Oppo Reno 7 5G Review: Great cameras, fancy looks

When was the last time you wanted to buy a phone just for the sake of its looks? In early 2022, Oppo is giving you that reason to consider its Reno 7. Just look at it -- it looks unearthly. But it is not only just about the looks; there's a lot of meat inside. The phone offers an impressive camera experience, comes with 5G connectivity, long battery life, fast charging and much more. Oppo has packed all these features for the price of Rs. 28,999, which is mainly dominated by Xiaomi, Samsung, OnePlus, etc.

With that said, I have spent around a week using the Oppo Reno 7 5G and here is what I think of the device. Also, to know if it is worth your consideration and money and how far it has been able to beat its competitors, check out the detailed review here.

Oppo Reno 7 5G Design

The Reno 7 is a beautiful looking phone with glow design. The phone is being offered in two colour choices, that is, Starlight Black and Startrails Blue. I have been using the latter, which I received along with a transparent plastic back cover, charger, SIM card ejector and manual.

Despite having a metal finish frame, the phone is slim (approx 7.81mm) and light weight (173 grams), making it comfortable and easy to hold. The back panel gets a shiny, glittery, and gradient design along with scratch and fingerprint resistance. Complementing the design, the back panel also holds a big rectangular camera hump accompanied with three lenses and a flashlight.

Moving to the front, the phone offers very narrow bezels and a 6.43 inch display with fingerprint sensor and front camera at the corner. You get a power button, two volume buttons along with the SIM and SD card slot on the side;. while the headphone jack, speaker and charging slot lies at the bottom. Overall, the Oppo Reno 7 has got a refreshing and attractive design.

Oppo Reno 7 5G Display

The Oppo Reno 7 5G comes with a 6.43 inch AMOLED screen along with 90Hz refresh rate and up to 180Hz touch sampling rate. The display is sharp and vibrant. The screen goes lively with colours, contrasts and the brightness range offered. From watching YouTube videos, Hotstar, scrolling social networking sites like Instagram, Facebook to playing games, it all looked pleasant on the screen. However, at the price range the phone is being offered, Oppo could have given a higher refresh rate of 120Hz.

Also, the brightness level can be adjusted as per the requirements. I kept the auto switch on for changing between light and dark mode and in my testing period. It did work well and felt adequate.

Oppo Reno 7 5G Performance

The Oppo Reno 7 runs on MediaTek Dimensity 900 Octa-core chipset and comes with 8GB RAM (expandable up to 5GB) and 256GB storage. It boots ColorOS 12 on top of Android 11. The phone comes with certain pre-installed applications, most of which can be uninstalled by you if not required. Other than that, the Reno 7 has a decent user interface with almost no advertisements.

Using the personalization feature, I loved the new lock screen that allows the use of Omoji. The Omoji did put a smile on my face with its cuteness everytime the display turned on. Other than this, the Kid Space, Simple Mode and Air Gestures feature offered by Oppo were fairly impressive.

By enabling the Simple Mode, the apps icons became larger in size along with the text, which I feel is a good move to help old age people or people with low eyesight issues use the phone easily. While the air gesture feature was also interesting to use. Just by moving my hands I was able to pick the calls, scroll the screen without even touching the phone. This was something new which grabbed my attention and surprisingly did perform well!

The performance of the phone is satisfactory in terms of doing regular activities like scrolling through Instagram or playing games or watching videos for hours. The phone worked flawlessly and without heating up or even getting slower.

Coming to the audio quality, the Oppo Reno 7 has a single speaker and the audio quality is decent. However, with the maximum volume, the sound did get distorted. The call performance has also been satisfactory along with reliable internet connectivity.

Oppo Reno 7 5G Camera

Oppo is known for providing good cameras and it has surely not disappointed me here. The phone has a triple rear camera with 64MP main camera, 8MP wide angle camera and 2MP macro camera. While the front camera supports 32MP.

The images shot with the 50MP lense have great clarity and capture even minute details with great dynamic range. The colours looked vibrant and similar to what we actually see in real life, while clicking the pictures in daylight. While in the dark, pictures clicked in the night mode looked pretty good. From overall brightness, colours to clarity in details everything was to the point.

The portrait mode offered a wonderful bokeh effect, either shot by the rear or the front camera, the effect looked amazing. The macro sensor provided for extremely close shooting also gave decent clicks. Coming to the front camera, the AI algorithm is on by default and offers beauty effects. But, when turned off, you will get the natural look.

Check the samples here.

On the video front, the phone supports stabilization and provides decent clipings with good colour contrast. Other than these there are options to click images in extra HD mode, panorama, expert, slow motion, time-lapse, among others.

Oppo Reno 7 5G Battery

The phone comes with a combination of 4500mAh battery and a 65W fast charger. Based on my regular usages including playing games, surfing the internet, watching videos or films, attending calls or video calls, using social networking apps, among others, it gave me a battery backup of around 1.5 days.

While on weekends and with continuous usage, the battery did survive almost a day on single charge. The phone comes with a 65W fast charging support and takes around 35-40 minutes to fill the battery from 0-100%.

Verdict

The Oppo Reno 7 5G is all set to give the premium phones a tough competition with its camera quality, battery life and charging, design, and much more. Though it lacks certain factors like the audio quality, refresh rate and much more, the phone compensates for it by offering additional features to attract the users. However, as the competition is tough and if you are looking for some other alternatives in this price range, you have options like Vivo V23 5G, Samsung Galaxy M52 5G, Xiaomi 11 Lite NE 5G, among others to choose from.