removing the plastic housing reveals a hard plastic protective cover, the VOOC fast charging power brick, USB-C cable, USB-C earphones with the play and pause button and that have an ocean green tint at the edge of the earbuds plus an extra pair of the rubber ear tips.
You should not the OPPO Reno 10x is a relatively heavy phone which some people prefer. The phone comes with a thick plastic screen protector that you can keep or remove depending on your preference.
The eye-catching design
The screen is where you’ll spend most of your time either watching movies, YouTube videos, scrolling through your gallery or Instagram and the OPPO Reno 10x Zoom wants you to enjoy the experience of using all the screen real estate that the 6.6 inch AMOLED FHD+(1080 by 2340) display with a 19.5.9 aspect ratio offers.
The screen doesn’t bend on the edge like the prototypes it is testing and thus you avoid the reflections when watching videos and the random unnecessary touches when you hold the phone.
Aside from the specs, the vibrant display and the extremely thin bezels will always excite you each time you unlock your phone.
At the back, you are met with a sleek frosted glass finish that will keep the phone smudge-free. Gorilla Glass 6 provides protection and reinforces the dual-glass design the OPPO Reno 10x Zoom rocks. The front is protected by Gorilla Glass 5. There’s a case for those that can’t live without it.
The phone features USB-C that works as a charging port and a headphone jack. OPPO offers type-c headphones to counter this inconvenience. There’s a sim slot and mono speaker next to the port. There is also another speaker at the top but not as loud as the bottom facing one.
At the top, there’s the shark fin pop-up selfie camera and at the back has an OPPO logo strip with a nubbing at the end of it since there are no camera bumps. We’ll talk about the phone’s optics below.
For biometrics, there’s an in-screen fingerprint scanner and face unlock in addition to the regular passcode. The fingerprint scanner is fast to give you fast unlocking. The face unlock is also fast as the shark fin pop-ups quickly too.
Software experience and performance
The OPPO Reno 10x Zoom comes with ColorOS 6 on top of Android 9 Pie. OPPO gave the Reno 10x Zoom a really good haptic feedback system.
ColorOS has come so far. The latest, ColorOS 6 is cleaner and flatter than its previous versions although that iOS inspiration can’t be ignored. It’s missing in other UI elements but you’ll feel it on the settings menu.
Gesture-based navigation is also similar to the iPhone X, its responsive and smooth. Swiping up from the bottom brings you to the homescreen and the recent apps if you drag up and hold. Swiping up from the left gets you back to what you were doing. You now also get an app drawer
When you swipe right from the homescreen, you meet OPPO’s smart assistant that contains a search bar for looking up apps, settings and other things on your phone. Customizable widgets are present for the Calendar, quick functions and Notes.
The OPPO Reno 10x Zoom is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 processor and an Adreno 640 GPU coupled with 8GB RAM and 256GB of onboard storage. All this makes the phone feel snappier during light, medium and heavy usage. Web browsing, scrolling through my social media feeds or snapping photos has been smooth. The OPPO Find X has handled multitasking between apps very well.
I just started gaming on the phone – I’ve been switching between light games and RAM intense games such as PUBG and Asphalt 9 mostly between periods of productive procrastination and the OPPO Reno has held its own. OPPO’s Game Space adds icing to this cake as it improves your gaming experience where you can switch between performance mode and balanced mode.
Cameras
Optics-wise, the OPPO Reno 10x Zoom packs quite the features. On the back, you get a triple setup that includes a 48MP f/1.7 sensor, a 13MP f/3.0 telephoto and an 8MP f/2.2 ultra-wide sensor.
It should be worth noting that you can only go to up to 5x for optical zoom and after that switches to digital boost but the results are remarkable as you’ll see in the samples below.(Click on each photo to expand)
Here are some other regular shots(click on each photograph to expand)
Here are some bokeh shots(click on each photograph to expand)
Going to the selfie shooter, the OPPO Reno rocks a 16MP pop-up selfie camera that unlike OPPO’s Find X, the mechanism rises asymmetrically like a shark fin and also spots an LED flash.
I took a couple of selfies and my oh my, do I look like a snack. That’s how good that front-facing camera is.
Here are some selfies(click on each photograph to expand)
Here are some portraits(click on each photograph to expand)
The camera’s performance is top-notch and I’m pleased with how the photos I took turned out. The image processing is pretty impressive as you get punchy and vibrant photos that retain a lot of detail and that you’ll gladly share on social media or other private platforms. I’ll be testing the camera in the next coming days as I check out other features such as how it performs in low light scenarios, so stay tuned for that article.
Battery Life
The OPPO Reno 10x Zoom packs a 4065mAh battery. The battery is so efficient that you’ll have to ditch the external battery you usually have. It pushes through the day with no hassle and most of the times I had an average of between 25% and 20% before I went to sleep. That’s enough power for late-night meme browsing or watching newly posted YouTube videos.
The OPPO Reno 10x Zoom comes with their proprietary VOOC 3.0 fast charging that will quickly juice up your phone in a matter of minutes if you’re in a hurry(75% in 30 minutes). An hour’s charge can get you to 100%
Is the OPPO Reno 10x Zoom worth buying?
The OPPO Reno 10X Zoom brings 10X the fun as it is OPPO’s most refined phone and a flagship worth considering if you’re in the market for one. OPPO upped their game by not only bringing function but also the looks.
The OPPO Reno 10X Zoom has a lot going on for it including that notch-free design, the outstanding battery life, the latest and powerful internal hardware plus the eye-grabbing AMOLED display, the triple rear camera setup and the shark-fin pop-up selfie camera.
If you liked the OPPO Find X, then you’ll definitely love the Reno 10x Zoom. So far, I’m enjoying my experience with the phone and I’ll keep you updated as I delve deeper into what the phone offers.
The OPPO Reno 10X Zoom is the only variant OPPO is selling locally and goes for Ksh 90,000.
