Oppo Reno10 review: sleek design and sharp screen's attraction tempered by mediocre camera
The Oppo Reno10 faces a crowded, chaotic and viciously fought mid-range smartphone market. Some of the rivals are better known than others (such as Xiaomi, Sony and Google Pixel), but Oppo has carved out a niche of its own as a neat-looking little overperformer in recent years.
We've reviewed some of its most recent models, and were impressed enough by the camera performance in particular to be rather excited to try out the Reno10, to see whether it could compete for a place on either our list of the best camera phones or best budget camera phones.
I had a loan unit to use for a couple of weeks, and I used it as a daily driver for that time, taking pictures, talking on video chats, working on mobile creative apps and playing games, among other things.
Oppo Reno10 review: Key specifications
Oppo Reno10 review: Design and screen
From both front and back, the Oppo Reno10 looks really sleek. The front is dominated by a cinematic 20:9 OLED waterfall screen (it's a long and narrow handset, 162.4 x 74.2 x 8 mm according to the official specs) that looks good even before switching it on.
The screen is a large 6.7 inches (about the same square footage as the iPhone 15 Pro Max), and there's a reinforced, slightly textured glass back on the phone too, making it a very slick-looking unit, definitely one of the prettier ones in the crowded midrange market. The back comes in two colour options, Silvery Grey and Ice Blue. I had the Silvery Grey and it lent the phone a slightly refined air, although if I were to buy one, the blue one looks more interesting to me.
The camera notch on the back (which houses, among other things, an 'AI Portrait Cam') protrudes a fair bit, but not so much as to make it feel distracting, and it won't affect wireless charging here (because there isn't any wireless charging).
The narrow shape I felt suited me very well, as I have rather short, stubby, clumsy fingers but I simultaneously like large-screen phones, and it suited particularly well for gaming and watching TV and videos on the phone.
The screen offers a competitive 394 ppi pixel density, with a resolution of 1080 x 2412 pixels and a max brightness of 950 nits, and although the typical brightness is about 500 nits, and while neither number threatens the industry leaders, this is still bright enough to show up impressive blacks and good contrast on screen.
Oppo Reno10 review: Features
As this is a midrange model, we're missing some features you see in flagship phones (and some competitors), such as wireless charging, but an upside is found in the microSDXC slot included (which isn't a given any more, especially in sub-£500 models) on top of the dual SIM card slot.
On the inside you'll find Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.3 and a high-speed USB-C charging slot, offering all the latest in each department. There's an optical under-display fingerprint sensor for security, and running the whole show is Oppo's ColorOS 13.1 based on Android 13.
As you can expect with pretty much any Android phone nowadays, it comes pre-cluttered with a jungle of variably useful apps, which will take a little while to clean up to your preferences. This particular phone did manage to surprise me in one way, with at least 12 games preloaded on my first start-up. And unfortunately, we're not talking treats like Genshin Impact, but rather the likes of GardenScapes and other more tedious in-app-purchase games.
Other than that, though, set-up was relatively painless, and the level of customisation available within the Android-based OS is wide-ranging and mostly intuitive. Android systems keep getting better with ergonomics, in my opinion, and the level of personalisation is something I really enjoy and appreciate.
Oppo Reno10 review: Performance
Despite the many, many, many games preinstalled on the Oppo Reno10, testing out gameplay and running benchmark tests quickly revealed that this is not exactly a pro gaming phone.
With 8GB RAM and a choice of 128 or 256GB storage on board, underpinned by an octa-core Mediatek MT6877V Dimensity processor (with 2 performance and 6 efficiency cores), it's actually fairly underpowered when it comes to many rivals in the mid-market bracket.
Geekbench 6 benchmark scores confirm this, as the multi-core CPU score lags behind models such as Google Pixel 4, the Xiaomi Poco X3 Pro, RealMe X3 and the Huawei Honor View 20, and only slightly ahead of the Huawei P30 and Honor 9X. The GPU score, meanwhile, confirms that this is not a phone for heavy graphic-processing tasks.
Instead, the performance, design and features very much point it directly at casual use aimed at light gaming and social-media use. So with that in mind, let's see how the camera performs. After all, the Oppo Reno 8 Pro impressed us greatly last year in that department.
Oppo Reno 8 review: Camera
Unfortunately, the camera on the Oppo Reno10 can't reach the same heights as the Reno 8 Pro's does. Specced at a stated 64MP for the main wide-angle lens on the three-camera rear setup (with a 32MP telephoto lens and an 8MP ultrawide one), I immediately noticed a fair bit of pixel-binning, as the images came out considerably less sharp and bright as I expected them to be, as the gallery above shows.
With an LED flash, an HDR mode, and panoramic photo options all available, the sensor underpinning the software simply doesn't seem to be up to the ambitious standards we, the creative folks at Creative Bloq, have come to expect and be spoiled by on so many impressive handsets lately.
To be fair, the 64MP back camera and the 32MP selfie camera on the front are perfectly serviceable for social-media posting, and the feature- and filter-rich photo and video-editing app helps too (there's more editing options here than on any iPhone I've used, for example), and casual video recording is decent too. It can shoot 4K video, but it's not going to be of pro filmmaking standard, although again, general social-media and [sigh] TikTok use is the intended one here, a bar this phone passes without too many fireworks.
What I was genuinely impressed by, though, was the surprising oomph of the speakers. They don't quite match my favourites of the year, the Xiaomi 13 Pro's, but there was very good depth to the sound, both when listening to music and watching streaming video, which looked very nice on the sharp and sleekly designed screen.
Oppo Reno10 review: Battery life and charging
The battery is a 5000mAh lithium-ion offering, and with the 6 efficiency cores it manages to eke a fairly good amount of life out of the handset between charges. I used the phone fairly heavily some days, for a mixture of photography, filming, app use, gaming and communication, and it easily survived the day.
Fast-charging is quoted at 67W, and it juiced my phone up from 20 to 100% in about half an hour. Very nice.
Oppo Reno 10 review: Price
The Oppo Reno10 5G's RRP in the UK is £399, and $399 in the US, although there you also have the option of a more powerful 12GB RAM spec (which will set you back $499). At the time of writing, though, there's a rather enticing discount on the phone on Oppo's official store, where it's down to £279 in the UK.
Should I buy the Oppo Reno10?
If you're looking for an affordable phone that looks really neat, is super slim and has a good screen for its price point, with impressive speakers too, the Oppo Reno10 ticks every box. It's good enough for casual social-media photo sharing, too, but won't bother those phones offering near-pro-level camera quality. As is the custom with Android phones, there is some amount of bloatware to clean out at the start, but a lot of that is games, so if that's what you're looking for anyway, you've hit gold here. It's not a processing powerhouse by any means, though, so it won't be too great at playing any more power-intensive games or doing heavy-duty creative work.
