OPPO Reno 12 5G review: stylish design with Gen AI goodness

The OPPO Reno 12 5G arrives as the successor to the OPPO Reno 11 5G, which launched in early 2024. The smartphone still retains its essence, with a key focus on its camera capabilities and stylish design, but with some upgrades focused on productivity. The OPPO Reno 12 5G comes with on-device AI features that not only enhance your camera experience but also your everyday usage. It incorporates features like AI summaries for web articles, an AI writer to check grammar, and many more thoughtful additions. Let’s take a closer look at what the new OPPO Reno 12 5G has to offer in this review. 

Verdict

The OPPO Reno 12 5G is a unique mid-ranger with a key focus on generative AI features, boosting both camera capabilities and productivity. The AI integration is quite ingenious and creates a delightful user experience for productivity enthusiasts. The main drawbacks of the phone include a processor which isn’t as powerful as the competition, and a UI cluttered with pre-loaded apps.

Design and display

The OPPO Reno 12 5G is undoubtedly one of the most attractive smartphones I’ve had my hands on. I received the Sunset Peach colour variant and immediately fell in love with the rear panel, which has imprinted cloud patterns that softly glow under light. The triple rear camera setup is arranged vertically within a rectangular module, finished with a silver rim that adds a touch of elegance.

Coming to visuals, the device flaunts a 6.7-inch curved AMOLED panel with an FHD+ resolution (2,412 x 1,080p). The peak brightness level goes up to 1200nits and the display remains sufficiently bright both indoors and outdoors. The screen is excellent, featuring rich colours that can be fine-tuned to your preferences with multiple colour modes for wider colour coverage. The phone comes with stereo speakers that are a step up from its predecessor and offer a richer multimedia experience. 

There’s also HDR10+ support, so you can enjoy HDR content across OTT platforms. The display incorporates Corning Gorilla Glass 7i for enhanced protection against scratches and damage, which is always something to appreciate. 

Cameras

The primary camera takes appealing daylight shots with natural colours, which reproduce the scene quite closely. The camera is versatile, and the low-light images turn out well with sufficient details and a low noise level. Here are a few direct comparisons against its chief competitors:

Daylight

The colour science varies between the OPPO Reno 12 and the Motorola Edge 50 Pro. The latter tends to oversaturate colours and has a high contrast, which makes the scene look more dramatic. The former maintains a balanced colour profile, but when you zoom in, the clarity takes a hit and there’s a noticeable amount of noise. The Motorola Edge 50 Pro maintains better clarity.

Comparing against the Redmi 13 Pro+, the colour science is once again quite different. The OPPO Reno 12 5G continues to maintain balanced colours, while the Redmi Note 13 Pro+ has a cooler hue. The scene appears a lot darker in the latter’s image, but the high contrast manages to bring out more detail in the clouds. In OPPO’s case, there’s slight issue with exposure balance, which makes the scene look hazy.

Ultrawide

The OPPO Reno 12 and Motorola Edge 50 Pro maintain a similar colour profile to their primary cameras. The former still has a decent level of noise once you zoom in, while the latter manages to retain more clarity. The Motorola Edge 50 Pro’s image also appears sharper compared to the OPPO Reno 12 5G. 

The Redmi 13 Pro+ has a shift in its colour science compared to the primary camera. This can also be attributed to the weather clearing up. The image is a lot more vibrant and sharper compared to the OPPO Reno 12. 

Portrait

The Motorola Edge 50 Pro comes with a dedicated telephoto lens, so I directly compared the images with the OPPO Reno 12. The former is able to preserve more facial details and capture a more vibrant image. The latter removes the skin texture entirely, but has much better clarity compared to the Edge 50 Pro. The edge detection on both is on par. 

Low light

With night mode enabled, both the OPPO Reno 12 and Motorola Edge 50 Pro capture good-looking images. The Motorola Edge 50 Pro, however, has a slightly better level of detail and clarity. 

The OPPO Reno 12 similarly falls short compared to the Redmi Note 13 Pro+ in terms of details and sharpness. The latter’s image is also more illuminated and has slightly better dynamic range. 

AI features

Let’s now talk about one of the major highlight of the OPPO Reno 12, its AI features. The smartphone packs a bunch of AI features, and I’ll talk briefly about each of them.

• AI Summary works exactly as you might think. Go to a webpage on your browser and if you’re feeling lazy or just want a quick look at what its talking about, you can enable the feature which will give you a short description of what the content says. 
  
• The AI Speak function works much like its namesake; it reads aloud the content on your screen and you can even customise the voice, playback speed, pause and play just like a media player.  
  

• AI Writer helps you generate text for emails by using a simple prompt, similar to how ChatGPT and Gemini work. 
  
• The AI Clear Voice feature essentially helps you reduce background noise during calls to improve clarity and is quite useful if you’re someone who’s often on calls. 
  
• If you habitually take voice notes, record lectures or attend meetings, the AI Recording Summary feature helps you generate detailed notes from said recordings or even transcripts, which you can easily edit later in the notes app. 
• AI Eraser 2.0 helps you remove unwanted objects from your final images. The feature can be a bit finicky and takes a few tries to offer good results. 

You get a variety of camera features to enhance your images and even make custom images using the AI Studio app. The phone offers two dedicated AI features in the gallery app, namely AI Best Face and AI Clear Face. AI Best Face is intended to fix close eye issues in group selfies or photos and requires at least three people in the photo.

You also need to have enough photos in your gallery with those people for the AI to “learn” their appearances. The feature did not work for me until I did so. AI Clear Face is quite simple and just enhances the image to make it more appealing. 

The AI Studio was quite fun to use and just requires you to input a few of your own images to generate results from premade templates. The results can turn out a bit wonky depending on the images you choose, so it’s better to choose clear images where all the details are clearly visible. Here are some results: 

Performance 

The latest MediaTek Dimensity 7300 Energy SoC lies at the heart of the OPPO Reno 12. The chipset is paired with 8GB of LPDDR4X RAM and 256GB of UFS 3.1 storage. Looking at the hardware, its easy to surmise the phone isn’t out to compete with the other options in the price bracket in terms of performance.

The chipset works well enough for regular usage and some light gaming, but don’t expect too much power out of it. If you want a capable gaming smartphone, you can check out the POCO F6 (review), which is more suited to it. If you’re a regular user, the OPPO Reno 12 is sufficiently powerful to fulfil all your daily needs.

There’s an occasional stutter, but that’s few and far in between, and the device more than makes up for it with the AI features I’ve talked about before.

Software

The phone operates on Android 14-based ColorOS out of the box, which comes with a regular ensemble of smart features. My personal favourite includes the Smart Sidebar, which helps you access frequently used apps and AI features with a simple slide gesture. There’s also Smart Suggestions, which alerts you to food deliveries and their real-time progress on the lock screen without having to rely on the app. The phone has an Air Scroll feature to scroll videos hands-free, but it’s only supported on Facebook and YouTube. The feature works, but there’s a slight lag.

ColorOS can definitely use some improvements, particularly the pre-loaded apps. There are a bunch of them after the initial setup, and while they can be uninstalled, OPPO’s native apps can’t be removed, which makes the phone feel cluttered. The Reno 12 will receive 3 major OS upgrades and up to 4 years of security updates, which is standard at this price point. 

Battery & charging

A 5,000mAh battery fuels the smartphone, and it comes with 80W fast charging support, which is a notch above its predecessor. In the PCMark battery benchmark test, the smartphone returned a score of 12 hours and 18 minutes, which is less than ideal compared to its peers.

During my personal usage, the phone easily returned a full day of battery life with 5G, 120Hz refresh rate and AOD enabled. The 80W fast charging takes 40 minutes to recharge from 20 percent capacity to 100 percent, and that’s an excellent charging time just a little behind its competitors, all of which feature higher-rated fast charging support.  

Final Verdict

The OPPO Reno 12 5G is priced at Rs 32,999 and is a unique offering in the mid-range segment as the only device with generative AI integration across the board. The device cleverly integrates its AI features to boost its camera capabilities and user productivity, a combination that makes for a pleasing smartphone experience. As innovative as it is, the choice of chipset remains one of my biggest gripes with the device. The  Motorola Edge 50 Pro (review), the  Redmi Note 13 Pro+ (review) and the POCO F6 (review) constitute its chief rivals, and all of these smartphones have better chipsets compared to the OPPO Reno 12 5G. 

Reasons to buy: 

• The OPPO Reno 12 5G comes in a beautiful, sleek design that’s quite comfortable to carry.
• The smartphone offers an impressive 120Hz curved AMOLED display 
• The generative AI features offered are unmatched 
• The phone offers a reliable battery life and charges quickly

Reasons not to buy:

• The smartphone’s performance could have been better 
• The UI feels cluttered due to lots of pre-loaded apps