Oppo Reno 8 review: Style with substance?

The stylish new Oppo Reno 8 brings Oppo’s trademark industrial design heritage, along with decently powerful internals that promise a good mid-range smartphone experience. Is this phone as good to use as it is to look at? 

Design

Design has always been the Reno series’ USP, and the Reno 8 honours the family name. You will immediately notice the shimmer on this Shimmer Black colour, which looks magnificent. 

The standout design element here is the camera bump, of course, which takes inspiration from Oppo’s Find X5 Pro flagship phone, and curves up from the back. This is an excellent look overall, and only enhanced by the little touches, like the way the camera bump curves up at the very edges, and the little green accent on the power button which has become a trademark for the Reno series. The lens cutouts are absolutely huge, which seems to be the in-vogue look for 2022. 

This phone has rounded corners, which means that even with the flat sides it doesn’t feel bulky to hold. In fact, with a thickness of around 7.6mm and weighing only 179kgs, this is a really easy phone to use one handed too. The sides and the back are made out of polycarbonate plastic, but it’s a very premium-feeling finish.

The front also looks pretty good, with a slightly big chin the only detractor from the overall polished and premium look.

If you’re the sort of person who values a good looking and well designed phone, the Reno 8 is very much made for you.

Display & Sound

The Oppo Reno 8 gets a 6.43-inch FHD+ AMOLED display, which is pretty great. A 120Hz refresh rate would have been nice, but the 90Hz display still keeps things very smooth. The screen also supports HDR10+, and a peak brightness of 800 nits mean it’s pretty usable in direct sunlight. It also has 95% DCI-P3 colour gamut coverage, and a max touch sampling rate of 180Hz. 

The Reno 8 gets one bottom-firing speaker, and that’s it. Now, the speaker itself is pretty great, it gets quite loud and has decent clarity, but a stereo speaker setup is expected in this sort of price range, and it would have really elevated the content watching experience.

Camera

The Oppo Reno 8 gets a triple rear camera setup, with a 50MP main camera that uses the Sony IMX766 sensor that Oppo is so familiar with by now, along with an 8MP ultra-wide and a 2MP macro camera. 

The main camera takes good pictures in daylight that capture a lot of detail, have good dynamic range, and generally represent a scene well. Sometimes the HDR algorithm can get a little weird and make things look slightly oversaturated or give the picture a white tone, but in general you’ll find it a reliable, good camera.

Portrait mode is also a strength, with good subject separation and skin tones. You can also change the bokeh effect after taking the picture, which is pretty neat.

Night mode has classic Oppo processing which really brightens up the scene and brings in a lot of light. It can make night-time shots look like daytime, but if that’s your thing you will be pleased with the results. It does take some effort to find proper focus though, and you’ll have to keep your hands very steady because the lens does not have OIS.

The 8MP ultra-wide is not as sharp, which is expected, but does a decent job capturing wider frames. 

The main camera can also do 4K 30FPS video, which is nice, and video quality is really good for the price. 

The 32MP front camera has the Sony IMX 709 sensor, which as we’ve seen before takes fantastic looking selfies with great skin detail captured. As ever, by default there’s a skin retouching setting on which makes you look really weird and smooth, but you can turn that off easily after which there are no issues.

Performance

The Oppo Reno 8 packs the new Dimensity 1300 chipset, which we have covered extensively recently in the OnePlus Nord 2T Review. In this phone too, the SoC is very fast in day-to-day usage, meaning you’ll have no issues using social media apps, taking pictures and videos, or doing productivity tasks. 

The gaming experience on this phone is also pretty good, where it can do Very High Graphics with Max Frame Rate on COD Mobile. It also does not heat up too much, and doesn’t throttle at all, as seen in the 3DMark Wild Life Stress test, where it maintained a stability rating of 99.4%. Pretty impressive.

The Reno 8 comes in a single variant with 8GB LPDDR4x RAM and 128GB UFS 3.1 storage. While these are fast-performing components, it would have been nice to have a 256GB storage option at least, especially when there’s no expandable storage.

Software & Battery

This phone launches with ColorOS 12 based on Android 12 out of the box. ColorOS 12 remains very customisable, light, and easy to use. There is some pre-installed bloatware on this phone, but you can remove it easily without any worries. 

Oppo has packed in a 4,500mAh battery into the Reno 8, which is easily enough to last a full day even with heavy usage. The charging has seen an upgrade - the new 80W SuperVOOC charger can take the battery from 0 to 50 in just 11 minutes, and 0 to 100 in around 27 minutes. These are incredible charging times which I’m sure will be very useful when you need a quick recharge.

Verdict

The Oppo Reno 8 continues the legacy of the Reno series by putting its stylish design front and centre. Combine that with decently powerful internals and you’ve got a really compelling mid-range smartphone package in your hands for under Rs. 30,000.