New Oppo Reno 12 series devices suddenly make flagship specs more affordable

When you think of the best Android phones on the market, there are a number of brands which likely come to mind. The market has been dominated by a selection of manufacturers for a while now, making them each household names in their own right.

Fortunately for those of us with champagne tastes and lemonade pockets, most of those brands also market cheap phones. These often take the design and some of the features from flagship handsets, but repackage it into a product which can be sold for relative peanuts.

That's what we get with the new Oppo Reno 12 series. Here, users find great swathes of the spec sheet you'd expect on a top-tier phone, but with a few tasteful revisions to bring the cost to a more manageable place.

The series features two devices – the Oppo Reno 12 and the Oppo Reno 12 Pro – which share large parts of their spec sheets. Both pack in a 6.7-inch display, giving users a large surface to view their content on. Those are capable of producing up to 1,200 nits of peak brightness, too.

Both also utilise a MediaTek Dimensity 7300-Energy chipset. That's a 4nm chip built on TSMC architecture, and runs ColorOS 14.1 based on Android 14.

The cameras form one of the main points of difference between the vanilla and Pro models. The Pro variant packs in 50MP sensors for the main and telephoto lenses, with an 8MP ultra-wide camera.

On the regular model, the telephoto option is foregone in favour of a 2MP macro camera. That's paired with an 8MP ultra-wide and a 50MP main sensor – a Sony LYT600.

Both models should be fairly nifty in the charging arena, too. Each has a 5,000mAh battery inside, with 80W SUPERVOOC charging on offer for speedy top-ups.

Priced at just £499, these are certain to be popular picks over the next year.