Design and artificial intelligence: Oppo's new Reno family

Oppo deserves credit for being a brave mobile phone company that should never be taken for granted. What impressed us about the Reno 12 family is the conviction in stylistic and design choices that break with the past and the competition. The very recent Reno 12 Pro that we tested for a few days is beautiful to look at and to handle. Two-thirds of the back cover is satin-finished and the lower part mirror-finished, with the Oppo logo dividing the two sections. adopted a design featuring a futuristic silver exterior. The glass back panel of both models creates a three-dimensional feeling of rippling water. The effect is jarring at first but fun in the long run. Reno12 Pro, Nebula Black features a two-tone matt-gloss design with two separate halves.

The two models use the brand new 4nm MediaTek Dimensity 7300-Energy mobile platform, created exclusively by MediaTek and OPPO. As for the photo compartment, there is a Sony LYT-600 sensor with full-pixel omnidirectional autofocus and optical image stabilisation (OIS). The photos are of good quality. The faster and more stable focusing is very good. Also noteworthy in the Pro is the 50MP Telephoto Portrait Camera that offers 2x optical zoom and a new 50MP Selfie Camera with autofocus and new AI retouching effects when taking portrait-style selfies. In short, selfies are easy and come out well. Almost all the time. Then 4K video recording at 30 fps is available for both rear cameras.

The Chinese manufacturer has chosen Google, Microsoft, MediaTek and other partners to speed up the release of a new generation of smartphones equipped with artificial intelligence. This means that functions have been designed that are also found in other first-class smartphones. With the new AI Eraser, people can easily remove disturbing elements within their photographs with a simple touch, thanks to the function's ability to automatically identify unwanted people and objects.

Among the new features is the use of Google's large language model (LLM) for AI Toolbox, which is a new intelligent sidebar feature consisting of functions such as AI Write, AI Speak and AI Summary, which uses recognition capabilities to understand the content displayed on the screen and recommend AI functions accordingly, such as quick content generation for social media or summaries for longer articles. In the Recording app, the AI Recording Summary function was also introduced to extract text summaries from a voice recording and organise them as notes.

Good indeed: 599.99 for the Pro and 499.99 for the simple one. On Amazon, from 18 June to 15 July, those who purchase the OPPO Reno12 Pro will receive a €50.00 Amazon credit on their personal account, which can be used for future purchases. The same promotion applies to the purchase of the OPPO Reno12: purchasers will receive an Amazon credit of €30.00, also spendable on future Amazon purchases.