Oppo Reno 10x Zoom hands-on: The shark-fin phone

Oppo has never been afraid of experimentation. Last year, the company gave us the Oppo Find X and the F11 Pro, both of which served as a showcase for the company’s unique (and off-beat) sense for smartphone design. Featuring a sliding screen and a pop-up selfie camera respectively, each of these two devices offered its own take on the all-screen phone with varying degrees of success.

This year, Oppo is launching the Reno – an ambitious phone that follows in the footsteps of its predecessors with a quirky “shark-fin” front-facing camera and eye-catching bezel-less design. It comes in two models, the base Reno and the Reno 10x Zoom. Both share a similar design, but have different specs and, as the name suggests, the latter sports 10x magnification in its main camera.

Today, we got the chance to check them out and we’d like to share our initial impressions of the Oppo Reno 10x Zoom with you. Do note, however, that the phone we got to check out was a Chinese, pre-release unit that wasn’t running the final version of the software. Oppo is supposed to start shipping out the global version next month.

The Oppo Reno 10x Zoom is gorgeous to look at. Even though we’ve already seen plenty of Chinese phones with no notches, camera punch-holes, or any other screen blemishes, the Oppo Reno still manages to impress with its extremely thin bezels and huge, vibrant display.

To achieve this, Oppo had to deal with the front-facing camera and earpiece in some way. The company opted for a pop-up solution, but it’s a tad different, in that it resembles a shark fin… or a wedge of cheese, depending on how you want to look at it. It’s motorized and (thankfully) rather quick to jump into action when summoned.

On the shark-fin resides an f/2.0 16MP selfie snapper that’s quite adequate and has portrait mode to boot, even though it’s just a single lens with no optical means of measuring depth. According to the company, the camera opens in 0.8 seconds and has been tested for 200,000 actuations, which totals up to around 100 uses per day over the course of 5 years.

The downside of this design? The Oppo Reno is not water- or dust-resistant, much like all other devices with non-solid-state designs. On the upside, Oppo has thought about protecting the mechanism from accidental drops. After all, one of the biggest disasters that could befall a phone with this design, is for it to slip out of your hands while the camera is in use, which would leave it vulnerable to all the horrible realities of dropping a phone in 2019.


Since it’s not our mission to destroy this device, I decided to gently drop it on the soft bed in my hotel room. As you can see from the video above, the drop detection feature works as intended. The phone even asks you if you’d like to activate the camera again. As if you would be in the mood for selfies after dropping this gorgeous phone on the pavement. Anyway, props to Oppo for making the Reno capable of detecting even short falls, such as the one that it courageously endured in my hotel room.

Highly-advanced camera with 6x optical zoom