The OPPO Reno 10x Zoom Review: Bezeless Zoom

Conclusion & End Remarks

The Reno 10x Zoom the is the first Oppo device we’ve reviewed here at AnandTech, and frankly I wasn’t too sure what to expect going into this review.

The one aspect where the Reno 10x does stand out in is its design. The full screen display without any notches, bezels or cut-outs does make it one of the unique devices in 2019, but much like the many other implementations of this design this year, it comes with compromises in terms of the build of the phone. I don’t have any concerns on the build quality of the design, but it’s just an overall thicker and heavier phone, all of that just for the sake of eliminating a few millimetres of display notch for the camera. For some people who put more value into aesthetics, this might work, but I personally put more value into the practicality of a phone as well as its ergonomics. In the end, it’s the same compromises we found on the OnePlus 7 Pro and its retractable camera module.

The display of the phone is good, but nothing really that makes the Reno 10x stand out compared to the competition. It’s a large display, but at 1080p, it’s a bit stretched out in terms of resolution. Colour accuracy and calibrations were adequate, but falling in below average. There’s nothing particularly bad or good about it.

Performance of the phone was good, but at the very lower end of what you’d expect of Snapdragon 855 devices. On the CPU side of things, Oppo has configured the phone to be quite conservative in terms of its scheduler and DVFS scaling. It’s by far not a slow device, but below other S855 phones. On the GPU side of things, the phone behaves exactly like the OnePlus 7 Pro in that it doesn’t showcase any thermal throttling at all. However, unlike the OP7Pro, the Reno 10x heats up unevenly enough that the phone’s software thermal panics and closes the running app.

The one benefit of the more conservative CPU tuning of the device is in its battery life. Again, the Reno 10x doesn’t have the most recent or most efficient display, but thanks to the larger battery and its decision to be a bit slower in terms of ramping up the CPU, it performs very well in our battery tests, especially in PCMark. It’s also doing well in the web test, however because of the less efficient screen it just shy of the best devices out there.

On the camera side of things, the one thing I was more impressed with the Reno 10x in this review was the new Night Mode. I’ve had the phone for a few months now, but it really breathes some fresh life into the camera in low-light conditions. In terms of detail it’s now amongst the limited group of vendors who have working computational photography algorithms, even if it still needs more tuning.

In daylight pictures, the phone is versatile. The main camera in daylight is good, albeit the processing does lag behind the best results that the camera sensor is able to achieve; Xiaomi still seems to be the one vendor that had the best calibration for the IMX586. The ultra-wide angle was good and consistent with the mains sensor, although it didn’t have any obvious weaknesses it’s also lacking any kind of clear strengths.

The periscope design 5x optical zoom of the phone seems to be a gimmick to me. We already saw the feature on the P30 Pro, and like on that phone, in most situations it’s not quite as useful as some lower magnification lenses. The problem for the Reno 10x Zoom is the fact that it loses out in quality compared to the P30 Pro – sometimes quite significantly, producing blurrier pictures than its sole competitor.

In Europe, the Reno 10x Zoom can be found between 579 to 649€ depending on storage configuration. The issue I had with the Reno 10x is that I don’t feel like it had any one defining feature that put it ahead of the competition. Everything was relatively passable or adequate, not shining in any one area. For being a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none phone, I feel it doesn’t convince me enough to actively recommend the phone over a competing solution. The phone has a cheaper sibling in the regular Reno, and the Reno 2 will also be released soon, but again I don’t feel like those phones substantially change the formula to make them worthwhile phones. Let’s hope Oppo continues to iterate in future designs, and better optimise and improve upon the core aspects of its phones.