OPPO Reno 12 Pro Review: A Stunning Design, Exceptional Camera, and Impressive AI Features

There are a plethora of Android phones out there. It can be hard to figure out what makes one stand out, and many come across our desks at Gear Diary. OPPO sent us the Reno 12 Pro to try, and it quickly stood out with its good looks and took it up a notch with a phenomenal camera array! A quick note: the OPPO Reno 12 Pro isn’t officially sold in the USA. You can find it on eBay, but there’s no guarantee it will work with domestic carriers. So, we tested the camera and other phone features but not the cellular portion.

Technically, the Reno 12 Pro is only available in India, Southeast Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, so keep that in mind as you read my review.

The OPPO Reno 12 Pro’s Design

The Reno 12 Pro is objectively a gorgeous phone. It’s hard to imagine many ways to make a slab phone stand out, but OPPO managed to do it. The color is officially silver but has a beautiful purple undertone that gives it a shimmery, ombre look.

There’s also a textured rim around the camera array that gives it a sparkly sheen.

The phone’s outer edge is chrome, with the volume and power buttons grouped on the right side.

It uses a standard USB-C charger, with the SIM tray on the bottom left.

There’s a hole-punch selfie camera on the front, and the screen curves very slightly at the edges—not enough that you might accidentally tap it while holding it.

Software, Processor, and Battery Life

The Reno 12 Pro runs Android 14 with OPPOS’s ColorOS skin. It’s basically Android with some OPPO touches, like a slight difference to the default icons, OPPO’s app store, and some other proprietary apps.

You can choose to use them or the stock Android ones; there’s no lock-in requiring you to choose one or the other.

ColorOS also includes a convenient sidebar tool. With one swipe in the upper right, you can quickly access several apps and services, some of which you can customize.

The sidebar is a great feature that more Android devices should have; it’s executed extremely well here, tucked out of the way but easy to call up at a moment’s notice.

Under the hood, the Reno 12 Pro runs on a MediaTek Dimensity 7300 with 12GB of RAM and the option of either 256GB or 512GB storage. You can read its full specifications here.

OPPO says the phone is made from a high-strength alloy framework and uses a special biomimetic technology to cushion the insides from drops. It’s also IP65 rated (dust and water splashes but not full immersion).

The Reno 12 Pro’s battery is 5000mAh, and it’s been phenomenal so far. Note that it couldn’t be tested on a cellular connection due to the lack of a compatible network here, but it remained connected to Wi-Fi and was used on and off for several days for testing and didn’t need to be charged once during that time. It’s been five days since it last touched a charger, and it’s still at 62%!

We didn’t test the Reno 12 Pro by drop-kicking or anything crazy, but the phone feels quite solid. One thing we did do, however, was test the “splash touch” feature, which claims to allow you to navigate the phone with wet fingers more easily. As anyone who has frustratedly rubbed their phone against their shirt knows, wet fingers or raindrops mean a confused capacitive touchscreen.

OPPO’s “splash touch” is supposed to fix this; in general, it did. Regular swipes and navigation worked great even with a wet screen and fingers; the only thing that didn’t respond well was the three-touch screenshot gesture.

Still, asking a wet phone to handle three points of simultaneous contact and sort them out to the correct gesture is A LOT and not something you’re likely to encounter regularly. Even so, one- or two-fingered gesture swipes worked great.

OPPO’s ColorOS includes several AI features. Some are available now, like editing photos with a service similar to Pixel’s “Magic Eraser,” while others will be available via a software update this fall. OPPO let us test several of them; they’re extremely handy and impressive!

AI Features

AI Writer: In select apps (like Gmail), you can use the sidebar to pull up the AI writer tool. Enter your prompt or information, and it helps craft your writing. I told it to craft an email to our Gear Diary editor-in-chief explaining why my review of the Oppo was late, and it did a good job (again, sorry, Judie!)

AI Recorder: If you use the voice recorder app for more than one minute of recording, you can generate an AI summary note. I rambled for a minute or so, and the AI did an excellent job of breaking down my jumbled “how do I fill a minute” thoughts into a coherent set of bullet points.

OPPO’s AI also gets props for understanding the gender-neutral “they” in this context since it didn’t know my gender and kept it neutral. Well done, OPPO AI!

AI Studio: Do you have the strange desire to turn a selfie into what you would look like as a gladiator, a vaguely British professor-type, or on vacation somewhere tropical? AI Studio will do that for you and also make you look vaguely computer-generated in the process. It’s quite the glow-up, and while it’s a gimmick more than anything else, it’s fun to play with.

AI Clear Face: We didn’t test this one specifically, but the idea behind it is that if there are multiple people in the shot, the AI will do a pass-through to make sure everyone looks their best.

AI Best Shot: Again, we didn’t test this, but in group shots of 3 or more people, the AI will check and fix it if your eyes are closed.

AI Eraser: Pixels have had the magic eraser for some time, and the OPPO Reno 12 Pro offers a similar trick. The AI eraser lets you delete people, “lasso” items for deletion, or just “erase” them.

As you can see from a selfie I took where I deleted my child from the background, you get mixed results depending on how the AI tries to fill in the blanks.

Stickers: You can also slap stickers or emojis over other photos, select a person or item from a photo, and turn it into a sticker. Here, I turned a selfie into a sticker that I slapped on a screenshot, which, given the phone background, has a sort of 90s school photo vibe.

Photos Taken with the OPPO Reno 12 Pro

As I said above, the real star here is the camera. The Reno 12 Pro sports a 50-megapixel telephoto portrait camera, a 50-megapixel main camera with OIS, an ultrawide camera, and a 50-megapixel front-facing camera.

I’m not our best photographer here at Gear Diary, but that actually helps prove the camera’s worth since the camera really has to do a lot of heavy lifting to make these shots look good!

We tested the camera by fiddling with the various filters on the selfies first:

I took the Reno 12 Pro on a walk through the nature path by my house, where we spotted a wild Pokemon as well as a family of deer that stopped to pose for us:

Note that with all the zoomed-in shots, like with the deer, we never moved forward —the camera did all the zooming, which shows how impressive it was at properly capturing detail from a distance!

Should You Buy the OPPO Reno 12 Pro?

The OPPO Reno 12 Pro is a slick and impressive phone. The camera is phenomenal, and again, while we didn’t torture test it, the company seems to have put a lot of effort into making it tough and durable. It’s a great phone as-is, and if you’re in a region where you can get 5G coverage and access the AI features (I had to set my location to Malaysia to do so), you’ll get to enjoy it fully!

I have to say, the AI writer aspect was really cool. If you’ve ever agonized over how to shoot off a quick email and capture the right tone, having it available from a quick sidebar swipe makes it feel like a true assistant/companion.

The OPPO Reno 12 Pro retails for £499 (~$660 US); it is available directly from the manufacturer in select regions, and in the US, it can be purchased from eBay, Giztop, and NewEgg.

Source: Manufacturer provided review sample

What I Liked: The camera is phenomenal; There are lots of filters and other options to improve your shots before and after you take them; ColorOS is visually a pleasant skin on Android; Durable build quality; Impressive battery life; Speedy and responsive in everyday use; AI features are a nifty demonstration of how you can leverage AI for everyday use

What Needs Improvement: This is yet another otherwise excellent smartphone that isn’t available in the US and won’t work with our carriers; All of the AI features aren’t yet available in all regions