It’s an unusually hot and humid January in Goa. I’m trudging up the cobbled slope to Reis Magos fort, glancing often at the glistening Mandovi river on my left. Walking alongside me is the eponymous tour guide - Mr Reis Magos, who animatedly talks about the fort’s history, and incites a collective chuckle when he claims the fort might as well have been his own. I’m here to take the new Oppo Reno11 Pro for a spin around this tropical paradise. But this time around, off the beaten (read Baga) path. 

Design and display

The Pearl White finish on the Oppo Reno11 Pro glistens under the Goan sun, with a unique, shimmery design that reminds me of uncut gemstones. It’s also one of those phones that lives up to its claims of being smudge-free at the rear. It’s lightweight enough at 181 grams and has a pleasantly slim profile. 

The 6.7-inch AMOLED display is gently curved along the sides and offers up to 120Hz refresh rates. Back in my hotel, I catch up on the last couple of episodes of the small-town comedy-crime drama Behind Your Touch on Netflix, where a sweet psychic veterinarian and a grumpy detective join forces to crack criminal cases. With the Widevine L1 certification in place, I can stream HD content from YouTube and OTT platforms. The visuals are crisp and the brightness, in general, easily holds its own even when I’m out and about.

Photography

One of the USPs on this device is its camera setup. The rear has a triple-lens setup which includes a 50 MP main camera, with a 1/1.56-inch Sony IMX890 sensor. This is supplemented by a 32 MP portrait camera with a 1/2.74-inch sensor size and an 8MP ultra-wide camera. OPPO’s proprietary algorithm, HyperTone Imaging Engine, has been fine-tuned further for this smartphone. 

Across the photos I snapped in bright daylight at the fort, some themes were common. The smartphone handles both shadows and highlights in the same frame well without over- or under-exposing any aspect of the photo. The colors rendered across landscape, nature, and architecture pics were well-saturated, without any visible amping up of the tones. In photos taken post sundown too, colours were vibrant, not unnaturally amped up, and not grainy either. The 2x portrait snaps rendered some wonderful snaps with the background blurred well and with accurate edge detection between the subject and the background and foreground. It was only with thin strands of green branches that sometimes it had trouble identifying, and as a result, ended up blurring parts of it when it wasn’t supposed to. What I particularly liked was the accurate retention of wheatish skin tones. 

The front camera too helped me capture some nice selfies while I lounged along the Mandovi sipping on a particularly welcome tender coconut. It offers a 32 MP resolution camera with the Sony IMX709 sensor, which also has autofocus. When I take a selfie, I can see the AI-finishing touches kick in, but the result thankfully is not a smooth-like-butter texture. My skin colour and texture are retained quite well, as long as I remember to turn beauty mode off!

A long-press on any of the images I’ve captured triggers the Smart Image Matting feature where the foreground object automatically gets cut out. These can be used to later superimpose on an empty template or even make memes out of it!

Performance

The OPPO Reno11 Pro runs on MediaTek Dimensity 8200, with the company having taken away any potential decision paralysis by offering a single variant. It includes an impressive 12 GB RAM (with an additional 4 GB virtual RAM) along with 256 GB storage space. 

I mostly used the phone to engage in some casual gaming, taking lots of photographs, checking emails, spending my commute plugged into Spotify, and watching a few Insta reels before hitting the bed. So, pretty moderate usage overall. At no point in my usage did the phone heat up. Looking back, I’m amazed it didn’t do this even when I was shooting under the scorching sun for about an hour and a little more. I’ve known of pricier flagship handsets that fail to stay cool during such stints. The smartphone runs on ColorOS 14, which brings in some interesting user interface experiences. There’s the ‘File Dock’ functionality for instance, which lets me quickly access recently opened apps or documents. I can even save cut-out images onto this, for later use. I find this quite handy as I keep switching between apps frequently during work. 

It comes with a fair bit of bloatware, which can be quickly uninstalled. There’s an interesting feature called LinkBoost that combines “AI network selection and a 360-degree surround antenna Design” for stable network reception. OPPO has promised 3 years of software updates and 4 years of security updates. 

The OPPO Reno11 Pro is powered by a 4,600 mAh battery which lives up to the OPPO legacy of devices that don’t give me battery anxiety. I’ve mentioned my usage earlier in this article, and the phone stayed on for more than a working day with my usage patterns. There’s a bundled 80W charger, which can charge the phone to up to 50 percent in about 12 minutes. 

Verdict

First impressions last. That much is true of the OPPO Reno11 Pro. When I first unboxed and started using the phone, I was particularly taken by the design details. As I went on to use it, I also grew to like the photography process and its inherent capabilities. The multitasking abilities with its split window and File Dock also proved quite handy, with the added assurance that the phone’s not going to die on me while I’m out gallivanting. Specs-wise it’s not a massive jump from its predecessor, but which smartphone these days is? So, if you’re looking for a premium smartphone that gets more things right than wrong, and doesn’t cost a bomb, you know where to look.

Price - ₹39,999

Pros - Aesthetic design, capable camera, long-lasting battery, productivity tools 

Cons - Bloatware, lack of stereo speakers

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