Original Oppo Reno 2

Original Oppo Reno 2 8GB+128GB Mobile Phone Snapdragon 730G Octa Core NFC 48MP Camera VOOC 3.0 AMOLED Screen Fingerprint 5X Zoom OIS Support Google by-（Real Star Technology

After launching the Oppo Reno series of smartphones in June 2019, comprising the Oppo Reno, Oppo Reno 10x Zoom (and later the Oppo Reno Z affordable device), it only took Oppo four months to follow them up with the Oppo Reno 2 series, consisting of the main device and the Oppo Reno 2Z.

The new devices aren’t upgrades on the four-month-old devices per se; instead they’re new entries to the Reno line-up that sit alongside the older phones, but at different price points.

So, you may be wondering, what’s the difference between the Oppo Reno 2 and the Reno 2Z? Well, barely anything really – this review is of the Reno 2, but we’ve also tested the 2Z alongside it, so where phones differ we’ll point that out. 

Oppo Reno 2 price and availability

The Oppo Reno 2 costs £449 (around $575, AU$850), and the more affordable Reno 2Z is available from £329 (roughly $420, AU$630).

In comparison, the Reno 10x Zoom price was £699 / AU$1,199 (about $889), while the Reno cost the same as the Reno 2 and the Reno Z launched at £299 / AU$499. We've been told the Reno 2 is replacing the Reno, so the new devices sit snugly between the Z and 10x Zoom.

You can pick up the Oppo Reno 2 and Reno 2Z from October 18, where they'll be available all over Europe, following a Chinese launch earlier in 2019.

Design

If you’ve seen the Oppo Reno or Reno 10x Zoom, you know almost exactly what the Oppo Reno 2 looks like, as there are very few changes. That’s not necessarily a bad thing though – those handsets are good-looking phones, although after seeing several similar-looking handsets the novelty is starting to wear off a little.

The key feature of the Oppo Reno 2 design-wise is its pop-up camera, housed in a ‘shark-fin’ segment that rises from the top of the phone. It’s certainly a novel solution to the problem of how to incorporate a front-facing camera in an all-screen handset without taking up valuable screen space (and good-novel, not bad-novel like the Samsung Galaxy A80). It’s pretty sturdy too, with drop detection built in so that the phone retracts the camera when it senses that it’s falling.

The Oppo Reno 2Z doesn’t have the shark-fin segment, and instead has a ‘standard’ (although this design is itself still fairly novel) pop-up rectangle like several other recent smartphones. It feels just as durable as the shark-fin.

The Oppo Reno 2 has the same rear design as the previous Reno phones, so instead of having a camera bump that sticks out, the cameras are nestled in the Gorilla Glass back, and the rear is smooth – smooth, that is, save for the O-Dot, a small bump on the back that protects the lenses from being scratched when you lay the phone down flat.

The volume rocker is on the left of the phone and the power button on the right, with a USB-C port and 3.5mm headphone jack on the bottom of the device. The Oppo Reno 10x Zoom doesn’t have the headphone port, so it’s a welcome inclusion here if you like to use wired headphones for gaming or watching movies.

We don’t have the official dimensions of the Oppo Reno 2, but judging by its screen size it’s about halfway between the Reno and Reno 10x Zoom. That means it’s comfortable to use for people with large hands, although those with smaller hands may need to stretch to reach things now and then. It’s also a relatively heavy device compared to other smartphones, which is noticeable if you’re using it for long periods of time.

Display

The Oppo Reno 2 display is a 6.5-inch AMOLED screen, sitting between the Oppo Reno’s 6.4 inches and the Reno 10x Zoom at 6.6 inches. It’s got the same screen quality as both handsets though – except for one tiny difference.

That difference is the aspect ratio. While the first-gen Reno devices have 19:9 aspect ratios, the Reno 2 is 20:9, so it’s slightly taller. Because of this, while both handsets have 401 pixels per inch, the Reno 2 has a resolution of 1080 x 2400, over the 1080 x 2340 of the Reno.

What does this mean in terms of viewing difference? Very little. But again, being little different to a very capable phone is fine with us, and the Oppo Reno 2 has a good-looking screen.

Max brightness is high, colors are bold, and quality is overall pretty good. It’s not the 4K screen of the Sony Xperia 1, but while it’s nice to have a display of such high quality, few people will miss not having it.

Thanks to the pop-up front camera the screen isn’t broken up at any point by a notch or ‘punch-hole’, so the Oppo Reno 2 is a good device on which to stream media or play games without a pesky lens encroaching on the picture.

Battery life

The Oppo Reno 2 battery is a 4,000mAh power pack, which is a healthy capacity that trumps most other Reno handsets, but in practice we found the battery life a touch on the low side. That’s not to say it was bad, it’s just not as impressive as some similar devices.

When we used the Oppo Reno 2 for a full day we always had to power it up overnight, otherwise it wouldn’t last for a second day. And if we were using the device for media-intensive tasks like watching Netflix on our commute or listening to music, the handset only lasted us until the evening.

This is understandable for a device with a large, vibrant screen, but it’s slightly confusing given that the Oppo Reno 10x Zoom, which has a bigger screen and smaller battery, seems to have the same battery life.

When we put the Oppo Reno 2 through the TechRadar battery test, which involves playing a 90-minute video with brightness locked to maximum and accounts syncing over Wi-Fi in the background, the handset dropped from full charge to 90%. We ran the same test on the Oppo Reno 2Z, and that lost 87%.

It’s unclear why the Reno 2Z had the bigger battery drop, but either way those are decent results for media streaming. The average drop is 12-14%, so the Reno 2 did better than most phones, and the Reno 2Z was bang-average.

In general, it feels as though both devices are optimized well for playing content without burning through battery power – it’s just a shame that normal runs down the battery relatively quickly.

The Oppo Reno 2 comes with Oppo’s VOOC 3.0 charging tech, a 20W fast charger that Oppo says can power up the handset to 50% in just half an hour. 

In practice we found this was pretty much accurate – after half an hour the device was at 48% charge, and it took another two minutes to reach 50%, with the device reaching full charge in an hour and 20 minutes. Those are pretty decent charging speeds for a smartphone, although it’s a shame we still haven’t seen the Reno series use SuperVOOC, an even faster charging tech from Oppo.

Camera

 The Oppo Reno 2 has four rear cameras, and while it’s not the most affordable smartphone to join the quad-camera club, these are four impressive snappers, compared to some budget devices that cut corners in the camera department.

The main camera is a 48MP f/1.7 snapper, which is joined by 13MP f/2.4 telephoto and 2MP Mono Portrait (depth sensing) cameras, and an 8MP f/2.2 ultra-wide angle shooter (the lens on which doubles as a macro lens, according to Oppo).

As we found with the Oppo Reno 10x Zoom, the Oppo Reno 2’s camera is impressive (the original Reno, and Reno Z, left a lot to be desired). However, we’re not sure the extra snapper here – the 2MP Mono Portrait camera – actually brings much to the party.

This functions similar to 3D cameras or depth sensors, in that it helps you to take better portrait shots by distinguishing between a subject and their background. Oppo hasn’t explained exactly how it works, but if we assume it’s similar to the Nokia 9 PureView (which had several mono cameras as well as color ones), the snapper helps capture more contrast and depth information.

In practice, though, portrait shots taken with the Oppo Reno 2 don’t appear noticeably different to those taken with the Reno 10x Zoom. That’s to say, they look good, with appropriate ‘bokeh’ background blur, and good separation between subject and background – but this was also the case on the Reno 10x Zoom that lacked the Reno 2’s fourth camera.

The main camera (with a little help from scene optimization, naturally), takes good-looking pictures – colors are bold, and snaps are bright and contain sufficient detail. Some of the problems of the Reno 10x Zoom have been fixed here, such as the limited color gamut, and this fix is likely as much the post-processing software as the 48MP sensor itself.

Night shooting is improved in the Reno 2, and Ultra Dark Mode now makes pictures taken in low-light settings look that little bit clearer. It’s still not as good as the night modes on the Google Pixel 3 or iPhone 11 Pro Max, but it’s close.

The 13MP telephoto lens supports 2x optical zoom, 5x hybrid zoom (a combo of optical and digital), and 20x digital zoom. That’s not as impressive as the Reno 10x Zoom, which offers 5x optical zoom, 10x digital zoom, and a whopping 60x digital zoom – not surprisingly, you’re not getting as good a zoom capability here as on the device with the word ‘Zoom’ in its name.

Zoomed pictures looked pretty decent – at 20x zoom images looked rather grainy, but that’s only to be expected with digital zoom. One thing we noticed with the camera app preview, however, is that when you’re zoomed in, you need to hold the handset steady, or else the image looks rather noisy.

At 5x hybrid zoom, pictures didn’t look grainy, but there were frequent exposure problems in the snaps we took.

The ultra-wide angle camera was impressive, as unlike many similar lenses on other devices, there was no distortion around the edges of the frame. Colors seemed a little pale though, so if you want vibrant-looking shots you may want to stick with the main camera.

This lens also supports a macro mode, which lets you take close-up pictures in high quality with appropriate background blur – this mode needs to be toggled on, which switches the preview to ultra-wide angle mode.

Small details are clear in the resulting images, and the entire subject is generally in focus, which can’t be said for photos taken the macro scene optimization mode on the main camera, which turns on by default if a subject is near the camera. That mode had focusing problems, especially with complex textures.

As on previous Reno handsets, video capture goes up to 4K at 30fps, but if you drop down to 1080p or 720p you can shoot at 60fps. The device can handle these lower resolutions well, but at 4K the phone heats up quickly – that’s to be expected for 4K video recording, though.

Video shooting is enhanced by one of the most reliable OIS (optical image stabilization) modes we’ve seen, which kept video looking smooth no matter how shakey our hands were.

The pop-up selfie camera on both the Reno 2 and Reno 2Z is a 16MP snapper, and it’s quick at recognizing a subject and effective at blurring the background.

With the Reno 10x Zoom we experienced two issues with selfies: they looked washed-out, and the camera had a tendency to blur parts of the subject it shouldn’t have.

The first of these issues is fixed in the Reno 2, with colors looking as bold as those captured by the rear cameras. However, the latter issue, while improved, still exists: when we took a selfie holding a mug for example, our body was in focus, but the mug was blurry.

Still, in the grand scheme of selfies, the Oppo Reno 2’s front-facing camera takes good-looking pictures that will outshine snaps taken on many other mid-rangers.