Oppo Reno 10 5G review

The phone on the lowest rung of the Oppo Reno 10 ladder, the Reno 10 5G may sit below the Reno 10 Pro and Reno 10 Pro Plus (a name that will really keep you up all night) but will make you wonder why you’d want to head further up the range when the basic phone is so good.

There’s a lot on offer here that used to be found only on manufacturers’ ‘pro’ phones, and it all sits behind a 6.7in AMOLED screen that rivals many at the top of the market in all but resolution. And it costs just £399, a lot less than similar phones from the likes of Samsung and Google.

the Reno 10’s is nothing if not distinctive

Design & Build

• Lightweight 
• Feels good in the hand 
• No IP rating 

The thing that distinguishes phones the most in this era of black pocket rectangles is the camera bulge, and the Reno 10’s is nothing if not distinctive. Its top camera lens – the main wide-angle camera with the 64Mp sensor behind it – is huge, sitting above the two other lenses like a strange hybrid of owl and cyclops.  

Elsewhere, it’s a nice looking phone, with silver sides and a grey back that complement each other well. It’s not too thick, not too big (in my large hands anyway). The solid and well-sealed build makes you wonder why it doesn’t come with an official IP rating, but that certification costs extra. Still, you best not dunk it.

The buttons and charging port are exactly where you’d expect them to be, while the one-hand mode and ability to use apps in floating windows mixes up the usual Android experience and makes the most of the 6.7in screen. 

Screen & Speakers

• Colourful AMOLED 
• 120Hz refresh rate 
• Single speaker grille 

AMOLED screens are among the best you’ll find on a smartphone in 2023, and the one on the Reno 10 5G with its resolution of just above 1080p is an excellent example.

The 120Hz refresh rate certainly helps, making interactions like opening folders and switching apps feel smooth, but the brightness and colour contrast you get from an HDR10+ AMOLED means the appropriately named ColorOS Oppo uses (on top of Android 13) can really shine.

There’s a theme store you’ll need to sign up to if you want the brightest backgrounds, but the more muted ones from the built-in wallpaper selection are less searing to the eyeballs and more appropriate for everyday use. 

The ColorOS icons are at about 130% of the Android default (measured against a Pixel 6) and this, along with the contrasty screen, makes it a fine place to find your apps and messages. The extra size may mean there are fewer icons on the screen, but they’re easier to find and use. 

The screen itself curves around at the edges like a OnePlus phone, and is covered in the lesser-known AGC Dragontrail Star 2 glass, which claims 20% greater drop resistance than Gorilla Glass 5. The bezel is extremely thin, though the usable screen area doesn’t extend quite to the silver edge of the casing, leaving a black rim around the screen. 

The phone claims to have stereo speakers, though only one grille is visible on the body. As with all the tiny speakers crammed into smartphone bodies, they’re fine for a hands-free call or for using the phone as an alarm clock, but you’re going to want some of the best wireless earbuds or a Bluetooth speaker if you’re using it for serious media streaming. There’s no headphone socket here. 

Specs & Performance 

• MediaTek with two fast cores 
• Plenty of RAM and storage 
• Outclassed by flagships 

The MediaTek Dimensity 7050 chipset that powers the Reno 10 5G has eight cores, but splits them into a pair of A78 performance cores, and six A55s that handle the background tasks.

This is good for battery life (see below), as the A55 cores use less power, but means it’s not going to keep up with phones rocking the latest Snapdragon processors.

That’s not to say it’s slow, however, as the two fast cores seem capable enough when running social media apps and even games. Having 8GB of RAM certainly helps here, and with 256GB of storage on board as standard, expandable using the microSD slot that doubles up with the SIM card, there’s plenty of room for saving video clips and images. 

The Dimensity 7050, also used in the Realme 11, is identical to the Dimensity 1080 from the Samsung Galaxy A34 and Xiaomi Redmi Note 12 Pro. It offers solid mid-range performance, but suffers from a pretty weak GPU – its results in the gaming-centric GFXbench Car Chase benchmark put it on a par with the OnePlus 5T, a phone from 2017. 

Away from games, there’s enough power here to push apps smoothly onto the 120Hz screen, and you never feel like you’re waiting around. Even setting up the Google Photos library, which can take a while when you’re dealing with data synced from multiple devices, was over quickly. Startup from cold can take a long time, though, compared with some other devices.

Oppo Reno 10 5G benchmarks

The big headline feature of the Reno 10 5G is its camera cluster

Cameras

• 64Mp main camera
• Improved portrait mode 
• Ultrawide needs some love 

The big headline feature of the Reno 10 5G is its camera cluster.

There’s the 64Mp main wide-angle camera, which pixel bins its files down to 16Mp by default for decreased image noise, but can be put in high-res mode for the full 64Mp, and the short telephoto camera which has some enhanced software to make its portrait mode more useful and looking less like a blur filter has been crudely laid over the background.

There’s an 8Mp ultrawide lens too, but nobody seems to be shouting about that. You’ll find a 32Mp backside-illuminated Sony IMX709 sensor behind the portrait camera, and Oppo is so proud of it, it’s calling the phone “the portrait king”.

Files get binned to 8Mp by default, but there’s a noticeable improvement in the quality of the blurred backgrounds it provides. This is a software feature rather than anything provided by the tiny camera sensor and lens, but it’s nice to see the camera app default to the short end of the telephoto range when you move to portrait mode.

This gives you a field of view similar to that of a 50mm lens on a full-frame camera. Indeed, the 5x maximum zoom isn’t available in the portrait mode, which you can use on all other cameras, including the front-facing one. 

Common problems in Android’s portrait mode, such as its inability to deal with sticky-out bits of hair and gaps under arms, are definitely lessened in Oppo’s implementation of the tech, even if it’s not yet perfect. There’s an option to increase or decrease the amount of blur, presented as opening and closing the lens aperture just like on an SLR or mirrorless camera. 

The camera app continues the Oppo’s trend of everything being slightly bigger. It’s much easier to switch between the photo, video and portrait modes when the area of the screen you need to push left or right is larger. 

As you’d expect from a phone with such a good quality sensor behind its main camera, video from this lens is very good for a smartphone. There’s no optical image stabilisation, however, and there’s no support for 4K/60fps either, meaning 4K/30fps is the best you can expect. With 256GB of storage and a microSD card slot, there’s plenty of room to store those huge 4K video files.

Battery Life & Charging

• 5000mAh
• 67W fast charging 
• Long battery life  

Having a charger and USB-C cable included in the box is becoming a rarity with new phones, so the 67W block that comes with the Reno 10 5G (my sample had a European two-prong plug, so I charged the phone with a matching third-party charger that was still fast but didn’t hit the speeds claimed for the SuperVOOC standard) is great to see.

Battery life is excellent, even keeping the screen on and the processors busy

It matches the phone’s quick-charge wattage, and can apparently push the phone from empty to full in less than an hour. It’ll also be handy for any tablets and even laptops you need to charge too, though the competing Quick Charge standard is more widely adopted. 

Battery life is excellent, even keeping the screen on and the processors busy, as in the PCMark benchmark test that simulates varied usage. The Reno 10 managed a huge 13 hours of constant use, on a par with other 5000mAh phones such as the Sony Xperia 5 IV.

It’s noticeable how much the AMOLED screen eats power, however, as the battery life with the screen set to automatic, and therefore dimmed while out of bright light rather than the constant brightness used in our tests, was longer than it was with the brightness manually set halfway. If you can keep the screen subdued, you’ll eke out even more life from the phone.  

Software & Apps

• Bright and colourful OS 
• Innovative floating windows 
• Lots of unnecessary apps 

ColorOS 13 seems close enough to stock Android 13 that you won’t notice a huge difference, unlike Xiaomi’s MIUI.

It keeps the search box on the home page, and Google’s apps are prominently displayed, but things like its floating windows set it apart. You can open an app in a small window that takes up only a tiny portion of the screen, and drag it out to a size that suits you.

The floating window lives up to its name and floats on top of other apps. You can only have one floater open at a time, while the tiled split-screen app view is also available if you need it. 

The 6.7in screen is just about big enough to mess about with windows like this, but as Apple has found with Stage Manager, it really works better when you’ve got a larger area to play with. 

There are a lot of extra apps you probably don’t want taking up the phone’s storage, even if you refuse the additional apps installed at first startup. I found free-to-play games, the ubiquitous booking.com app, LinkedIn, Netflix and more waiting for me on a supposedly clean phone. Luckily they’re easy to uninstall. 

Oppo has some of its own apps on the phone too, though they can mostly be completely ignored in favour of the Google equivalents if you don’t fancy signing up. There’s an app store, photos app, gaming hub, the theme store we mentioned earlier and an app for the useful IR remote feature you can use for controlling your TV.

Software support is two years of Android updates and four years of security updates, meaning it will likely top out at Android 15. 

Price & Availability

• Good value 
• Not that widely available 

The Reno 10 is well-priced for what you get, though not particularly widely available. At the time of writing, you can get it from EE and the Oppo online store, priced at £399.

That undercuts the Samsung Galaxy A54, Google Pixel 7a and 2022’s iPhone SE, while providing a better array of cameras.

It’s also exactly the same price as the Samsung Galaxy A34, a phone that shares the same chipset as the Reno 10, but again the Samsung’s cameras are beaten by Oppo’s as it lacks a tele camera, preferring instead a 5Mp macro, but does benefit from optical image stabilisation on its main camera.

Oppo doesn’t officially sell its phones in the US an although some models end up on Amazon, the Reno 10 5G isn’t there at the time of writing.

Check out our round-up of the best mid-range phones to see more options. 

Should you buy the Oppo Reno 10 5G? 

We spend a lot of our time just looking at our phones, so you may as well get one that’s nice to look at.

The Oppo Reno 10 5G is extremely nice to look at, with a combination of a bright, smooth screen and an OS that does its best to make things easy to use. It’s also got a decent set of cameras, long battery life and speedy charging with the adapter even included in the box.

For £399 it’s an easy phone to recommend, but an official IP rating would be really nice to have.

Specs

• Chipset: Mediatek Dimensity 7050 
• RAM 8GB 
• Storage: 256GB + Micro SD (2TB max) 
• OS: ColorOS 13.1 (Android 13) 
• Screen: 6.7in AMOLED, HDR10+, 120Hz, 1080×2412 pixels (394ppi) 
• Cameras: 64Mp wide, 32Mp telephoto, 8Mp ultrawide, 32Mp front 
• Connectivity: 5G (nano SIM/eSIM), Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.3, NFC, IR blaster 
• Battery: 5000mAh 
• Dimensions: 162.4 x 74.2 x 8mm 
• Weight: 185g