Oppo Reno 10 5G review: Long-lasting and far-shooting

While Oppo’s Find series is handling the flagship side of things, the Reno 10 5G has now arrived to take the baton for the brand’s mid-range efforts. Interestingly, the Reno 10 has picked up a neat trick from its pricier brothers and sisters, becoming one of the very few handsets at this price to include a dedicated telephoto camera.

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As far as gimmicks go, that’s a decent one to have, and it certainly lends the Reno 10 an advantage in the ever-growing mid-range arena. On other fronts, however, the Reno 10 finds itself on the back foot, with rivals that offer faster performance and cleaner operating systems. With such strong competition, can the Reno 10 coast along on a telephoto camera, or is it just a one-trick pony that can’t keep up in the race?

Oppo Reno 10 5G review: What you need to know

The Oppo Reno 10 5G comes into the brand’s lineup as a replacement for last year’s Reno 8 5G. Despite sticking with the sub-£400 pricing, the Reno 10 5G includes several improvements over its predecessor.

The flagship feature here is the inclusion of a 2x optical zoom telephoto lens, which sits in the elliptical camera module on the rear, alongside an 8MP ultrawide sensor and below the massive main 64MP camera. Flip the phone over and you’ll find a larger 6.7in display with a 2,412 x 1,080 resolution and a beefed-up 120Hz refresh rate.

There have been some shake-ups inside the phone as well. The processor is now an octa-core MediaTek Dimensity 7050 chipset, clocked up to 2.6GHz, and it’s backed up by 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. The battery is now a larger 5,000mAh unit, and a 67W fast charger is included in the box.

Oppo Reno 10 5G review: Price and competition

The Oppo Reno 10 5G retails for £399, which places it in a slightly unique position. Though there’s plenty of choice around the £350 and £450 marks, this middle ground is relatively sparse, with the only notable alternative being the Nothing Phone (1), which originally retailed for £399 but is currently £309.

For £50 more than the Reno 10, you could pick up Google’s latest mid-ranger, the Pixel 7a. Performance is a big deal here, as the 7a uses the same Google Tensor G2 chip as the regular Pixel 7. You’re also getting an excellent camera suite and Google’s clean installation of Android, but the display is limited to 90Hz.

For the same smooth 120Hz display as the Reno 10, you could go for the Xiaomi 12T, which was £499 when we first reviewed it but has since dropped to £400. You’re getting faster performance here and a gorgeous AMOLED display, but the secondary cameras aren’t particularly impressive and there’s a lot of bloatware preloaded on the phone.

Oppo Reno 10 5G review: Design and key features

Once again, the most notable design changes revolve primarily around the cameras. Where the Reno 8 series incorporated a unibody design that saw the camera bump curving elegantly into the rear panel, the Reno 10 opts for a more traditional setup, with the metal module sitting on top of the backplate, rather than blending into it.

It’s a shame to lose the uniqueness of the unibody design, but what we get instead is far from unattractive. Available in Ice Blue or Silvery Grey, the curved back fits nicely in the hand and tapers into rounded plastic edges that add some shine with a mirrored finish. The frosted glass on the rear both looks and feels much more premium than the price would suggest and, better still, it effectively hides fingerprint smudges. Other protections are less impressive, with the phone only rated IPX4 for minimal splash resistance.

The Reno 10 is quite light on other features, with no 3.5mm headphone jack or microSD slot. The right edge houses the power and volume keys, the bottom is home to the USB-C port, SIM-tray and one of the stereo speakers, and the opposite speaker can be found on the top. Face and fingerprint unlocking are both present and each works efficiently enough; the selfie camera recognised me with and without glasses on, and the under-display fingerprint reader correctly scanned my thumb from various angles.

One feature we don’t see all that often any more is the IR sensor, which allows you to use the Reno 10 as a remote control. Oppo even helps out with this by pre-installing an IR remote app. Unfortunately, it’s not the only app that’s on the phone by default, with a barrage of phone games clogging up the home screen, as well as bizarre inclusions like the Booking.com and Joom online shopping apps.

Bloatware aside, the operating system is fairly decent. ColorOS 13.1 is based on Android 13, and Oppo has pledged to deliver three years of OS updates and four years of monthly security updates to the Reno 10. In use, ColorOS has some useful features, including an app sidebar that you can customise to your heart’s content. In terms of visual presentation, icons and menus are a bit on the gaudy side, but it’s nothing so egregious that it should put you off the phone completely.

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Oppo Reno 10 5G review: Display

The display is 0.3in larger than the Reno 8’s, but only marginally increasing the resolution (2,412 x 1,080 compared to 2,400 x 1,080) means that the overall pixel density drops slightly to around 394ppi. Even so, the display is nice and sharp, with the 120Hz refresh rate making scrolling and swapping between apps feel fluid and efficient. Maximum brightness was recorded as 467cd/m², but flicking on the auto-adjust and shining a torch on the ambient light sensor pushed that limit up to a solid peak of 760cd/m².

There are two colour modes to choose from, Natural and Vivid, with the former producing the most accurate shades and the latter offering more saturated colours. On Natural, I measured an impressive 100% coverage of the sRGB gamut, with a total volume of 110%. The average Delta E colour variance score came back at just 1.28, which is right in the pocket for a phone of this price. Finally, with this being an AMOLED panel, contrast is as close to perfect as you can get.

Oppo Reno 10 5G review: Performance and battery life

The train of praise for the Reno 10 is about to come to a screeching halt. It’s not that the octa-core 2.6GHz MediaTek 7050 chipset is bad, it’s just that it’s handily outperformed by plenty of other phones in this price range. It’s understandable that the Xiaomi 12T and Google Pixel 7a would score better – they cost more – but even the Nothing Phone (1) pulls a solid 22% ahead in the multicore results.

To be clear, none of this means that the Reno 10 is a sluggish handset. In use, I found it to be efficient enough for a mid-range phone, with breezy scrolling and barely any micro pauses when loading apps. It’s just not a good look that you can get better performance for similar money – or, in many cases, a fair bit less.

Things look much the same as we turn to GPU performance. Both Xiaomi handsets refused to play nicely with our GPU testing software so we don’t have figures for them, but you can see how much of a jump you get from the Nothing Phone (1) and especially the Google Pixel 7a.

If your gaming aspirations fall in the lands of Candy Crush and Solitaire, you’ve got nothing to worry about with the Oppo Reno 10. Anyone who regularly plays graphic-intensive 3D games, however, would get on much better with the Pixel 7a.

Things swing back towards the exceptional with the battery tests. The Reno 10 5G is fitted with a 5,000mAh battery, which lasted for an outstanding 26hrs 16mins in our looping video benchmark. This terrific result handily outpaces all the other options here, and skyrockets the Oppo Reno 10 reasonably far up our best phone battery life chart.

I received a European plug with my review sample so I can’t accurately judge the charging speeds, but Oppo has stated that just ten minutes on charge can take the battery from flat to 31%.

Oppo Reno 10 5G review: Cameras

The telephoto lens is definitely the star of the camera suite, but there’s a lot to like about the main lens, too. It’s a 64MP (f/1.7) sensor, but as standard, it shoots 16MP photos, pixel-binning four pixels into one. Even without switching to the full-resolution mode, images are rich with detail, with plenty of definition in the shadowy areas underneath the boardwalk in the below image.

Even when the light gets low, the main camera puts in a strong showing. The artificial brightening is evenly coloured and relatively free from noise, and bright light sources are tempered effectively, keeping extravagant lens flares at bay.

The 32MP (f/2) telephoto lens is designated as “portrait mode” in the camera app, and for good reason – portraits taken with the 2x optical zoom have a terrific depth of field and naturally produced skin tones – but it’s good for more than just people. This bridge was ready for its close-up, and the camera captured an excellent level of detail in the brickwork, while also producing strong colours in the graffiti.

The final rear lens is less outstanding than its fellows, but the 8MP (f/2.2) sensor still performs well enough. When shooting towards the sun, the sky gets completely washed out and the highlights are a bit over the top, but if you absolutely need to widen the angle, this lens gets the job done.

Video can shoot in 1080p up to 60fps or 4K at 30fps and, once again, it’s fairly decent. Changes in exposure are compensated for quickly enough, and although the stabilisation is only electronic there’s no overly distracting shaking in the footage.

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Oppo Reno 10 5G review: Verdict

If you’re trying to get the most performance for the least money, Oppo’s Reno 10 5G is not going to be the one for you. In that circumstance, I recommend the Xiaomi 12T, where you’re getting a massive leap in performance for the same price. Alternatively, Google’s Pixel 7a isn’t much more expensive and offers better performance than the Reno 10 5G, as well as a clean Android installation and a terrific suite of cameras.

Of course, the Pixel 7a doesn’t have a telephoto lens, and it’s here that the Reno 10 5G really finds its niche. Optical zooms are as rare as fairy dust in this price range, and the Reno 10 manages to include a decent sensor with very few corners cut. Add in the extensive battery life and the near-flawless display, and there’s just enough here to make up for the flagging performance. If you care more about a robust camera array than speedy processing, the Oppo Reno 10 5G could well be for you.