Oppo Reno 8 Pro review: Style and substance

The similarity with the OnePlus 10R doesn’t end with the design as the Reno 8 Pro is also powered by the Mediatek Dimensity 8100-Max. The chipset under the hood comes paired with 12 GB of LPDDR5 RAM and 256GB of UFS 3.1 storage. The whole configuration is powerful enough to steer clear of whatever is thrown at it. The Reno 8 Pro handles day-to-day performance nicely. You will hardly notice any lag throughout the user interface or even while scrolling through the apps.

Speaking of the GPU prowess of the phone, the Reno 8 Pro is capable of running BattleGrounds Mobile India at maxed-out graphics quality at 90Hz, and the experience was top-notch. Other heavy-duty titles such as Apex Legends, Call of Duty Mobile and Genshin Impact ran quite well without any lag or major frame drops. However, we noticed that the phone gets a little warm over an extended period of gameplay, especially with the high-performance mode turned on.

For the nerds reading this, we ran some benchmarks to quantify the performance and got some decent numbers. The Reno 8 Pro managed to get single-core and multi-core scores of 881 and 3557 in Geekbench 5. Meanwhile, the phone finished the 3DMark WildLife Extreme stress test with the best loop score of 1558 and 95.8 per cent stability. However, the temperature went well over 40 degrees by the last loop of the 3DMark test. With the high-performance mode turned on, we saw almost a 10 per cent improvement in both the benchmarks.

The Reno 8 Pro runs ColorOS 12.1 on top of Android 12. While ColorOS is a feature-rich skin, it does come with a lot of bloatware, which can be uninstalled or hidden. Everything else with the ColorOS is just fine; it is highly customizable, and there are many gimmicky features that can sometimes be useful.

We need to talk about one interesting feature – Air Gestures. The feature is as gimmicky as it sounds but it is fun to use. The Air Gestures let you interact with the phone without touching it. You can answer or mute calls, scroll within the apps and play or pause videos. However, the feature is limited to very few apps, and you need to be very precise with your hand movements to use this feature correctly.

There are several other features that add up to the whole experience such as anti-peeping for notifications, password to power off, multi-screen connect and more.

Oppo still needs to up its game when it comes to Android updates when compared to some of the competition. The Reno 8 Pro will only get two Android updates whereas some other phones in its price segment offer at least three OS upgrades. Also, it will be getting three years of security patches when other phones are up for four years of security patches.

The similarity with the OnePlus 10R doesn’t end with the design as the Reno 8 Pro is also powered by the Mediatek Dimensity 8100-Max. The chipset under the hood comes paired with 12 GB of LPDDR5 RAM and 256GB of UFS 3.1 storage. The whole configuration is powerful enough to steer clear of whatever is thrown at it. The Reno 8 Pro handles day-to-day performance nicely. You will hardly notice any lag throughout the user interface or even while scrolling through the apps.

Speaking of the GPU prowess of the phone, the Reno 8 Pro is capable of running BattleGrounds Mobile India at maxed-out graphics quality at 90Hz, and the experience was top-notch. Other heavy-duty titles such as Apex Legends, Call of Duty Mobile and Genshin Impact ran quite well without any lag or major frame drops. However, we noticed that the phone gets a little warm over an extended period of gameplay, especially with the high-performance mode turned on.

For the nerds reading this, we ran some benchmarks to quantify the performance and got some decent numbers. The Reno 8 Pro managed to get single-core and multi-core scores of 881 and 3557 in Geekbench 5. Meanwhile, the phone finished the 3DMark WildLife Extreme stress test with the best loop score of 1558 and 95.8 per cent stability. However, the temperature went well over 40 degrees by the last loop of the 3DMark test. With the high-performance mode turned on, we saw almost a 10 per cent improvement in both the benchmarks.

The Reno 8 Pro runs ColorOS 12.1 on top of Android 12. While ColorOS is a feature-rich skin, it does come with a lot of bloatware, which can be uninstalled or hidden. Everything else with the ColorOS is just fine; it is highly customizable, and there are many gimmicky features that can sometimes be useful.

We need to talk about one interesting feature – Air Gestures. The feature is as gimmicky as it sounds but it is fun to use. The Air Gestures let you interact with the phone without touching it. You can answer or mute calls, scroll within the apps and play or pause videos. However, the feature is limited to very few apps, and you need to be very precise with your hand movements to use this feature correctly.

There are several other features that add up to the whole experience such as anti-peeping for notifications, password to power off, multi-screen connect and more.

Oppo still needs to up its game when it comes to Android updates when compared to some of the competition. The Reno 8 Pro will only get two Android updates whereas some other phones in its price segment offer at least three OS upgrades. Also, it will be getting three years of security patches when other phones are up for four years of security patches.