OPPO, the huge Chinese smartphone manufacturer launched a new smartphone to the Kenyan market with the Reno family name.
The Reno 2F is the smartphone in focus here and it bears the Reno name that has been associated with premium OPPO smartphones like the Reno 10X Zoom. It may have a ‘premium’ name but this phone now occupies the upper mid-range region of the smartphone market.
Starting with the body, it has a plastic body and with a relatively large 6.5 inch 2340 x 1080 pixel-dense screen. It is an AMOLED panel and looks pretty good. This screen is covered by Corning Gorilla Glass 4. The back has this textured pattern that is visible and also features its quad-camera array.
Speaking of the cameras, there are 4 cameras at the back. We have the main 48MP camera with an f/1.79 aperture. This has been a popular sensor and we have seen it in a lot of phones this year. There is also an 8MP wide-angle camera with an f.2.2 aperture. There are two 2MP cameras where one is a ‘mono’ camera and the other a ‘secondary camera.’ which is weird.
The Reno 2F has a motorized 16MP selfie camera with an f/2.0 aperture. The mechanism has free fall protection where it senses your phone falling and retracts the camera immediately. There are also RGB LEDs around the camera which is kind of flashy.
The primary camera features Ultra Night Mode 2.0 which is geared to make you take better night photos. Portrait 2.0 aims to make you take better portrait photos with background blur. HDR portrait uses multiple shots while taking portraits so as to balance the image well. Beauty mode is here as well if you want to take selfies with your skin looking all smooth. The wide-angle camera adds the ability for you to take ultra-wide-angle videos.
OPPO also touted its Smart Video Editor which makes it easy to edit the videos that you shoot with the Reno 2F. It can automatically add music to match with the timing and transitions of your footage which is kinda awesome.
The OPPO Reno 2F doesn’t have a normal capacitive fingerprint scanner and instead has an optical one under the glass. They say that it is 11.3% faster at unlocking and has a 16% brighter unlock area which means it will be faster to unlock compared with the Reno.
We should not forget about the OPPO Reno 2F’s other major specifications. It has 8GB of RAM which is great, 128GB of ROM and runs on the Mediatek MTK P70 processor. It has a 4000mAh battery with VOOC Flash Charge 3.0 for 0-51% charge in 30 minutes. It runs on OPPO’s ColorOS 6.1 that runs on Android Pie. Yes, it also has a USB type C port for those that are asking. It ships in two colours: Sky white and Lake Green.
OPPO says that the phone will cost Kshs 39,999 which is not a surprise at all if you compare it with the A9 2020. They share the same internal storage, RAM, speakers and cameras. The differences are the pop-up cameras, the way better AMOLED screen and the smaller 4000mAh battery on the Reno.