Introducing, the OPPO Reno12 Pro. It’s OPPO’s latest premium mid-range smartphones and they’ve taken quite a different route this time. Hint – AI Phone. Yeah, that’s a hit word for 2024.
Screen
Let’s start with the screen. It’s using a pretty standard 6.7-inch OLED screen with 2412×1080 pixels in resolution and goes up to 120Hz refresh rate and by default, the screen is already very good.
It can reach up to around 1240 nits of brightness at most, covers 99.91% of sRGB and 98.62% of DCI-P3 color gamuts while having a maximum ΔE of around 2.58.
There are more color modes to be selected from the settings menu – and my favorite one is the Cinematic mode. The color gamut coverage changes to 99.99% of sRGB and 98.48% of DCI-P3, but the maximum ΔE is only at 1.0238.
The Brilliant color mode though, is not worth it. Sure, the color gamut coverage is now 100% for sRGB and 99.89% of DCI-P3, but the maximum ΔE has gone up to 4.0668.
So what this means is that I suggest you leave it in its default, or if you want a slightly better-looking screen, go for the Cinematic color mode.
By the way, the under-display fingerprint scanner is once again placed way too low to be used.
Performance
One big change that OPPO did to the Pro model within the Reno12 series is the chipset. It’s a big change, honestly. Previously for the Reno11 Pro, we have the Dimensity 8200, which is a mid-to-high range chipset.
Now for the Reno12 Pro, we have the Dimensity 7300 instead. To be specific, it’s using the Dimensity 7300 Energy for Reno. I think this is a customized version of the Dimensity 7300 for this phone specifically, much like how we have the Dimensity Plus and Ultra variants in the past.
Genshin Impact defaults to the “lowest” graphical settings. Even at this graphical setting, it can’t maintain 60fps. In terms of performance, there’s no way around this – it’s a downgrade compared to the Reno11 Pro. This phone is using the Mali-G615 GPU, with only 2 cores – that’s why the name has the word “MC2”.
Even the RAM has been downgraded to LPDDR4X on the Reno12 Pro.
Battery life
What has been upgraded though, is the battery life. Whatever magic OPPO did to the Reno12 Pro, it’s amazing. This phone is using a pretty standard 5,000mAh battery with 19.55Wh capacity, and it lasts for 14 hours and 49 minutes in our standardized battery life test.
That is truly amazing, and honestly speaking – we can expect a two-day battery life from this phone.
Charging speed
The charging speed though, is pretty much going to be similar to what we had before. It comes with an 80W SuperVOOC charger in the box.
It charges the phone from 15% to completion in less than an hour. The temperature is kept in check at around 37.5°C throughout the entire charging cycle – and that’s great.
It also supports up to USB-PD 2.0 only, which is 9V at 1.5A – meaning 15W maximum. I really do hope they’ll support USB-PD 3.0 at up to at least 45W for broader compatibility with other laptop chargers.
Software
Now, the software is what I want to focus on as well because they’ve made a few changes here and there since we last saw ColorOS. So out of the box, our unit is running the ColorOS 14.1 and as usual, lots of bloatware and things that I don’t use are included.
The typical Hot Games and Hot Apps are here – and the first thing that I did was to disable the App Market.
Then, when I swipe down for the Shelf feature, I was immediately blasted by ads from Lazada. I didn’t know Lazada had a widget for the shelf, and I immediately removed this widget.
The Fineasy app is still here as well, and once again – we can’t customize the double-press power button shortcut to do anything else.
Now, there are a lot of AI features built-in now. We have the typical AI Eraser that removes certain things from the pictures we’ve taken, a face detail enhancer, an AI Toolbox that aggregates a bunch of AI tools into the sidebar, an audio recording summarization service, and another new feature here called AI Studio.
Yeah this AI studio pretty much superimposes your face into these templates that OPPO has in their catalog. We need to spend gems to generate each image, and I have no idea how we can replenish these gems.
Design
All of these are housed within this design of a phone. It is available in 3 different colors, and we have the Space Brown color here. Not sure which part is brown since it looks very black to me – and it has two different textures. A bit of a matte finish with reflective sparkles at the top, and a glossy finish at the bottom.
One thing I immediately realized when I grabbed this phone is that… how should I say this? Both the front and back pieces are curved into the frame, but the curvature doesn’t seem to be like any other curved phones? Yeah, it’s just not enough curvature to be considered a curved screen phone, yet it is slightly curved.
And that camera bump. I’d say this is rather reminiscent of phones from like 2020 with this kind of camera cutout. I thought they’d do some fancier design or something.
Camera
And that leads us to the cameras. There are 3 cameras that are usable here – so that’s good. But are the cameras good?
To have a look at all the pictures taken with the OPPO Reno12 Pro, watch our video at the top of this review.
Few more things to mention
And a few more things to mention before we end this review – the OPPO Reno12 Pro is using a USB 2.0 port at the bottom with no support for display output and no audio jack.
It does have microSD card support but it’s a hybrid slot, and it does have an IR blaster at the top too.
Should you buy the OPPO Reno12 Pro?
Now, should you buy the Reno12 Pro? Well, we have to know the price first.
Okay, the OPPO Reno12 Pro starts at RM2,599 – which is RM100 more than the Reno11 Pro. I have no idea why OPPO raised the price even though this Reno12 Pro is a clear downgrade. Do I recommend it? No, this is going to be tough to recommend.
I’m really not sure what’s the rationale behind this price increment alongside the downgrades. A phone still needs to be a good phone before any of the additional features are highlighted – particularly AI features.
Where to buy? (Affiliate links)
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