Oppo Reno12 5G review: Shimmery value

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OPPO announced the Reno12 series of phones back in July with the promise of mid-range AI functionality.

Given the best smartphones in Australia can’t deliver reliable, useful AI, (or a strong reason to care about it) my hopes for the functionality on the $799 Reno12 weren’t very high.

And after a couple of months testing it out, that feeling has played out. The AI is underwhelming, and is better left avoided.

Fortunately, the AI functions are completely optional, and if you wilfully ignore them, you actually end up with a reasonable mid-range device.

There are better options on the market at that price, but that doesn’t make the Reno12 a bad offering. It’s just not the best offering at the price.

What is the Oppo Reno12 offering?

The Reno12 is a stylish mid-range phone. Available in either “Black Brown” or “Astro Silver”, the Reno12’s rear backing is notable for how it shimmers in the light.

I tested the Silver version, and it is quite striking, though a bit faux-glamour for my tastes.

The phone itself is wrapped around a 6.7-inch FHD+ AMOLED display, with a colour depth of over a billion colours and a maximum brightness of 1200 nits. The edges of the screen are curved, giving the phone a more premium feel than its price indicates, while the screen itself is Corning’s Gorilla Glass 7i.

Around the back of the phone in the top corner of the shimmery back is the triple lens “AI Camera System”. It has an almost jewelled bezel around the entire camera array, which adds to that “faux-glamour” effect I was talking about earlier. It’s not jewelled, but it’s designed to look like it by the way it reflects the light and feels.

The cameras themselves are pretty standard fare – you get a main 50MP lens with a 79-degree field of view and an f/1.8 aperture, plus an 8MP ultra-wide angle (112º FOV, f/2.2) and a 2MP Macro lens (89º FOV, f/2.4).

The cameras can shoot 4K/30fps with optical image stabilisation, and slo-mo in 1080p at 480 fps.

A lot of what OPPO is pitching with this phone though is its camera AI features, like object removal, automatic sharpening of facial details and things like opening eyes of people who blink in group shots.

There are also the standard AI writing features, if you struggle to compose emails or text messages.

Powering all of these features is the MediaTek Dimensity 7300, 12 GB RAM and 256 GB of storage. The phone also packs a 5,000 mAh battery, Wi-Fi 6 connectivity and Bluetooth 5.4.

What does the Oppo Reno12 do well?

For a mid-range device, the Reno12 takes pretty decent pictures. Nothing to completely blow you away, but also nothing you should be ashamed of sharing on social media.

The beauty mode is switched on out of the box though, and I really hate beauty mode (on every device, not just the OPPO), so you probably want to make sure you turn it off before you start taking photos.

But the real star of the show is battery life. OPPO’s decision to use the power-efficient MediaTek 7300. I could get through a couple of days fairly easily.

What’s even better about the battery is that it includes OPPO’s 80W Supervooc fast charger, which promises to take the battery from 0-100% in 47 minutes. I never really needed to charge it from flat, but I did find the charging fast.

What could the Oppo Reno12 improve?

The performance on the Reno12 didn’t blow me away. It was usable enough in the real world for the price tag, but benchmarks were underwhelming, especially compared with similarly priced phones from Motorola.

But for me, I’m going to call out that the included AI features being marketed just aren’t that great. Here’s a selfie of me in front of my air conditioner, and one where I tried to use AI to remove the air con unit.

It looks like shit. Just a blurry smear behind my flawlessly smooth forehead (I forgot to turn off that bloody beauty mode).

There’s also an AI Studio app pre-installed that’s designed to let you create fake images of yourself, whether an animation style or simply putting your head inside another image.

To use the app, you need to use an OPPO account, which gives you (after you agree to numerous T&Cs), a currency called “Stars” which you need to use the AI generation tool.

But again, the results are shit. It’s not worth it at all. Using the same selfie as before, this is “me” from the “Traditional Glow” template.

I particularly love how the AI decided to leave in the bridge of my glasses in the first shot.

Honestly, What is the point of this garbage? The whole push to artificially generate substandard portraits is such a tremendous waste of time, energy, and resources. The sooner “AI” goes the way of NFTs, the better.

Verdict

Phone companies are a bit stuck right now. To be considered progressive, they have to be pitching AI features. But across the board, most of these AI features produce useless slop that isn’t worth using beyond an initial play around.

The problem is that when you put so much effort into marketing the phone as AI-friendly, but it sits in the mid-range, then all the inadequacies stand out.

Without the AI features to consider, the Reno12 would be just another mid-range device to consider. Not the best, not the worst, but something that looks pretty good and is reasonably affordable.

With the AI stuff, you have to consider that people buying this phone for AI features that underwhelm are going to leave even more disappointed than if they just bought a middle-of-the-road handset.

By setting up expectations for a device to do more than it can actually manage, OPPO has made the Reno12 worse than it should be.

Buy the OPPO Reno12 5G online

OPPO Reno12 5G

RRP: $799

Check Price @ Amazon