In less than 6 months, OPPO announced its Reno6 series successor, the OPPO Reno7 series; OPPO Reno7 Pro 5G, Reno7 5G, and Reno7 Lite 5G (which will launch later this year). Today we will be checking the Reno7 5G that is priced for RM 1,999 for Malaysia market and how it fares against the competition for the asking price.

OPPO Reno7 5G Specification

Design

The OPPO Reno7 5G has a new design with a rounded frame and curved edges on the back. Adopt the OPPO’s signature Reno Glow design and claims that’s it’s the first phone to use LDI (Laser Direct Imaging) processing for its back cover.

The review unit that came in was the Startrails Blue with a stunning glow that shifts colors when light hits at different angles. The matte finishes have a textures kinds of cover that functions reduce fingerprint smudges and add grips.

Frankly, OPPO never failed to impress with its color palette design even for their A-series, the OPPO A95 that adopted the Reno Glow design.

The overall design and build are impressively good and premium.

Display

Featuring a 6.4-inch AMOLED Full HD+ AMOLED display and supports up to 90Hz refresh rate and 180Hz touch-sampling rate. There is a punch-hole cutout on the top left corner which houses a fixed focus 32-megapixels f/2.4 front camera. The panel is HDR10 certified and supports Widevine L1 DRM, so you can be assured enjoy Netflix and Prime Video at the best quality possible.

It also gets an optical in-display fingerprint scanner which is fast and responsive.

Camera

Equipped with a 64-megapixels main camera with a rather wide f/1.7 aperture lens. It can create some natural bokeh effect when shooting closes up images. The main camera shoots pretty sharp and high-dynamic-range images in daylight. While in night mode, it does pick up some noises while pushing the images to look brighter and eye-pleasing.

The 8-megapixels ultrawide on the Reno7 5G now has a more consistent white balance and is still not as close with the main camera. Although OPPO heavily relies on their AI algorithm software for all their camera, I’m sure they can do something about it.

As for the 2-megapixels macro lens, one word “Redundant”. Not only it doesn’t do autofocus, but the low megapixels made the images look washed out and in poor quality. I would rather shoot close up with the main camera and crop if required.

OPPO also offers tons of different modes to play around with within the camera app and the one they promote the most is the Portrait Mode, which creates an artificial shallow depth of field to images and video. It then allows you to manually change the bokeh aperture varying from f/0.95 to f/16. This also works on its front 32-megapixels front camera, no Auto Focus if you wanted to know.

Overall the main camera and ultrawide camera are pretty good for other smartphones in this segment. Ladies would love this camera and the features it offered.

Here are some photo samples from the OPPO Reno7 5G

Performance & ColorOS 12

The MediaTek Dimensity 900 powered the OPPO Reno7 5G is solid, able to handle day-to-day tasks and mobile gaming without any problem. Comes with 8GB of RAM and even includes RAM Expansion features that can swap up to 5GB of internal storage as RAM. It runs smoothly with the 90Hz display without any sluggishness.

The ColorOS 12 which is based on Android 11 (which is rather confusing naming) has a lot of bloatware pre-installed and even have their own Market App that works the same as Google Play Store but why?

Battery

Another great upgrade of this device is the battery capacity and charging speeds. It boasts with 4,500 mAh battery and supports OPPO proprietary 65W SuperVOOC Flash Charge. It device can be fully charged from flat to 100% in just 31 minutes, however, in my use it takes around 38 minutes which is impressively good. With this capability, I no longer charge it overnight, instead, I only charge when it’s low.

On the other hand, the battery life is decent with an average of 6 to 7 hours of screen-on-time, which can last me a day with just a single charge.