OPPO has announced the availability of Reno4 Pro, OPPO Watch and OPPO Enco W51 in Singapore. The Reno4 Pro and OPPO Watch will be available islandwide from 15 Aug. The Reno4 Pro comes in 8GB/256GB at S$899, while the OPPO Watch comes in 2 variants. The 41mm retails at S$299 and the 46mm is S$399. The OPPO Enco W51 true wireless earbuds will be on sale from early September at S$179.
After being impressed greatly by the OPPO Find X2 Pro, the OPPO Reno4 Pro specs may not be as stellar, but it’s only at half the price. After using it as my main phone for a week, I find the overall performance quite good. Running on Snapdragon 720G, the benchmark score is lower, but if you do not use it to play extreme games, you won’t feel any performance issues for normal social media and communication apps. So far, my experience with the new 700-series of Qualcomm Snapdragon has been quite good.
As for the camera, the OPPO Reno4 Pro comes with 48MP primary camera, an 8MP ultra wide-angle camera, as well as a 2MP macro camera and 2MP mono lens. The anti-glare matt rear finish has become sort of a signature on OPPO Reno series, but the Reno4 feels less silky and more friction, because it’s made of plastic. Both front and rear panels curve around to make the sides thin, making it feel like the phone is thinner than it looks. While not a fan of curved display screen, your fingers won’t get in the way if you use it with a protection case.
OPPO Reno4 Pro features the 90Hz display refresh rate with up to 180Hz touch sample rate, enabling smoother animation and transition. To further enhance the visual experience, the display panel uses Super AMOLED and OSIE (OPPO Screen Image Engine) Ultra Clear Visual Effect, together with many other display customisations like screen colour temperature, low-brightness flicker-free eye comfort, font and display size. So yes, you get pretty premium display experience.
The Reno4 Pro runs on the latest ColorOS 7.2, and in this latest UI, OPPO makes one-hand navigation more usable with Icon Pull-Down Gesture: when you swipe your finger from the corner upwards, the homescreen icons collapse towards the finger. Continue swiping towards the icon and release it to select. On the other hand, Reno4 Pro now uses more stock Android apps like Phone, Messages, Calendar, Files. This also means that Reno4 Pro no longer supports call recording.
As for camera quality, the OPPO Reno4 Pro delivers pretty vibrant and sharp images with good capture speed too, even in low light. Compared to Google Pixel 4a, the Reno4 Pro edges in sharpness and vibrancy.
I still find the portrait beautification mode too aggressive for my liking, but that can be turned down. There are some new portrait enhancement features like AI Colour Portrait Photo mode and Night Flare Portrait mode which is fun and social media worthy but the effect is too processed for my liking.
Even though there is no telephoto lens, it’s safe to zoom in a little thanks to the hybrid zoom: even though the main camera is 48MP, it only captures 12MP by default, so if you zoom in, it will basically do digital crop and still retain the pixel resolution. You can enable 48MP capture, but in this mode, you cannot zoom in or out.
For macro shots, while there is a 2MP macro lens, the output is still in 12MP, fortunately. You can use the digital zoom up to 10x to get even closer crop, which is really good. Not many smartphones allow that, even though the final result may appear too digitalised.
Verdict
On the whole, the Reno4 Pro feels very responsive with smooth animation. It inherits the positive vibes from the OPPO Find X2 Pro which I reviewed favourably, and the overall performance works good for me who usually prefers flagship phones for that extra speed. It supports in-screen fingerprint sensor, facial recognition, all-day battery life, 65W SuperVOOC 2.0 fast charging, NFC, external micro-SD card.
The Reno4 Pro comes in Starry Night and Silky White, with 8 RAM and 256 RAM and is priced at S$899. The phone is available island wide from 15 August 2020 at Singtel, StarHub and M1 stores, OPPO Concept Stores as well as OPPO’s Shopee and Lazada Flagship Stores.
