Oppo Reno 12 Pro Review — Top of the Smartphone Pile in 2024?

Oppo is slowly, but surely, building an incredible name for itself across the South African market, delivering some stellar phones in just about all the price brackets. The Reno 12 Pro is the brand’s latest flagship, which is, undoubtedly, a standout contender for the best smartphone of 2024, for a number of different reasons.

The Reno 12 Pro boasts a sleek design and an alloy body that offers both style and robust protection against drops, pressure, and water; paired with a gorgeous backplate with a shimmery finish, this thing just looks premium and feels it too.

Internally, the Reno 12 Pro houses a 6.7-inch, 120Hz OLED display, which is vivid, incredibly responsive, and easy on the eyes despite its brightness due to the device’s intelligent dimming, reduced blue light, and colour adjustment to suit your eyes.

You also get some serious oomph (the price-tag does demand it, after all), with 12GBs of RAM, 512GBs of storage, and MediaTek’s 4nm Dimensity 7300 chipset bundled with the Mali-G615 MC2 GPU. It may sound like a lot of technical jargon for some, but this is essentially the best bits of hardware on the market currently, giving you a more-than-suitable device that’ll handle anything from multi-app manoeuvring to some strenuous gaming.

Battery-wise, the Reno Pro 12 includes a sizable 5,000mAh battery with Oppo’s 80W Supervooc Flash Charge technology, helping the battery charge to 32% in just 10 minutes and 100% in 46 minutes, which is a key factor for those looking to use the device on the road or for extended business or media-viewing purposes.

Oppo has been priding itself on its camera tech as of late, and the Reno 12 Pro doesn’t disappoint in this department. Armed with a 50MP wide camera using the Sony LYT-600 sensor, a 50MP telephoto portrait camera and a 50MP selfie camera, the photos look crisp, sharp, and colourful, and have a much-desired professional, cinematic look to them thanks to some great AI retouching tricks.

One of the other standout features of the Reno 12 Pro is the AI toolbox built on the Google Gemini 1.0 Ultra large language model (LLM). It recognises on-screen content and suggests relevant AI tools, like social media content generation or article summaries. Additionally, the AI REcording Summary tool organises voice recordings into clear, actionable notes, making it easier to manage information on the go.

The Reno 12 Pro’s other ‘under the hood’ feature is a proprietary AI LinkBoost technology, which basically uses its built-in antennae to optimise the performance of calls and data transfer by latching onto the best network signals. This also speeds up the process of the device jumping from cell towers to WiFi connections, for example. It’s a hard feature to test ourselves, but the phone did function excellently in normal settings and had no hiccups or connectivity problems throughout our review time.

Pricing and availability

The Oppo Reno 12 Pro is available now and priced at R18,999.