Oppo Reno 3 Pro review: Great battery life, super fast charging

The Oppo Reno 3 Pro’s battery life managed to steal the show than its army of six cameras.

Oppo Reno 3 Pro review (HT Photo)

Brand: Oppo
Product: Reno 3 Pro
Price: ₹29,990 (base price)
Rating: 3.5/5

Oppo's Reno series stood out for the unique shark fin camera and premium design. Things have changed on the Oppo Reno 3 Pro which offers a more subtle design with punch-hole selfie cameras. The smartphone has a more regular looking design now. Oppo has reduced the price too with the phone just hitting the ₹30,000 mark. The smartphone still falls in the affordable premium segment.

Oppo Reno 3 Pro's highlight is its pair of selfie cameras which boasts a combination of 44-megapixel and 2-megapixel sensors. The rear cameras are no less with a 64-megapixel, 13-megapixel, 8-megapixel and 2-megapixel sensors. Oppo Reno 3 Pro is also powered by the new MediaTek Helio P95 processor. Here's our review of the latest Reno smartphone.

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Design, display

The Oppo Reno 3 Pro isn't a bad looking phone but it also isn't one that stands out. In fact, you can find similar looking ones or even better under ₹20,000. The phone is much lighter than the first Oppo Reno but its tall display requires two-handed use on several occasions. We had the blue colour variant which offers a gradient finish. It also comes in black and white colour options.

The smartphone's display is very poor outdoors in bright sunlight. Even on full brightness you'll barely manage to use the phone. If you step out on low brightness then you'll have to look for a shaded place to increase it. So it's better to put the display on auto-brightness. Otherwise the display is pretty good and looks even better on dark mode. The Oppo Reno 3 Pro has a 6.4-inch 1080p Super AMOLED display.

Oppo Reno 3 Pro features a 6.4-inch full HD+ AMOLED display with Gorilla Glass 5 protection. (HT Photo)

Oppo Reno 3 Pro features a 6.4-inch full HD+ AMOLED display with Gorilla Glass 5 protection. (HT Photo)

Performance

The overall performance of the Oppo Reno 3 Pro is quite remarkable. There weren't any lags or heating issues even during heavy usage. You can game, stream content and carry out other heavy tasks with ease on the Oppo Reno 3 Pro. You also get the latest ColorOS 7 with Android 10 on the Oppo Reno 3 Pro. ColorOS isn't one custom OS I would go for personally but it looks much more refined and cleaner now. The in-display fingerprint sensor is fast as claimed and there were honestly no failed tries.

Oppo advertises the cameras most for its Reno 3 Pro. However the show stealer is the phone's battery life and super fast charging. It comes with the VOOC 30W flash charge 4.0 which is really fast and surprised me every time I charged the phone. Even just 30 minutes of charge will get you up to 60% of juice. The battery life on the Reno 3 Pro is great too with the phone lasting for more than a day on regular usage. It can go on an entire day on heavy usage.

Cameras

Let's start with the front cameras. The selfies come out good, I wouldn't say excellent. Portrait mode still needs to be worked on although you can adjust the level of bokeh on your selfies. Low-light selfies come out really good though and with less artificial light making it look as natural as possible. Beautification is still major but you can always disable it for more natural looking photos.

An indoor lowlight shot taken from Reno 3 Pro (image resized for web) (HT Photo)

An indoor lowlight shot taken from Reno 3 Pro (image resized for web) (HT Photo)

With the rear cameras, I could take some very pretty photos of flowers in macro and wide angle modes. The results were satisfying without missing much on details. The experience wasn't the same with people as subjects as the photos didn't look crisp enough and there was loss of detail. This can easily be found out when you zoom in.

Reno 3 Pro captures colours in detail in conducive light conditions (image resized for web) (HT Photo)

Reno 3 Pro captures colours in detail in conducive light conditions (image resized for web) (HT Photo)

The phone tends to brighten up photos a lot when taken indoors and at night. Oppo says the cameras can deliver 108-megapixel photos which is actually image processing in the backend. But even so, the photos weren't impressive enough to say that it was of 108-megapixel quality.

A nightlight shot from Reno 3 Pro. Look closer at the colour reproduction and less noise (image resized for the web) (HT Photo)

A nightlight shot from Reno 3 Pro. Look closer at the colour reproduction and less noise (image resized for the web) (HT Photo)

Verdict

The Oppo Reno 3 Pro still has much to prove especially on the camera front. You can definitely get the Oppo Reno 3 Pro for its battery and performance but that's about it. You might want to increase your budget for phones like the Galaxy S10 Lite or Asus ROG Phone 2 or simply go for one that's priced below ₹20,000 and still does most of the job.