Oppo Reno 6 Review: A well balanced premium mid-range that has a lot to do with the style quotient!!

Oppo Reno 6 defines great styling, cameras, and performance.

Oppo is one of those few manufacturers which build a very stylish and design-oriented smartphone as we have seen in the past with the Reno series. The Oppo Reno 6 series consists of two smartphones - Oppo Reno 6 and 6 Pro. The Oppo Reno 6 has a great look with the Reno Glow Design and since it is an Oppo smartphone, it has a great set of cameras and provides good performance.

The Oppo Reno 6 fills the premium mid-range segment where we have been facing stiff competition from different smartphone manufacturers. It shares almost all the features with its higher sibling, the Oppo Reno 6 Pro as it gets a 90Hz AMOLED display, 65W fast charging, and also enhanced cameras with some very good features. However, there is no curved display here like the Oppo Reno 6 Pro.

It is also the first smartphone in India to have the powerful Mediatek Dimensity 900 chipset thus ensuring good performance and gaming capabilities. Can the Oppo Reno 6 make a statement for itself with its looks and good performance and is it worth buying compared to other smartphones in the premium mid-range segment? Let's find out in the full review.

Oppo Reno 6 Design:

The Oppo Reno 6 has a unique design with its Aura Glow Design where the back of the smartphone has a matte finish which has an attractive look as it shines in different colors when light strikes it. The Oppo Reno 6 is available in two colors - Aurora and Stellar Black with the Aurora color variant looking the more striking one. 

The back has a flat design instead of rounded which makes the smartphone slightly awkward to hold. There is a rectangular camera array with three cameras and an LED flashlight. The back of the Oppo Reno 6 is better compared to the Oppo Reno 6 Pro which has a glossy finish so as a result, the back of the former does not catch fingerprints or smudges.

In terms of thickness, the smartphone is just 7.6mm thick and weighs slightly heavier at 182grams. The back does not have an IP rating but you have a P2i coating making it slightly splashproof. Around the sides, there is a metallic frame that houses the power button on the right side whereas the left side has the volume buttons. 

The bottom houses the USB Type-C port, a primary microphone, a loudspeaker grille, and a dual SIM card slot and on the top, there is a secondary noise-canceling microphone only. There is no microSD card slot for storage expansion and no 3.5mm headphone jack either. On the front, there is a single punch-hole display with minimum bezels to the sides. Overall the design feels great and refreshing.

Oppo Reno 6 Display:

The Oppo Reno 6 sports a smaller 6.43-inches Full HD+(1080x2400 pixels) AMOLED display with a screen-to-body ratio of 20:9. Since this display is AMOLED, the color reproduction and viewing angles are great. This display also has a 90Hz refresh rate which ensures smooth scrolling, multitasking between applications, and also while playing games.

With a 90Hz refresh rate, there is a 180Hz touch sampling rate which is good as it makes playing games responsive but still the similarly priced POCO F3 GT has a massive 360Hz touch sampling rate. There are two options where you can either switch between standard 60Hz or higher 90Hz. However, a Smart Switch option could have been better. 

In terms of brightness, the display of the Oppo Reno 6 achieves 620nits of brightness and can go as high as 800nits which is not the brightest but you can view the display easily under direct sunlight. There are two different color modes - Gentle and Vivid where Gentle produces more natural colors and Vivid provides more contrast on the display. 

In terms of protection, there is Corning Gorilla Glass 5 on the front whereas the back has an AG Matte glass build which makes it premium. The Oppo Reno 6 has HDR10 and Widevine L1 support, but you cannot stream HDR content on Netflix. Since it is an AMOLED display, this panel covers 84 percent of the DCI-P3 gamut. 

However, there is one caveat that the display brightness does not hold well in low-lighting conditions and maybe Oppo could fix this in a future software update. There is an optical in-display fingerprint scanner that is fast and responsive with fast face unlock also. Overall, this display is great for media consumption but a 120Hz display could have made it a sweet deal as most of the competitors have it.

Oppo Reno 6 5G Performance:

The Oppo Reno 6 is the first smartphone to be powered by the Mediatek Dimensity 900 chipset and this is a very powerful and capable chipset that just sits under the Mediatek Dimensity 1200 chipset found in the Realme X7 Max and the OnePlus Nord 2. Still, this is a very powerful chipset from Mediatek that can handle all the tasks with ease in day-to-day life.

The Mediatek Dimesnity 900 chipset is based on a 6nm process and has 2x2.4 GHz Cortex-A78 cores and another 6x2.0 GHz Cortex-A55 cores coupled with a Mali G68 MC4 GPU. However, there is only one variant available with 8GB LPDDR4X RAM and 128GB storage where speeds are of UFS 2.1. This is a letdown as the competition offers UFS 3.1 storage speeds that are faster than UFS 2.1.

    (OnePlus Nord 2 plays both Extreme frame rate with HDR graphics) 

The 90Hz display with the powerful processor makes the smartphone feel responsive whether it is video rendering or multitasking between applications. Even many heavy games like Call Of Duty Mobile, BGMI, and Genshin Impact ran smoothly with out many frame drops except we noticed quite some in Genshin Impact when the graphics were set to the highest settings.

In BGMI, the Oppo Reno 6 can do Smooth graphics with a High frame rate and there was no option for Extreme frame rate which is a slight letdown as the similarly priced OnePlus Nord 2 and the Realme X7 Max can achieve HDR graphics with Extreme frame rates. The gameplay feels smoother and after long hours of gaming, the back does not feel much warmer and here Oppo seems to have kept the heat under control.

In CPU throttling tests, the Oppo Reno 6 did not throttle much like the OnePlus Nord 2 where CPU throttling was considerably more with slightly inconsistent results. Also in benchmarks, the Oppo Reno 6 did well but still, the Mediatek Dimensity 1200 chipset-powered smartphones scored better. However, with gaming and performance, everything is well handled and better on the Oppo Reno 6.

Oppo Reno 6 Software:

The Oppo Reno 6 runs on ColorOS 11.3 with Android 11 out of the box. Oppo has made the user interface a lot more optimized and this skin's codebase has been used in recent OnePlus smartphones behind the scenes as Oppo and OnePlus have been merged recently. But there is a considerable amount of bloatware present.

There are many third-party applications present that can be uninstalled but the browser app throws in a lot of notifications which are disturbing and also some ads do pop up in the notifications which hamper the software experience. Compared to this OnePlus's OxygenOS is much more cleaner and OneUI found in Samsung smartphones is well optimized than ColorOS.

ColorOS is feature-rich as you get a lot of features like a Smart Sidebar, change the wallpapers, Personalization where you can set the icon and shape, look, and also to the Always-On display. The look and feel resemble the look of Stock Android. In terms of software updates, Oppo provides two years of Android OS updates and three years of security updates. The overall software experience is good.

Oppo Reno 6 Cameras:

The Oppo Reno 6 sports a triple camera setup which includes a 64MP f/1.7 main camera, an 8MP f/2.2 ultrawide camera, and a 2MP f/2.4 macro camera. On the front, there is a 32MP f/2.4 camera. The main camera does a good job in terms of dynamic range and has more natural colors. There is no oversharpening as such but you have some noise in the background. 

The contrast is good though. At night, the images have good dynamic range and the color saturation is good with no oversharpening but slight noise is present in the background. The highlights in shadows look blown out but with the Night Mode, things change quite a bit as you get better dynamic range, contrast and noise is barely present in the background.

The 8MP ultrawide camera does a good job in terms of dynamic range and contrast. There is a lot of noise and also distortion around the edges of the image. The 119-degree field of view captures a larger field of the image though. The colors are slightly oversaturated and are not as good as on the main camera.

At night, the images have a large amount of noise and the dynamic range is just average. The images have softer details and the color looks oversaturated at times. The edges of the images have a lot of distortion also. However, with the dedicated Night Mode, the dynamic range improves with better details. However, the noise remains the same.

There is no dedicated telephoto camera here so you can achieve 2x digital zoom from the main camera itself. These images look softer and the dynamic range is pretty average with a large amount of noise. The third camera is a 2MP macro camera that is an extra and does a decent job in terms of dynamic range. However, there is a lot of noise and the colors also look washed out.

In terms of portraits, the dynamic range and edge detection are good. The skin tones look natural but there is some oversharpening present in the background. The background blur is implemented very well and you do get different background blur effects. The selfies from the 32MP camera come out with a good dynamic range and have sharper details.

The selfies have very little noise and a larger field of view. The skin tones have a natural look and when you zoom in, the details look sharper. In terms of selfie portraits, the edge detection and dynamic range are good. The background blur has been implemented well as there is no oversharpening. Overall, for selfies, the Oppo Reno 6 does a good job 

In terms of videos, the Oppo Reno 6 can do 4K videos at 30fps. This is a sort of disappointment as there is no support for 4K videos at 60fps though the Mediatek Dimesnity 900 chipset has this feature. The videos have a good dynamic range and details look sharper. There is some noise in the videos and slight oversharpening takes place.

The 1080p videos at 60fps come out with sharper details and a good dynamic range. There is EIS which results in stabilized videos with no jitteriness but you do miss out on OIS which is present on the OnePlus Nord 2. The ultrawide camera can record 1080p videos at 30fps only and the videos have a large amount of noise with decent dynamic range and there is a lot of overexposure in the background.

There are a lot of portrait video features like the Bokeh Flair Effect which adds cinematic effects in videos and also there is the AI color Portrait that maps a perfect cutout of the subject from the background and applies the black and white effect. On the front, you can do 1080p at 60fps and there is EIS present so the dynamic range is good and details look sharper with very little noise.

The portrait videos from the selfie camera come out with good edge detection and dynamic range. There is some oversharpening in the background but the blur is implemented well. Here also you do get different filers and effects for videos. So overall, the cameras are good but some video features make it an attractive one.

For a detailed camera, review click here.

Oppo Reno 6 Battery Life:

The Oppo Reno 6 houses a 4300mAh battery which can easily last for a single day with the display set at 90Hz with heavy usage which includes playing games like BGMI for 4-5 hours continuously, scrolling through webpages, running benchmarks, and multi-tasking between applications. However, it may not provide the battery life provided by a 6000mAh battery smartphone but still, it is good. 

With normal usage, the smartphone lasted for two days with normal usage with some battery left. The standard screen-on time was around 7-8 hours which was extremely good considering the efficient 6nm process on which the chipset is built. ColorOS provides some very good optimizations to the battery and power-saving modes are present.

However, there is a 65W SuperVOOC 2.0 charger bundled inside the box which takes around 35 minutes from 0 to 100 percent which is very fast. The 0 to 50 percent takes around 15 minutes which seems to be the fastest of all smartphones. Overall the battery life is good with faster-charging speeds.

Oppo Reno 6 Audio Quality:

The Oppo Reno 6 houses a single bottom facing speaker which is adequately louder and cannot simply match to other stereo speakers present in smartphones of the premium mid-range segment. The sound feels muffled at the highest volume level. You do not get a 3.5mm headphone jack but you do get a pair of USB Type-C earphones bundled inside the box which are of good quality and the sound level is also good.

Verdict:

The Oppo Reno 6 is a good all-rounder as it has a unique design and build, a good AMOLED display comes with a powerful chipset thus providing good performance and gaming, and has a good set of cameras. The design is one of the biggest standout features of this smartphone with that Reno Glow Design that looks attractive and will appeal to many.

The Mediatek Dimesnity 900 chipset is a very good chipset for performance and gaming as it handles all tasks easily but still in games like BGMI there is no option for Extreme frame rate which maybe Mediatek will be fixing in a future update. Other smartphones like the OnePlus Nord 2 and even the Xiaomi Mi 11X have better gaming performance with more powerful chipsets.

The display has a 90Hz refresh rate that makes everything smoother but the 120Hz refresh rate makes things even smoother on smartphones like OnePlus Nord 2, Realme X7 Max, etc. The cameras are very capable and you get good images and videos but still, the ultrawide camera struggles in low-light, and the support for 4K videos at 60fps is missing. 

The battery life is good not the best but with faster-charging speeds at 65W it does make up for itself. Then the lack of stereo speakers is the biggest downside for a premium mid-range smartphone as almost all other smartphones have stereo speakers present.  So as a package, if you want the premium look and design, good set of cameras, good performance, and faster charging speeds, then the Oppo Reno 6 is the perfect buy.