OPPO just released their brand new Reno16 series – and what we have here is the new Reno16 Pro 5G. It has a brand new unique look, has a lot of performance and a large battery packed into this small body – so dive deep and look at what this phone has to offer in today’s review.
Design
Let’s get started with the design of the Reno16 Pro as that really the one thing that immediately caught my attention when I looked at the phone – and it’s called the 3D Pop Planet Design. Yeah, this design makes the design pop out and it also has a parallax effect too. It looks absolutely fantastic. The footage that you’re seeing here might look like it has a moire effect, and that is due to how the texture is kinda made out of little dots. Just know that these rainbow effect lines only appear on camera.
Another thing that I like about the Reno16 Pro is the size. It retains the compact size of a 6.32-inch screen, and I honestly do like this kind of small phone.
Screen
Now, let’s talk about the screen. As mentioned, it’s small. This is a 6.32-inch AMOLED screen with a resolution of 2640×1216 pixels and goes up to 144Hz.
The brightness achievable with this screen is also pretty decent. It can reach a maximum of 1111 nits and goes down to 1.93 nits minimum – pretty good range there.
It also has a total of 3 different color profiles – so let’s talk about the default Standard color profile first. It has pretty good color gamut coverage, though definitely not the most vivid since it only covers 70% of DCI-P3.
Switching to the Natural color profile, it’s pretty much similar to the default color profile, but with slightly lower color gamut coverage across the board. It’s meant to look more desaturated but in my opinion and also proven with data – it doesn’t really change much.
Changing to the Vivid color profile, this cranks up the sRGB coverage to 100% and the DCI-P3 coverage to around 98%. Not the highest, but definitely a lot vivid than two other color profiles. So, it truly depends on whether or not you want vivid colors or not. There is no in between.
Performance
Okay, let’s talk about the performance of the OPPO Reno16 Pro. This phone is powered by the MediaTek Dimensity 8550 SUPER. There are many things to unpack here. First, the Dimensity 8550 is going to give us the same performance as the Dimensity 8500. It’s also similar to the Dimensity 8400, but the clock speed and GPU core count are different. Here’s a summary of everything on the screen because it’s much easier to understand this way.
As for the SUPER, it’s basically the same as any other Dimensity 8550. It’s just that there are some special software tuning. We have another video talking about it – so watch it at the top right corner there if you want to know more.
Now, in terms of the performance, I actually think that the Dimensity 8550 is pretty good. As mentioned in other videos before, the Dimensity 8000 series is positioned higher than the Snapdragon 7 series, but lower than the flagship chipsets. Many games will recommend rather high graphical settings.
Genshin Impact actually runs really well at the recommended medium graphical preset. It can get around 60fps while running around, but it’ll drop to around 40-ish FPS while in combat. So, if you do want consistent 60fps throughout the entire gameplay, then you can turn down the graphics for that.
For Zenless Zone Zero, it’s a much more demanding game. We lowered it to the Low graphical preset – which isn’t the lowest graphical settings, and it can get around 30-something FPS throughout the entire flower boss fight. It’s quite consistent, as the FPS doesn’t fluctuate too much. Still, we could lower it to the lowest graphical settings to get even higher FPS.
Now comes Wuthering Waves. It’s definitely the most demanding game that we have because of the details in the game, and also it’s just not optimized. The game also recommends “Balanced” graphical preset and the frame rate is definitely not that good. When we look at the analysis part of the video, the bottleneck is actually the CPU. I mean, it makes sense. The Cortex-A725 is not exactly the most powerful or the newest CPU architecture. I do think MediaTek should use the Cortex-X4 as the prime core or anything similar – that would’ve alleviated the CPU bottleneck issue by a lot.
One surprising thing is that this Dimensity 8550 can actually perform consistently at 60fps with ray-tracing turned on in War Thunder Mobile. That’s great.
Now, throughout my entire gaming test with the OPPO Reno16 Pro, the problem is the thermal limit. The thermal limit is only at 41°C. And it’s supremely easy to reach that thermal limit. Games will hit it within like 10-15 minutes even at somewhat low graphical settings.
This behavior happens on flagship OPPO devices as well. But do note that I’m not calling it an issue since this is just a weird quirk of how OPPO tuned their devices and we’ll have to live with it. I don’t think there’s any way to actually change this on OPPO phones.
Battery life
Now, let’s talk about the battery life. The OPPO Reno16 Pro comes with a 6,700mAh battery, or 24.93Wh in capacity. Remember, Wh is always a much better way to measure the battery capacity – watch that video at the top right corner there to know more.
Anyway, it’s either PCMark or the OPPO Reno16 Pro having a battery bug because the battery life from our test doesn’t look good. It’s either because the PCMark has updated to Work 3.1 or the Reno16 Pro has a not-so-good tuning that consumes way too much battery during the battery life test, because it only lasts less than 12 hours. We did it twice – and the results are very similar.
By doing some quick math, that means the OPPO Reno16 is consuming an average of around 2W throughout the entire test. That’s extremely high.
Either way, it seems like there’s something wrong somewhere and we can’t pinpoint it – so we’ll just leave it as that for now.
Charging speed
Let’s now talk about the charging speed. The OPPO Reno16 Pro comes with a proprietary 80W SuperVOOC charger in the box. With its default charging settings, it takes around 50-ish minutes to charge from 15% to completion.
Then, we can go into the settings menu and turn up the charging speed – and that doesn’t actually change the charging speed, but the temperature did go up. That’s weird.
Switching to our USB-PD PPS charger, the Reno16 Pro only takes around 36W at most, and it also takes around the same time to charge. So… it’s good that the Reno16 Pro supports USB-PD PPS so well, but it’s also weird that there’s basically zero difference between all the different scenarios.
Either way, it’s great to see that the Reno16 Pro supports USB-PD PPS so well. I don’t have to take their proprietary USB-A charger with me when I travel.
Software
Now, the software. The OPPO Reno16 Pro comes with ColorOS 16 and it actually comes with all of the features from the flagship Find series. Take for example, the Snap Key. Yes, it’s here on the Reno16 Pro too.
This Snap Key is found on the left side, and we can remap it to do quite a lot of other things. However, I’d like to keep it in default because the OPPO Mind Space is an actually very useful feature. It basically is our personal assistant. It keeps our screenshots, voice memos, and we can ask it stuff, then it’ll sift through everything that we have saved.
Really handy feature to have, honestly.
Of course, the animation speed is still too slow for my liking – so I had to turn up the speed using this option in the menu.
And there are still a lot of pre-installed apps when we start up the device. I have unselected all the apps during the setup process, but it still installs a bunch of stuff that I didn’t ask for. Personally not a fan of this, and it’s annoying that we have to deal with it.
Other than that, ColorOS 16 actually works really well.
Camera
Now, let’s talk about the cameras. The OPPO Reno16 Pro comes with triple cameras and I’m actually really impressed that they didn’t skimp out in terms of the sensors and the lenses. All of them have autofocus, and that’s great.
Throughout my short time of using the OPPO Reno16 Pro, I managed to capture some random pictures here and there only – and I have to say, the images look great. I mean, that is to be expected from a camera that comes with such sensors.
But, that’s not the only fun feature that the Reno16 Pro. You know of a new trend of gadgets called the Kodak Charmera? Basically, the Reno16 Pro has that feature too. Just swipe here and you’ll get a bunch of different looks to select from. It emulates the flaws of the digital cameras from the early 00’s – and the vibes are very different.
So, if you enjoy using these features, you can use them. It’s all built-in to the OPPO Reno16 Pro.
To have a look at all the pictures taken with the OPPO Reno16 Pro, watch our video at the top of this review.
A few more things to mention
And we have a few more things to go through quickly. The Reno16 Pro comes with a USB 2.0 port at the bottom – yes I couldn’t believe it too and I had to do a test to find out myself. It also does not have display output capability, in case you’re wondering.
It does have dual SIM card slots alongside eSIM support, which is great for those who use it to go travel and whatnot.
Plus, it also has an IR blaster at the top, so we can control other stuff with it too.
Should you buy the OPPO Reno16 Pro?
So then, should you buy the OPPO Reno16 Pro? Well… we’ll have to start with the price. It’s at RM3,699 for the 12GB RAM with 256GB variant, with a launch promo price at RM3,299 now. It’s extremely pricey – but we have to take a step back and evaluate things.
The memory crisis that we’re going through now is affecting the price of all gadgets, phones included. And that really does significantly impact the price of new phones. We did a whole video about this – you can watch it down below to know more.
But then again, the Reno series is always on the pricier side. Combining these two factors, we arrived at the final price of RM3,699 – which is the same price as the OPPO Find X9s that we reviewed like two months ago, which is equipped with the Dimensity 9500s chipset – and that’s on a higher level than the Dimensity 8550 found in the Reno16 Pro.
Granted, it takes time to adjust our perspective to new prices due to the memory crisis – and the prices will continue to climb for a long time. So, if you’re looking to get a new phone, do it now. The prices will only continue to rise in the coming years.
Where to buy? (Affiliate links)
Like our Facebook Page here at NasiLemakTech.com for more news and in-depth reviews! Also, join our Facebook Group for insightful information and memes!
Subscribe to our YouTube channel too!
