Oppo Reno 12 Pro review: it takes on the Google Pixel 8a with gusto

Oppo Reno 12 Pro two-minute review

With its latest mid-range Android phone, Oppo seems to be going after Google’s latest affordable camera phone the Pixel 8a with a similar range of smart AI photography features. And it’s a great attempt, with some solid magic eraser action and a few other cool tools, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

The Oppo Reno 12 Pro is the latest entry in Oppo’s middle tier of smartphones, the Reno range, which sits below the top-end Find mobiles and above the A line. The Reno family offer mobiles at middling prices with some impressive features but with corners cut, and generally only the even-numbered options launch in the West.

I tested the Oppo Reno 10 when that came out just under a year prior to the 12 series, and the newest member of the line comes on leaps and bounds thanks to its improved camera sensors (and faster charging). It’s a shame that Oppo has ditched the curved-edge look of the Reno 10 series though, which makes the phones much more comfortable to hold.

Sitting just above the Oppo Reno 12, the Pro distinguishes itself from its sibling and from many other mid-rangers in one key way: it has a telephoto camera lens for zoom photography.

This camera hardware brings huge benefits to the photography potential of the Reno; you can take better portrait, macro and long-distance pictures than on any similar-priced rival thanks to the presence of a zoom camera.

If you want a great camera phone that doesn’t cost as much as the iPhone 15 Pro , Samsung Galaxy S24 or OnePlus 12 , the Reno 12 Pro will be a blessing. Even the Pixel 8a doesn't have a telephoto lens.

The signature selling points here, though, are the AI photography features. While top-end mobiles have had these for a while, it’s taking time for them to trickle down to mid-rangers in any serious way, but the Reno performs admirably in this department. It’s great at removing background people from your photos, whether it’s vanishing a lone wanderer or bigger crowds, and replacing them with a background so realistic you’ll forget which image is real.

It’s slower to use than the Pixel alternative, but that’s not the end of the world. And I’d say this is one of the best Pixel 8a rivals for people who don’t want a Google phone or want a zoom camera on their mobile.

The Oppo charges quickly, lasts for ages, and feels pretty snappy for gaming. Its display is big and attractive, while being fairly easy to use one-handed. Best of all, you’re getting all these features at a really competitive price.

It’s not the perfect phone though, showing some signs of its mid-range positioning. I was frustrated by how many pre-installed apps (bloatware) clutter up the phone when you first turn it on, making your first 15 minutes a game of ‘weird-knock-off-app-whack-a-mole’ as you try to delete them all. The design also feels a little cheap, even though it emulates the two-texture Pixel back on certain color options.

Even with those issues I can recommend the Reno 12 Pro as one of the best mobiles at its price, especially if you’re looking for an affordable camera phone that won’t break the bank. And with the possibility of software updates bringing improvements to the AI, the handset could prove to be a real rival of the Pixel 8a in the future.

Oppo Reno 12 Pro review: price and availability

• Released in UK and AU in June 2024
• Costs £499 / AU$999 (roughly $640) for sole variant
• Different versions of mobile in different regions

The Oppo Reno 12 Pro has seen a few different releases in different parts of the world, and of slightly different phones too. The western version of the mobile, which I tested, was announced in mid-June 2024.

You can buy the phone for £499 / AU$999 (roughly $640) cementing this firmly in the mid-range phone bracket. Oppo generally doesn’t sell its smartphones in the US and evidently, that’s unchanged with the Reno.

There’s only one version of the phone available in the UK, with 12GB RAM and 512GB storage, though a reduced-storage model is available in other regions. Oppo’s website also sells one color, even though it offers a different one on Amazon.

At that price, you can see why I compared this mobile to the Google Pixel 8a – that costs $499 / £499 / AU$849, so it’s a really close rival. Other mobiles at this rough price point include the iPhone SE , Samsung Galaxy A55 and Xiaomi 13T.

Oppo Reno 12 Pro review: specs

The Oppo Reno 12 Pro has roughly mid-range specs, and here's what we're playing with:

Oppo Reno 12 Pro review: design

• Big but thin and light
• Plastic body feels cheap
• Three color options but depends on region

If you were to pick up the Oppo Reno 12 Pro without knowing what it was, you might confuse it with a Moto or Nokia phone — it gives off budget ‘vibes’. This is mostly down to the plastic frame and back of the body, the latter of which has a two-texture partition that closely resembles a Google Pixel a phone of yore.

Measuring 161.5 x 74.8 x 7.4mm it’s wider than a Pixel, though it’s nice and thin so it won’t weigh you down like a really big phone will. On that topic it weighs 180g which isn’t much for its size – the first time I picked it up I was surprised as I expected it to be heavier.

No 3.5mm headphone jack in sight — there’s a USB-C port for all your connectivity needs instead. The power button and volume rocker are both on the right edge of the device, well within reach for people with average-sized hands.

On the back of the phone, the camera bump protrudes slightly from the panel; it doesn’t stick out so far that I’ll get caught on the side of your pocket as you slip it in.

The screen houses an under-display fingerprint scanner and it worked reliably, although if I’d last used the phone on an app that requires a horizontal orientation  (for example, a game), the scanner would appear at 90 degrees to where it should, oddly.

The phone is available Space Brown (black), Sunset Gold (rose) or Nebula Silver (pinkish silver) hues, though depending on your region not all options may be available. I tested the former which is why I know it’s black and not brown.

An IP65 rating ensures that the phone is protected from dust and fine particles, as well as water splashes like rain or an accidental hit from the garden hose. It won’t stand up to immersion in water though, so don’t drop it in, say, a bath.

• Design score: 3 / 5

Oppo Reno 12 Pro review: display

• 6.7-inches with 1080 x 2412 resolution
• AMOLED display shows punchy colors
• 120Hz refresh rate for smooth scrolling

The Oppo Reno 12 Pro screen clocks in at 6.7 inches diagonally, so it’s a nice big phone — a hand-stretcher for sure, but big too for your Netflix or gaming needs.

The resolution is 1080 x 2412, or FHD+, the same as you’ll see in almost every phone save for the cheapest or priciest rivals. It’s the resolution that most apps output at, so you don’t really need more pixels anyway.

The display refresh rate hits 120Hz, which again is pretty standard for most smartphone in this day and age. It ensures that motion feels nice and smooth when you’re scrolling around the menu, and on supported apps it has the same effect.

A few extra specs make sure that the screen displays vibrant colors: it uses AMOLED tech and supports HDR10+, with a color gamut spanning a billion colors and a fairly high max brightness of 1,200 nits.

• Display score: 4 / 5

Oppo Reno 12 Pro review: software

• Android 14 with Oppo's ColorOS laid over the top
• No confirmed number of software updates
• A huge number of pre-installed apps

And here I was thinking the bloatware infestation on Chinese Android phones was going away: when you boot up the Oppo Reno 12 Pro it’s chock-full of pre-installed apps. There are big names like Netflix, Facebook and TikTok, games I’d never heard of in a folder titled ’Must Play’, countless Oppo-made apps that don’t have an obvious function and even apps titled in Chinese characters that I just don’t understand.

It’s hard to feel like a phone is ‘yours’ when, upon first booting it up, you’re met with an array quite like this.

It’s a shame, too, because under the layers of tacky bloatware ColorOS (Oppo’s own Android fork) is decent. With the Reno 12 Pro you’re getting ColorOS 13.1 by default, laid over Android 14 , though Oppo has been quiet about how many Android updates the phone will get.

There’s a wide range of customization options for things like font, always-on display, the layout of the quick settings menu (the swipe-down one) and the edge lighting when you get a notification.

This quick settings menu has a pretty easy-to-understand layout, more so than on most Android forks, so you can easily toggle whatever function you want quickly. The phone also has an app drawer so by default, your phone’s main menu pages look relatively clean.

• Software score: 2.5 / 5

Oppo Reno 12 Pro review: cameras

• 50MP main, 50MP telephoto and 8MP ultra-wide cameras
• 50MP selfie camera rounds out the suite
• Magic eraser AI tool is useful for spritzing up pictures

Oppo named one of its first Reno phones the ‘Reno 10x Zoom’ before promptly dropping telephoto cameras from the series; well zooming is back and better than ever in the Reno 12 Pro.

I’m getting ahead of myself; the main snapper is a 50MP f/1.8 unit with a few bells and whistles like PDAF (for quick focusing) and OIS (which compensates for your shaky hands).

Pictures taken on the main camera are nice and bold and bright. Maybe they lose a little more detail in darker areas than I’d like but the vibrancy of colors more than makes up for it. Focusing was a little more scattershot than I’m used to with PDAF though and I found myself jumping into the Pro app once or twice just to have better control over it. Overall, though, this is a nice camera that returns pleasing social media-ready pics.

Its 50MP companion is the f/2.0 telephoto lens, which supports 2x optical zoom — that’s not quite the 5x of the optical zoom but it’s still a breath of fresh air given how few mid-range mobiles include zoom cameras at all.

When analysing my camera samples to write this section, I kept needing to refer to the metadata to remember which were the zoomed-in snaps – this is to say that they look great, missing on loads of the tell-tale signs of other phone camera zooms like grain, washed-out colors, a lack of dynamic range or a different color profile than the comparable 1x image.

While 2x zoom is the optical limit you can go up to 5x hybrid or 20x digital zoom, and pictures taken on the latter actually look decent. You could easily use some of the 20x snaps I took on social media – I know because I did.

The third rear camera drops the resolution considerably. It’s an 8MP f/2.2 ultra-wide camera with a 112-degree field of view — as you can imagine pictures are a little lower-res than on the main camera, so you’re missing some quality, and they are a little less vibrant too. This lens can be used sparingly and situationally and ignored most of the rest of the time.

We jump back up to 50MP for the f/2.0 front camera, so you can expect high-res selfies.

Selfies look bright and detailed, with fairly realistic-looking color replication. Jump into Portrait mode and there’s mostly (though not always totally) accurate bokeh background blur (sometimes I lost some hairs). However the default beautification is very zealous about smoothing over your skin so I’d recommend playing around with it a bit.

Oppo has been putting the Reno 12 Pro’s AI photo features at the forefront of its marketing, in a clear attempt to rival the offerings Google includes with its Pixel phones. According to the marketing, it has tools to remove unwanted background elements of photos, save aspects of a snap as stickers, open closed eyes in selfies, add clarity and upscaling to objects or completely change a selfie into a different art style or location.

I say ‘according to the marketing’ because the current version of the software as of my testing of the mobile (July 2024) only has the first two… at least, as far as I could find. Maybe they’re hidden deep in menus but I did a lot of searching to find them.

The smart features present are pretty smart, though, as long as you’ll forgive them being a little slow to use in certain circumstances. Magic eraser is easy to use and you can select individual objects to delete or a ‘mass erasure’ option that identifies all humans in the background. It’s really accurate too.

Equally accurate is the replication part, so when you remove a person from your picture, the phone is great at identifying what should be there and filling in the blanks. Even if a person straddles different backgrounds, there’s no problem.

Beyond the smart features, you’re getting the same features that most modern mobiles have: Pro, Portrait, Night, Full-Res, Slow-Mo, Time-Lapse round out what you’re used to.

In terms of video, you can record up to 4K at 30fps or 1080p at 60fps on the front or rear cameras; don’t expect 8K recording here.

Oppo Reno 12 Pro camera samples

• Camera score: 4 / 5

Oppo Reno 12 Pro: performance and audio

• Dimensity 7300 Energy provides middling power
• 12GB RAM and an impressive 512GB storage
• Stereo speakers plus Bluetooth 5.4

The power in the Oppo Reno 12 Pro comes from the MediaTek chipset it uses, called the Dimensity 7300 Energy, which as the name suggests focuses on energy efficiency. Alongside the non-Pro model, this is the first phone to use the chipset.

In the Geekbench 6 benchmark tests, the Reno returned an average multi-core score of 2,005, which is the kind of lower mid-range score that you’d expect to be associated with a phone at this price point – it’s not exactly blazing power but it’s enough for normal tasks.

That score is reflected in the gaming power of the phone – it could handle most normal titles like Call of Duty: Mobile and PUBG Mobile quite well, but there were the occasional bouts of lagging or slow loading that gives away that this isn’t a top-power phone.

The mobile comes with 12GB RAM which handles your everyday tasks, and I never found the phone slow when using social media apps, playing around with the camera app or scrolling through menus. That’s paired with 512GB storage, which is a huge amount for a phone at this price point. There’s no expandable storage but with 512GB space at your fingertips, you might not need it.

On the audio front, there’s no 3.5mm headphone jack, so you’ll have to use the USB-C port and an adaptor for wired audio. Wirelessly, you can use the Bluetooth 5.4 connectivity to pair headphones or earbuds, and there are also stereo speakers on the top and bottom of the mobile. These are positioned well enough that I didn’t find myself covering them when holding the device landscape.

• Performance score: 3.5 / 5

Oppo Reno 12 Pro review: battery life

• Long-lasting 5,000mAh battery
• Phone lasts at least a day and a half
• 80W wired charging is pretty fast

On paper, the Oppo Reno 12 Pro’s 5,000mAh is big but also pretty standard for phones at this price; it’s rare to see mid-range mobiles with any other size of battery.

However in the field (ie, in testing), I was pretty surprised by the Reno’s lasting power. I’m used to phones like this having battery life’s of roughly a day and half, but the Reno comes closer than most at turning that ‘half’ into something like ‘two thirds’ through normal use.

In more handy terms, it meant that I could indulge in long gaming sessions without having to worry about the battery running too low for me to use the handset for the rest of the day.

Charging is fast too, at 80W, which will top you up in no time. Oppo says that it’ll power the phone to full in just under 50 minutes, but I had enough charge to last me a full day of use in about half an hour of charging.

The Reno 12 Pro also offers reverse wired charging, so you can plug a cable into the phone’s USB-C port and then into another gadget to power it up. It’s not fast, but it’s a useful way to keep your smartwatch or headphones powered on the go.

• Battery score: 4 / 5

Oppo Reno 12 Pro review: value

The Oppo Reno 12 Pro has a few rough edges, but they’re all in the areas where it tries to outstep its bounds. Looking at what you’re getting for the price, the Reno offers great value for money.

For a distinctly price you’re getting a display, camera array, battery and charging department and design that feels better than you’d expect at the cost.

None of the Reno 12 Pro’s weaker areas are any worse than you’d expect for the price either; bloatware is annoying but the Oppo is far from the only mobile to have it, and while the design is uninspired, you have to pay twice as much for a really good-looking mobile.

• Value score: 4 / 5

Should you buy the Oppo Reno 12 Pro?

Buy it if...

You want an affordable camera phone
A zoom camera? AI smart features? Vibrant scene optimization? The Oppo has it all, making it one of the best cheap camera phones I've tested.

You need a long-lasting battery
The Oppo Reno 12 Pro lasts longer than most other 5,000mAh battery phones I've tested, probably thanks to the efficient chipset, which is a blessing for people who aren't always near a charger.

You need lots of storage
With a default storage space of 512GB, the Oppo Reno 12 Pro ensures you won't need to buy an SD card for extra space.

Don't buy it if...

You need blazing-fast processing speeds
The Dimensity 7300 Energy is fine for most tasks, but passionate gamers or people who need blazing-fast power will find it's not enough.

Bloatware annoys you
Even compared to other low-budget Android mobiles, the Oppo Reno 12 Pro has loads of pre-installed apps that you'll need to delete.

Oppo Reno 12 Pro review: Also consider

If you're split on whether or not to buy the Oppo Reno 12 Pro, here are some other mobiles you might want to consider.

How I tested the Oppo Reno 12 Pro

• Review test period = 2 week
• Testing included = Everyday usage, including web browsing, social media, photography, video calling, gaming, streaming video, music playback
• Tools used = Geekbench 6, Geekbench ML, GFXBench, native Android stats

The testing period for the Oppo Reno 12 Pro was two weeks, which began with product testing (hence there not being many of my apps).

Over the testing period I used the Reno like my normal phone: taking pictures, streaming music and videos, contacting people on social media, and playing lots of games. The testing period fell across a holiday so I got to take the phone out and about on a few trips.

I've been reviewing smartphones for TechRadar for over five years now, including using the original series of Reno mobiles and plenty more since then, as well as rivals across the mobile market.

Read more about how we test

First reviewed July 2024