Oppo has officially launched its Reno 12 series in South Africa during a local launch event on Wednesday, 19 June. The Reno 12 Pro is the first model of Oppo’s new smartphone range to arrive, though it says the Reno 12 FS will show up in July while the Reno 12 F 4G will hit stores in August 2024.
Those models will join the A79 and A58 as part of Oppo’s broader range for South African consumers, but until then, the Reno 12 Pro gets all the limelight.
This time ’round Oppo is introducing its very own AI tech which apparently “marks a significant milestone in Oppo’s commitment to making AI phones accessible to everyone,” while also offering decent photography chops.
The nuts and bolts (smartphone equivalent)
The Reno 12 Pro ticks off a lot of desirable boxes before we even get to the juicy bits. It’s powered by a Dimensity 7300-Energy chipset, co-developed by MediaTek and Oppo, which is supposed to offer “exceptional power efficiency.” It might not be as powerful as the Dimensity 9200+ the Chinese variant houses, but at least it will last longer… probably.
That chip will draw power from the 5,000mAh battery which uses Oppo’s SUPERVOOC Flash Charge tech to provide 80W of wired power for a claimed 1%-32% in 10 minutes or 100% in 46 minutes.
There’s 12GB of local physical memory which can be expanded with Oppo’s RAM Expansion feature… kinda like the Windows page file (yeah). You’ll have 512GB of UFS 3.1 storage to fill up with apps and memes and when you run out there’s a slot for a microSD card and up to 1TB of additional storage.
On top of all that you’ll find a 6.7in OLED display sporting a resolution of 1,080 x 2,412. It’ll do 120Hz, offer HDR10+ support, and get up to 1,200 nits bright.
Reno 12 Pro brings AI to the masses
The real focus for Oppo with the Reno 12 Pro is the aforementioned ‘more accessible AI’ and portraiture photography.
Starting with the latter, the Reno 12 Pro features a trio of rear cameras consisting of a 50MP wide shooter with multi-directional autofocus and optical image stabilisation (OIS), a 50MP telephoto sensor with 2x optical zoom, and an 8MP ultrawide that’s just happy to be included.
Up front, there’s another 50MP front-facing selfie cam to further improve portrait capabilities, along with something Oppo calls ‘AI Portrait Retouching’ which “allows users to make real-time adjustments to enhance facial features.”
Users can also remove unwanted subjects from their photos with AI Eraser or turn a single photo into a digital avatar with AI Studio. These AI features are largely thanks to Oppo’s partnership with Google and use the search giant’s Gemini 1.0 Ultra large language model (LLM).
Elsewhere, social media content generation or article summaries will be suggested based on what’s on your screen. You could also have your voice recordings organised if that’s more your speed.
Those aren’t the only AI features onboard the Reno 12 Pro, ‘AI LinkBoost’ does what you’d expect and boosts network signal reception by “optimises network selection using a system-level AI model that adapts to network environment.”
Then, Oppo introduced BeaconLink, a proprietary communication feature that uses Bluetooth for one-to-one calling over 200m in areas without network coverage.
The most important numbers – price and availability
If any of what you’ve read tickles your fancy then you’ll need to count out R19,000 in small, non-sequential notes and give them to the person holding your Reno 12 Pro hostage. If that sounds like a lot of effort, the Oppo Reno 12 Pro will also be available on contract starting from R750/m.