Oppo Reno 2 Unboxing and Review After 1 Month of Use

Unboxing and review of the Oppo Reno 2. I also have the Reno 2F video coming out right after this I’ve had the Reno 2 for quite a while. I’ve been using it as my sort of daily driver for well over a month now. It’s one of the few devices I’ve enjoyed using really and I’ll share all the positives and negative of using it and as always, I’ll have my timestamps in the description and pinned comment below so you can skip ahead to sections of this review that you need quick information about.

Straight to the unboxing of the Reno 2, First things first, it’s a really long box, and you’d see why in a bit. You get the illustrated back of the device and Every branded label on the box has a bit of gradient to it just to fit in to a certain aesthetic. When you open the box, you’ve got a smaller box that houses a smaller box. Inside this smaller box, you get the safety guide, and the quick guide for setting up. Underneath that is the device itself in a wrap that’s just taking up a certain percentage of the box, we’re yet to see why its this tall, and we’ll just keep it to the side for now. When we take the hard paper material, we get the Oppo Leather case which feels very very cool and I like the inner material as well.

And now for the reason why we have a tall box, it’s the presentation of the accessories. There’s a semi gigantic charging adapter, this adapter is a 20W VOOC 3.0 Flash charge fast charger. We get the thick charging cable and the sim ejector tool right underneath it. Lastly we get the headphones with green accents in the ear-tip section dnd it’s packaged in a special mini box…and that’s the reason why it’s tall, I gotta hand it to Oppo though, they tried with the packaging. Anyway that is all we get in the box and now we’ll get to the device itself. Meet the Reno 2. On the front, we get all the features that Oppo deem as the more important features, 48MP quad cameras, 5 times hybrid zoom, ultra dark mode, steady mode, the 6.5 inch AMOLED display. VOOC 3.0 charging and of course the 8GB RAM and 256GB Storage. When you take that wrap off the device, we of course get the device with that flush Gorilla Glass 6 panel up front with an added screen protector and on the back when you take that sticker off, it’s the flush ocean blue finish with the Oppo branding and cameras. For a quick note, the Reno 2F which is the younger sibling is Gorilla Glass 5 on both the front and back The right side of the Reno 2 has the Hybrid or shared sim slot, you can either use dual nano sims and not have a space for a micro sd card or use one nano sim and have space for at most a 256GB micro sd card on here. Beneath the sim and micro sd slot is the power button with a green accent which just looks nice and an antenna line above. The antenna line continues on the left side and it’s also there that we’ve got the volume rockers which sort of have their own bowl if you will.

The bottom of the Reno 2 has the headphone jack, thank you for keeping it alive Oppo, then the microphone, USB C port, and the speaker grille alongside an other antenna line on a flat surface in that Oppo aesthetic. Also at 9.5mm thick, it’s pretty sleek and it stands on its The back of the Reno 2 has the quad camera set up including a 48MP sensor and you get hybrid zoom feature which goes up to 20x of zoom. Basically, from top to bottom we get a 48MP camera, 8MP camera ultra wide camera, 13MP telephoto which helps with that zoom, and 2MP black and white sensor which would help for depth and silhouette like shots. The Reno 2 also shoots at 4K. Beside the cameras is the dual led flash and beneath all that is a tiny microphone and this half ball, oh by the way, the camera sensors are flush to the back of the device.

I mentioned the front display is a Gorilla Glass 6, well the back is a Gorilla Glass 5 protection and the camera is just underneath, I don’t know how Oppo did this but, it’s just lovely. Anyway back to that ball or half ball I was talking about, well, that ball sort of helps lift the device up a bit and serve as further help if you will to help the camera sensors not get scratched when placed on a flat surface. The device is curved and it would definitely rock on a table and that’s okay but hey I used this with the leather case it came with during my usage so I didn’t really feel the effect of that. By the way, the case that the Reno 2 comes with protects it quite well, you can place the device face down without worrying about any scratches since it’s got slight raised edges up at the four corners of the device to keep it from having much contact with a flat surface. Beneath all that is the Oppo branding, and designed for Reno badge. The top of the Reno 2 has a microphone embedded in that pop up camera and the earpiece. Yes, the earpiece is literally in the pop up camera, you’ll see that when you lift it up, you of course get the 16MP f2.0 motorized pop up camera but up there it’s just tucked away and you also get fall protection with the pop up camera so it goes back in once a fall is detected. Well you’ll notice there’s no fingerprint reader on anywhere of the body of this device and that’s because we’ve got an optical fingerprint reader under the display which basically just shines a light on your hand and it works even with the screen protector applied.

Color options for the device, are ocean blue which is what we have here and luminous black, both variants are of the gradient kind and it looks very interesting. The front of the Reno 2 has a screen protector as I mentioned which is a pretty nice addition. Something we’ve seen in many recent midrangers and in fact this is even coupled with the fact that we have a gorilla glass 6 screen on the front. Overall weight dissipation for the Reno 2 and Reno 2F are slightly apart the Reno 2F is slightly heavier than the Reno 2 which weights 192 grams compared to 197 on the Reno 2F. They both have 4,000 mAh batteries and from my own inference, I’d say it’s just a slight body variation since they’re both 6.5 inches. It took one minute and 30 seconds to set up the Reno 2 with the fingerprint applied and we’re ushered into Color OS 6.1. You may not be able to quickly tell but the Reno 2 is an AMOLED displa. It’s a 6.5 inch AMOLED Display, resolution is set at 1080 by 2400 pixels, it’s a 20:9 aspect ratio display with a decently large 401 ppi, of course protected by Gorilla Glass 6 up front. Thankfully, there’s no notch on this phone to hinder the display. Again just like my Oppo F11 Pro which I reviewed way earlier. I really like the aesthetic with these new Oppo devices same as the Reno 2F as well you know, no notch but pretty different pop up camera styles. * You get auto-brightness, with the help of the ambient sensor, you can also adjust the screen temperature to cool or warm depending on what you want and there’s even a mode for colors in “Screen Color Mode”, here you can make it gentle or vivid and I could tell the difference. It’s on Vivid by default and I’ll suggest you leave it that way. You get to also adjust the font sizes, display sizes, for menus and word boxes Same thing with new Color OS 6 devices, you get the drawer mode or standard mode. I mentioned this in the Oppo A9 2020 review I made earlier and what it basically does for you is that in the standard mode, there’s no app drawer, apps are only seen horizontally from the home screen or via search while in the drawer mode, apps are both seen in the horizontal screen but also in an actual app drawer for this drawer mode that you can then checkout via Shortcut Initials. I kind of preferred the drawer mode. You also get to change your app layout from 5x6 to 4x6 and vice versa and watch what happens when you try to move UI elements around, it moves in a very cute way which I liked a lot.

I kinda stumbled upon that by accident and I play with it occasionally. *clap* Moving on! One thing you don’t see in many smartphones are the customizability of Do Not Disturb calls and on here you can easily work that out. You can schedule times that you don’t want to be called, say you have lectures, this is a good fit or you work somewhere that you don’t want interruption at a certain time or maybe you’ve got a meeting, this could definitely come in handy. You get to customize the notification times, messages, and who to allow calls from. Also say you are in a semi formal setting you definitely have the option of allowing it to ring for repeated calls. Native screen recording comes with the smart side bar that you can pull in when you’re watching a video or game, you can also take a screenshot and switch to other apps. You can also take screenshots when you press the power button and volume down button, doing this with the up button is for putting your phone in vibrate mode. Split screen is also very similar to other Color OS 6 devices, once you’re in a compatible app and you jump into multitasking mode, you can then tap on it and it preselects capable apps that would work in this half-split screen mode. The Notifications slash control center section has some of what you’ll need when you swipe down once, you get up to 16 icons when you swipe down again. You can click the icon beside the settings gear icon to expand and see more notification options, another set of 16 icons that you can drag and drop so many nifty features on here.

Viewing videos on the AMOLED Panel of the Reno 2 was very immersive. Because there’s no notch, nothing distracts you from what you’re watching. Infact, you can even stream HDR videos from YouTube in full hd and it also did look immersive but you can’t stream at 1440p you’re capped at 1080p which is okay. Now among the control center icons is a feature call Dolby Atmos which if you’re familiar with movies, you’ll probably know what it is, well, I’ll be coming to that later. In a very short time. We don’t have a stereo speaker set up on here and when you’re watching videos you can easily block the speaker and cut off almost 80% of the sound. However, we’ve got 3 microphones on this guy. At the bottom, back and up top and one of them is dedicated for active noise cancellation which is cool. Anyway, I did a quick test with to know how the microphone and the speaker sounds. Here’s how they perform. The speaker did lack bass and was fairly thin and punchy but it was loud, the microphone was just awesome in my opinion and I didn’t have any complaints. One thing I liked and it’s a very small thing, um, it’s that the Reno 2 has this fade in fade out effect when you pause and play music. I’m a music lover and small things like this just makes me appreciate the overall experience, shout out to Color OS 6. When I used the Reno 2 for calls it did sound very clear I didn’t have any qualms with using it so far.

The Dolby Atmos feature, the Dolby atmos feature comes on when you plug in a headphone and for me this is a pretty big deal because I’ve not really trusted much android devices with my car when it’s on here, I could really hear the surround sound separation with the speakers from left to right, same thing with using a monitor headphone it just gets better and that’s pretty cool for me. The pop up camera makes some sounds that you may or may not want to keep. You can select between no sound, Technology, Mechanical and Musical. The Reno 2 comes with the Snapdragon 730G which is a 15% graphic boost update to the regular 730 and is an 8nm Chipset. Of course it’s an octa-core chipset with an average 2 Ghz Clock speed and the supporting graphics are the Adreno 618. Using the device felt snappy and it’s easy among my top android experiences. The model I’ve got with me has 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage which is alot more than I need and you can even expand it by another 256GB so you can get a total of 512GB of storage on this guy. There is a second version just with lesser storage at 128GB. This is for the price of 179,000 Naira or 180 thousand, approximately $500. I’ll have my verdict towards the end of the video. I also like that Oppo is pretty big on security with their device, alot of apps I opened, it had its own firewall question before allowing permissions. It’s nothing major but it just feels safer and it made me stick to it more.

However, there’s no mention of any IP Rating for this guy for water or dust resistance, it’s got a moving part in the notch which could by dicy so there’s that. When it comes to gaming: default graphics was set to high for pubg, you know it’s a pretty high density amoled display and there was no lags on my end. It was also in the typical 5% range I get for most of my midranges. Basically after 30 minutes of gaming battery dips by 5%. You still have game space which Optimizes gaming and blocks calls from entering among other useful things. What I like about Gameplay though is that it’s very immersive with that bezel-less display. Overall Battery life for me was actually good for my overall usage, it’s a 4,000 mAh battery that lasted me for the better part of most days till their respective evenings. But when I used it heavily it tends to be much shorter say 6 hours. Of course you can do reversible charging stuff, OTG as well to transfer files between devices. The Reno 2 comes with a 20W charger as I mentioned earlier and the battery charges pretty fast. It gets from 0 - 100% in 1 hour and 36 minutes and here’s the breakdown: In 30 minutes, it goes from 0 - 47% and in another 30 minutes it goes from 47% to 80%. Yes, in 1 hour, your battery chargers from 0 - 80% and then when we move further, we get from 80% to 98% in another 30 minutes and then from 98% to 100% in approximately 6 minutes. It’s one of the fastest charging speeds I’ve seen. Fingerprint works with the screen protector as I mentioned, it’s an optical sensor which basically flashes lights and captures that date and not something fancy like the ultrasonic ones. You may have to press and hold for quite a bit longer and also, you get face unlock which works with the shark fin pop up camera, also not the fastest but it’s novel.

I was more into the fingerprint side of things. And of course, we have bluetooth 5.0 while the Reno 2F has bluetooth 4.2. So you can easily connect multiple bluetooth devices, share audio but may not be able to on the Reno 2F. As with the new color OS 6 devices that we have, Oppo maintains simplicity with their cameras. You get video, photo and portrait mode and this is a similar thread with the front facing camera. As with the back camera, you can select either 1x, 2x, 5x and all the way up to 20x. You also get a few icon options up top and the settings all the way to the left. As far as other options, you get to choose the rest of them from the hamburger menu to the left, with regards to the back camera, you get options for night, panorama, expert and more while for the front camera, the hamburger menu only gives us panorama, time-lapse and sticker mode. For both modes, whether you’re on the front or the back, you get options at the top and the settings all the way to the left. It’s from the settings that you’ll see that the Oppo Reno 2 can shoot at the lowest video resolution of 720p at 30 or 60fps, 1080 at 30 or 60fps and then 4k at only 30 fps and as you’ll see shortly, all these cameras have some sort of stabilization. Still in the settings for photos, this is where you can change to 48MP mode not in the expert mode. Here you can change to it in the Photo Ratio section and select that you’ll see the same ratio with a 48MP label. It doesn’t even matter which lens you’re switched to, even in 48MP mode, you still get access to the AI features.

I’ll say that I’m not a huge fan of the portrait mode on the Oppo Reno 2 because of the edge line that it has which is too defined, it’s not supposed to look like this. However, selfie portraits looked much better, the edges are not too defined and the smoothening effect is somewhat manageable. Indoor or normal selfies on the other hand are very sharp, very detailed, I liked them a lot Really. When you look at the normal shots you take vs the 48MP shots, you may be able to tell some difference from afar but it only becomes ever so obvious when you zoom in and you see it for what it is. The 48MP camera seems to have more quality in the colors retained and the regular sensor isn’t as saturated at it is. If you compare the 48MP shot on the Reno 2 with that of the 2F, I’d say there’s quite the difference, especially in texture. If you look at the images in 5x zoom in comparison with the Reno 2F you will notice a huge difference as the 2F tries to over sharpen things because it doesn’t have a native telephoto lens like the Reno 2 has. There’s some form of texture to every shot you get and accuracy when it comes to background blur, not to be confused with portrait mode. When you also look at buildings in 48MP vs normal ones, the sky seems washed out in the normal setting and the 48MP sensor brings out alot of details. I also like how natural the blur gets with the Reno 2, this shows in skin tones as you’ve seen before and now and also in plants, either green or red. It just pops and I like how it separates everything. Once the sky and maybe buildings are identified the AI cam turns it into a scene shot which then translates into some very sharp imaging. I like how it shades the sky while protecting the natural colors. I also took this picture of a building with some sort of patterns and it just highlights the details well.

When looking at the hierarchy for 1x, 2x and other zoom levels, I was quite impressed with the Reno 2. The ultrawide shot I took as quite wide, compared to the 1x level of zoom shot I took which was warmer. However, when you change zoom levels, it becomes cooler as you go. 48MP zooms are quite sharp and retain a lot of detail. And one thing to note about 48MP shots is that they are 2 times bigger than regular image in resolution, that is 3,000 by 4,000 compared to 6,000 by 8,000 and 3 times bigger in file size. That is 2-3MB compared to 9 to 10MB of your 256GB storage. If you want to zoom into text, there’s no problem. From the ultrawide which still maintains alot of the quality I talked about, the 1x lens, the 2x lens, up to the 5x lens and in fact 20x lens. The text is still very legible And guys, I want you to look closely at this screenshot, it’s 20X of zoom and I was very very far away from this sign board and the AI camera still recognizes in this range and displays text. I think it’s also pretty cool. When it comes to night mode on here, in comparison to the normal shots you get, I’d say that night mode is very worth it, I like how it blends the colors. Normal shots have a little bit more exposure but the night mode keeps everything in check and retains quality while boosting the colors up a bit. Where you would notice discoloration with the ultrawide shots is at night. These shots were taken just a few seconds apart and the result is this warmer and cooler default tints to it.

Then you can zoom in and see the color stays the same but quality gets lesser the more you zoom and blurrier. 4K video is a bit more saturated and the good side is that it’s not too shaky. Pretty smooth if you ask me. While in 1080p, you may notice a little less popping colors and more shakiness. That’s pretty much it for my review of the Oppo Reno 2, I personally have been using this for quite a while this past month and if I was asked if I would recommend it, the answer would be a yes. Has it got great features, yes, specification-wise, battery life, charging speed, heck the charging speed, the immersive display, 3 microphones if I’m not mistaken and the fact that I could actually rely on this device is enough but for the price of 179K about 180K or $500, it’s kind of steep but is not unexpected for the features so yeah, I’d recommend if you have the budget. Did I miss something? Is there something you wanted me to talk about that I didn’t mention, please let me know in the comments and if you enjoyed this video or found it useful, please hit that like button and don’t forget to subscribe and hit the bell icon next to it to turn on notifications, as I mentioned earlier, the Reno 2F video will be dropping shortly after this and I can’t wait for you to see that as well.