Oppo Reno 4 Pro 5G review: a premium mid-ranger with a punch

The Oppo Reno 4 Pro 5G is a decently specced mid-to-upper-range phone, jumping into what is an increasingly crowded and competitive part of the market – you can pick up classy handsets such as the Samsung Galaxy S20 FE for a similar sort of price to this.

The newly launched iPhone 12 mini comes in at the same price point too, so you can see the sort of competition that the Oppo handset is up against – even with 5G on board and a good mix of internal specs, it needs to stand out to tempt you away from the alternatives.

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Besides 5G, the main draw here is the 65W fast charging that we've also seen from OnePlus this year and previous Oppo phones. It gives you a full charge from zero in just 30 minutes or thereabouts, which could make a big difference in the way that you use your phone.

In this Oppo Reno 4 Pro 5G review we'll take you through how the phone scores in all the key categories that matter: the design, the performance, the battery life, the camera quality, and more besides. It should help you decide whether this is the phone for you.

Oppo Reno 4 Pro 5G review: price and availability

The Oppo Reno 4 Pro 5G is available to buy now and from a whole host of retailers and networks as well: SIM-free and contract-free the phone will set you back £699 from Amazon, Carphone Warehouse or Oppo's own online store, but it's also available with deals from EE, Vodafone, O2 and Virgin Mobile. Oppo has yet to officially put its phones on sale in the US, so you can't buy it direct from there.

Oppo Reno 4 Pro 5G review: design and screen

As has usually been the case with Oppo phones of the past, the Reno 4 Pro 5G is a fine-looking device, dominated by its 6.55-inch screen. There are thin bezels all round, with just a punch hole notch to interrupt the display, placed up in the top left-hand corner. Around the back, the camera array is also up in the top left corner. The fingerprint sensor is located under the display itself.

The display is definitely one of the best parts of the overall Oppo Reno 4 Pro 5G experience: running at a resolution of 1,080 x 2,400 pixels, the AMOLED, HDR10+ panel is bright and sharp and a pleasure to use. It's also smooth in terms of scrolling and animations, with a 90Hz refresh rate that is better than a lot of phones at this price point (though not the absolutely best around of course). The screen curves at the sides, giving you an immersive effect, and just about everything you pull up on this display looks great.

The phone feels like a premium piece of hardware when you pick it up and hold it in your hands, and it also feels like it's been carefully put together and built. There are some very nicely designed phones in the mid-range smartphone market at the moment, but the OnePlus Reno 4 Pro 5G definitely holds its own – and we like the Space Black and Galactic Blue colour options as well.

As is often the case with mid-rangers, the phone doesn't offer an IP68 rating for waterproofing and dustproofing. There is support for a dual SIM, while charging and data transfer is of course handled via USB-C. You don't get a 3.5 mm headphone jack with this handset, so you may have to upgrade your headphones at the same time as you're upgrading your smartphone.

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Oppo Reno 4 Pro 5G review: camera and battery

The Oppo Reno 4 Pro 5G comes sporting a triple-lens 48MP+13MP+12MP rear camera, combining both an ultrawide mode, 2x optical zoom and 5x hybrid optical zoom – it's not often that you get both ultrawide and optical zoom together at this price. There's a 32MP selfie camera on the front and some neat stabilisation technology for recording videos – the maximum video resolution is 4K at 30 frames per second.

On the whole you're going to get photos that you would expect from a phone at this point – crisp, detailed and punchy. They do occasionally come across as oversaturated, but it's not a huge issue. The photos that we took while out and about with the phone were more than good enough for some social media posting and indeed another level above that – it's not the best phone camera around by any means, but we were pleasantly surprised at how well it did.

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Performance in low light and at night is good too, thanks to the dedicated night mode on board the phone: you can get a longer exposure as long as you hold the phone still for a couple of seconds. It can brighten up the darkest of photos to acceptable levels, but it's not quite as impressive as the night performance on phones by Google and Huawei.

In our standard two-hour video streaming test – at maximum brightness and a low volume – the Oppo Reno 4 Pro 5G logged an impressively small drop of 12 percent from a full charge to 88 percent. That suggests about 16-17 hours of video streaming, which is very decent indeed. In day-to-day use, it wasn't so great, but provided enough juice to make it through the day. The 4,000 mAh battery supports super-speedy 65W fast charging (like the OnePlus 8T) but there's no wireless charging support on this phone.

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Oppo Reno 4 Pro 5G review: other specs and features

The Oppo Reno 4 Pro 5G specs list looks like this: a Qualcomm Snapdragon 765G processor, 12GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage (with no memory card slot to expand that). In terms of the chipset at least, that puts this phone on a par with the likes of the OnePlus Nord and the Google Pixel 5 – it's a mid-range processor, but it's going to be capable of tackling anything you want to throw at it.

In the Geekbench 5 benchmarks that we ran, the phone scored a respectable 606 (single-core), 1780 (multi-core) and 1253 (OpenCL). That's not bad at all, and the difference in performance with the very best phones on the market isn't gigantic – you might just notice a few milliseconds of extra loading time here and there, whether you're playing the most intense games or switching between dozens of browser tabs.

As the name suggests, the phone comes with 5G on board, so you're future-proofed against the network upgrades that may or may not be happening in your area. At this sort of price though, we would expect 5G to be included nowadays, and you can actually get the next-gen connectivity feature on phones that cost much less.

The ColorOS that Oppo puts on top of Android (it's Android 10 in this case) isn't one of our favourites, but there are no glaring problems with it – it's just a bit fiddly and a bit over-the-top for our tastes. We prefer a clean, stock version of Android, but you might prefer ColorOS, and it certainly isn't going to cause you any major problems. As this is Android, you can always change the look of the software with a launcher anyway.

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Oppo Reno 4 Pro 5G review: price and verdict

The Oppo Reno 4 Pro 5G is a really nice phone, there's no question about that. It's also a relatively expensive phone, and it's up against some very strong competition too – for £100 less you can bag yourself a Google Pixel 5 and for £100 more you can get a foot on the iPhone 12 ladder. That's just two of many other phones circling this price point.

When you start running through the features, the phone is definitely worth its asking price: it has an excellent screen and good build quality, the performance levels are decent, and the camera is relatively impressive. That 65W fast charging is a genuine game changer – no more overnight charging needed – and of course there's 5G.

The question is whether other phones around this price offer a better overall package. We're not that convinced by the software on board the Oppo Reno 4 Pro 5G, and you miss out on features such as waterproofing and wireless charging. These aren't massive issues really – there are no major problems – but they give you reasons to pick something else instead of this.

Ultimately, if you like the design of this Oppo handset and it falls within your price range, it's a good choice for your next smartphone – it's certainly not going to let you down in any of the key areas. Just be sure to weigh up everything that the competition is able to offer before parting with your money.

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