We go hands-on with the Reno 10x Zoom!
While we enjoyed our short time with OPPO’s Reno, the real star of the show for the company this year is their current flagship, the Reno 10x Zoom. This particular phone is a flagship through and through, thanks to its upgraded internals, triple rear camera arrangement and a 10x optical zoom camera, capable of shooting at 60x zoom. Is OPPO’s new phone the next zoom king?
Packaging and contents
The Reno 10x Zoom comes in a premium-looking box much like its smaller brother, though OPPO upgraded a few accessories in the package.
The back cover feels quite nicer, and the USB Type-C headphones look and feel more premium than the standard plastic one that’s included with the regular Reno.
Aside from that, you’re getting a USB Type-C cable, VOOC charger, phone and documentation with the package.
Bigger, but heftier
Both Reno smartphones from OPPO are easy on the eyes thanks to an updated design language that makes them look especially premium. The pricier Reno 10x Zoom edition comes in the same Jet Black and Ocean Green colorway, though the latter looks more visually interesting than the former without being as loud as the gradient finish on the company’s other offerings.
The Reno 10x Zoom has the same modern design as its smaller brother, which means gentle curves and rounded corners, along with the triple camera module located at the middle of the phone’s glass back, arranged vertically.
The Reno 10x Zoom has a metal frame sandwiched in between two panes of glass that’s protected by Corning’s Gorilla Glass 6.
The power button is on the right while the volume rocker is on the left side of the device, with the USB Type-C port on the bottom flanked by a speaker grille. There’s no 3.5mm jack anywhere, and annoyingly enough despite being billed as a flagship phone, the Reno 10x Zoom doesn’t have water resistance nor does it have wireless charging capabilities.
If there’s one thing we didn’t like about the Reno 10x Zoom, it’s how big it is – it’s significantly taller than the regular Reno, and tips the scales at 215 grams. That makes the Reno 10x Zoom one of the heaviest phones we’ve ever used.
The front of the Reno 10x Zoom doesn’t feature a notch, traditional or otherwise, thanks to the shark-fin motorized pop-up selfie camera located on the top of the frame.
This “Pivot-Rising” structure holds the 16-megapixel selfie camera with f/2.0 aperture on the front and an LED flash at the rear, similar to the one on the regular Reno.
The Reno 10x Zoom is physically larger than the regular Reno thanks to its larger 6.6-inch OLED display. Resolution comes in at 2,340 x 1,080, giving it a 19.5:9 aspect ratio and 93.1 percent screen-to-body ratio. We like how the display looked, with colors looking vibrant and bright. There’s no always-on capability here, which is a bummer since the screen is an OLED panel you’d think OPPO would include that functionality. OPPO did include an on-screen fingerprint scanner with the Reno 10x Zoom, which feels much quicker than the solutions they’ve provided in their previous phones.
One of the things that make the Reno 10x Zoom stand out over the regular variant is the inclusion of a triple camera module. While the 48-megapixel Sony IMX586 sensor with an f/1.7 aperture also makes an appearance on the standard variant, only the pricier 10x variant has the 8-megapixel f/2.2 ultra-wide angle camera and 13-megapixel f/3.0 periscope camera with 10x Lossless Zoom and OIS.
The Reno 10x Zoom is the first phone from OPPO to finally implement their periscope-like optical zoom tech that we’ve seen in one iteration or another since 2017. While other companies have implemented the tech in their phones first, the idea is the same – the sensor sits sideways in the phone, and uses a lens plus a prism to refract the light like a periscope.
OPPO’s Reno 10x Zoom only has 5x optical zoom – the phone uses a mix of both the optical zoom and digital zoom to produce hybrid zoom images from 6x to 10x. The result is quite good though, and the phone can push the zoom further from 10x all the way to 60x, though anything above 10x is purely digital zoom.
Hardware-wise, you’re looking at a Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 processor with 6GB/8GB RAM and 128GB/256GB of storage, with our review unit coming with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.
That’s more than enough to play every conceivable Android game available in high settings without any issues. That, combined with the enormous display makes the Reno 10x Zoom a great choice for people who like to game on the go.
Thanks to its large physical footprint, the Reno 10x Zoom has a large 4065mAh battery inside of it. The phone can quickly go back from 0 thanks to quick charging via VOOC 3.0.
That’s it for this hands-on. We don’t know yet how much this particular phone will be.
OPPO Reno 10X Specs
- Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 octa-core processor
- Adreno 640 GPU
- 6GB/8GB RAM
- 6.65-inch Full HD+ OLED display, HDR10+ compliant,19.5:9 aspect ratio, Gorilla Glass 6
- 128GB/256GB internal storage
- 4G, LTE
- Dual SIM
- Triple rear cameras: 48-megapixel f/1.7 Sony IMX 586 main camera with OIS;8-megapixel f/2.2 ultra-wide angle camera; 13-megapixel f/3.0 periscope camera with 10x Lossless Zoom and OIS; dual LED flash
- 16-megapixel f/2.0 pop-up front camera
- WiFi, Bluetooth
- Dual band GPS, A-GPS, GLONASS, NFC
- In-display fingerprint scanner, face unlock, Dolby Atmos, Game Boost 2.0
- Android 9 Pie with ColorOS 6
- 4065mAh battery with VOOC 3.0 quick charging
