Kelly Choos 
The price of Rs 40,000 is tough in the world of smartphones. It’s unambiguously more expensive than budget and even mid-range offerings, but not as pricey as proper flagships.
What’s available at this price also varies somewhat. There are phones running previous generation flagship processors, there are phones with slightly older processors but offering some imaging excellence, and then there is the Oppo Reno 7 Pro 5G, the phone I have with me to review, which retails for Rs 39,999.
I’ve had this phone for a few weeks now and spent a lot of time on it, and the word that comes to mind when looking at it is ‘competent’. Now, I will try to consider during this review if all this skill makes it a compelling device to buy.
Equipment
It is an attractive device. Following the trend of flat sides led by the iPhone, the Oppo Reno 7 Pro 5G I have comes in a beautiful “Startrails blue” color with a shimmering blue-pink glass back. The phone feels great to hold in the hand and is quite thin and light by today’s standards.
While the flat edges are great for two-handed use, they’re less than ideal for one-handed use, making the phone feel a bit taller than it is when trying to reach the screen with your thumb.
The front features a 6.55-inch AMOLED display that refreshes at 90Hz, covered in Gorilla Glass 5. The back, however, features a slightly less reassuring Panda Glass (no disrespect to the pandas here). The display looks practically flagship-grade even though the specs are a step below. Colors are vivid, HDR videos look great, and the 90Hz refresh rate is fast and smooth. I know it’s not quite the standard 120Hz, but to me the difference seems imperceptible and not a deal breaker. Outdoor visibility isn’t best-in-class, but you’ll be able to use it for most tasks, although you might not like watching a movie in the sun. The color temperature is a little cooler, and fiddling with the temperature slider in the settings doesn’t seem to help much.
At the top, there’s a punch-hole corner for the selfie camera. The camera bump on the back is quite nice and houses the two useful cameras (and the useless macro snapper). The party trick here is that the edges of the camera bump glow like a notification light, and I have to say, it looks pretty cool, if you’re into that sort of thing.
Inside, the Oppo Reno 7 Pro 5G packs a Mediatek Dimensity 1200 Max processor, which appears to have the same base configuration and clock speeds as the standard Dimensity 1200, but with a few upgrade features. AIs added. There’s also a generous 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.
Although there are stereo speakers, unfortunately there is no headphone jack and this is a flagship assignment that an Rs 40,000 phone can barely afford. The speakers themselves are reasonably loud and full, though not quite on par with my personal favorite, the Poco X3 Pro.
The battery is a solid 4,500mAh and the device comes with a 65W charger. The fingerprint sensor is an under-display optical unit and, as always, not as fast as the capacitive ones. My quest to get phone makers to abandon this inferior technology lives on.
Used
The Oppo Reno 7 Pro 5G is running ColorOS 12 on Android 11 and has been updated with the February 2022 security patch at the time of writing. ColorOS, just like its stablemate BBK Funtouch OS, is a good slick Android skin that lacks the visual style and cohesiveness of stock Android. There are a bunch of pre-installed apps, but you can uninstall most of them.
Overall, the OS works very well and does not hold any surprises. The phone is smooth and fast, as long as you don’t expect absolutely flagship-level performance.
Everything about the interface is smooth and consistent and apps load instantly without any noticeable stutter or lag. Most of the time when using this phone you’d be forgiven for thinking you’re using a flagship device because it does most things really well, which is also a testament to how well Android has worked over the years and how nicely Oppo has optimized its version of it to work with this chipset.
Watching TV shows and movies is a pleasure, and the AMOLED display delivers the color and contrast you expect, with more than enough stereo speakers to watch something in a quiet room on your own, though. that the lack of a headphone jack means you’ll need to use Bluetooth headphones if you want more.
Calls (remember calls?) and data speeds are all absolutely competent and there’s nothing to complain about. Video calls also work well within the confines of a phone screen.
The battery life of the Oppo Reno 7 Pro 5G is excellent. For most users this is a day and a half phone and if you regularly charge it overnight there will be very few occasions where you will drain the battery over the course of a day . You can expect over six hours of screen time easily. And when it’s time to recharge, the 65W charger lets you recharge the entire device in less than an hour or get a super-charged charge in 10-15 minutes.
Cameras
This is where the device leans more on the budget side of things than the flagship side.
The main camera has a 50MP Sony IMX766 sensor and the hardware is actually quite excellent, producing very pleasing images with a good amount of detail and well judged white balance and dynamic range, in the most cases. Low-light performance was also surprisingly competent, with impressive detail, although colors are starting to get a bit too vivid for my taste. Night mode is fast and fairly crisp, and is a solid implementation that punches above its weight.
The only major flaw with this phone is when it tries to take photos of people. As soon as it sees a face, it amplifies shadows and midtones and flattens the dynamic range to make skin look dramatically lighter than normal.
As far as I could tell, there was no way to turn off this aggressive tone mapping, other than by significantly underexposing the image. This is an acceptable workaround and gives great photos, but shouldn’t be necessary and makes the user experience boring.
The real tragedy is that the sensor is capable, and detail and other aspects are very good. If only that tendency to brighten people’s photos could be turned off, this would actually be a really good camera. There is a brief half second before processing is applied when you can see a good image that the phone has captured. But it’s ruined as soon as the treatment starts. I hope they fix this in a future update, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. Now, some of you might prefer this kind of skin-lightening look, and if so, you might like what this camera does, but I personally don’t.
The 8 MP ultra-wide camera is really a budget unit. In good light, it produces decent images. But even there, the drop in quality compared to the main camera is obvious. When the light starts to dim, the quality also drops sharply, with low-light performance significantly more in line with budget phones. The 32MP selfie camera is again a fairly capable unit, delivering crisp and detailed images – as long as you don’t forget to turn off the beauty filters. It’s notable, however, that the selfie camera doesn’t suffer from the main camera’s aggressive tone-mapping flaws.
Videos shot on the phone look good, with a setting similar to the iPhone’s cinematic mode offering impressive focus tracking and fairly consistent background blur.
Should I buy it?
As I had mentioned at the beginning, the price range of Rs 40,000 is tricky. Phone makers struggle to define the USP of the devices they sell in this range.
The Oppo Reno 7 Pro 5G also suffers. The phone is competent without offering outright excellence in any department. Apart from its shortcomings when processing photos of people, there is not much to complain about. But is there something that really attracts you? I’m not entirely sure.
Add to that the fact that the competition in this price bracket includes phones that do more for the money, like the Xiaomi 11T Pro 5G and OnePlus 9RT which both feature the more powerful Snapdragon 888 chipset, not to mention screens. 120Hz. Or the Samsung Galaxy S20 FE, which has a comparable processor but decidedly superior imaging (and flagship features like wireless charging and an IP68 rating).
Also consider the fact that there are phones like the OnePlus Nord 2 that have very similar specs but cost Rs 10,000 less, and it’s hard to outright recommend this phone to anyone.
This Oppo Reno 7 Pro 5G was sent to the reviewer as a loaner unit for review. The unit will be returned at the end of the exam. Oppo has not received any prior information about the contents of this notice and does not exercise any copy approval.
