Oppo Reno 16 Pro Review

Design

• Chunky square-sided design
• Aluminium sidewalls
• “Crystal Guard” glass front and rear

The Oppo Reno 16 Pro is technically a mid-range phone. But if you haven’t upgraded in years, it could well seem like a top-end one. 

It has a metal and glass body, and Oppo manages to combine the subtle and desperate in its attempt to make the Reno 16 Pro look at least slightly different to other phones. Under the glass back is a lenticular bit of line art that looks like a star swooshing around a planet, one that appears to move — as if three-dimensional — as you turn the Oppo Reno 16 Pro around. 

My first impression on picking the Oppo Reno 16 Pro was: it’s thick. But that’s more just proof of how slim the (semi) rival Samsung Galaxy A57 I used beforehand is. 

This phone is a reasonable 8.4mm thick, and the square-sided brick design does nothing to hide that thickness. Oppo supplies a translucent case with the phone, and I’d recommend using it even if it does add a little bulk. 

The front and rear panels are Crystal Guard toughened glass. And while it’s no doubt fairly scratch-resistant, Oppo doesn’t have the faith in it to put it in the next-level Find X9 Pro, which uses Corning’s more desirable Victus 2. 

Oppo does factory-apply a screen protector, though. If you manage to scratch the phone on day one, it’s your fault. 

The Reno 16 Pro has just as strong water and dust resistance as the Find phone line, mind. It’s rated at IP68/69K, fit for a dunk in water or some pretty intense water sprays. As good as you’ll get in a phone, basically. 

Much of the rest of the hardware is business as usual. Memory is non-expandable but you get at least 256GB. There are two SIM slots in the one tray and the stereo speakers are good — loud, if not near to class-leading for bass output.

There’s a fast fingerprint scanner under the screen, an IR blaster up on the top for universal remote-style use. And a button on the left side, called the Snap Key, can be customised to take on a bunch of roles from silent mode switch to torch toggle and screenshot-taker.

Screen

• 1700 peak brightness (tested, HDR)
• 6.32in OLED screen
• 144Hz maximum refresh rate

The Oppo Reno 16 Pro has a 6.32-inch screen with an OLED panel and punch hole.

It’s largely a smaller version of what is seen in the Find X9 Pro. Colour is deep, but not oversaturated unless you want it to be. It has a fast 144Hz maximum refresh rate and while the 2640 x 1216 is barely greater than 1080p, the display does not seem in need of a higher pixel count. 

Oppo claims the Reno 16 Pro puts out 600 nits ordinarily, or up to 1800 nits in a very bright environment. We tested it at 580 in normal conditions and 1195 in bright ones, and it hits 1700 nits when playing HDR video in a bright space. Close enough.

In person I didn’t find the screen to be supernova bright compared to, for example, a top-end Samsung Galaxy S26 series phone. But this is sometimes to do with how quickly it ramps up to max brightness when needed. We humans are better at noticing change than absolutes.

Outdoor visibility is perfectly sound, as our test figures would suggest.

Performance

• Mid-table Mediatek processor
• Intermittent thermal throttling under sustained pressure
• Solid for all purposes, including gaming

Processor brand is one of the key concessions made in the Oppo Reno 16 Pro. It has a MediaTek SoC, not the Qualcomm type seen in many chart-topping Androids. 

Less trendy, but also less powerful? The Reno 16 Pro has a Dimensity 8550 Super processor, with a Mali-series GPU. 

It sits a little behind the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. They are both a cut below top-tier 2026 chipsets like the Snapdragon 8 Elite. But it has more than enough power to handle titles like Fortnite respectably. 

Like more moderately powerful phones, though, it will suffer from throttling when put under strain for a while. In a 20-minute stress test it dropped to lows of 51% of its peak performance, with everything taking a tumble once the Oppo Reno 16 Pro’s internal temperate sensors hit around 40 degrees centigrade. 

Unlike some phones, though, this one tends to make fairly brief but drastic performance cuts before attempting to get fairly close to its peak — rather than gradually lowering the power ceiling as heat accumulates. 

It’s a perfectly solid performer, if not that impressive for the money when you look back at what we’ve had elsewhere in recent years. The Nothing Phone 3 is cheaper, a bit more powerful. The Xiaomi Poco F8 is a lot more powerful, and also cheaper.

Software 

• Some unremarkable additional “AI” apps
• Android 16
• ColorOS interface

The Oppo Reno 16 Pro runs Android 16 with Oppo’s ColorOS software splattered on top. It’s a solid and familiar interface, but does come with a bunch of preinstalled apps. 

These aren’t limited to Oppo’s own, extending to third-party stuff like Temu, AliExpress and Amazon Music. 

Oppo’s attempts to add value with software aren’t worth dwelling on for long. The most notable among them are a duo of AI-derived apps that attempt to weave the contentious tech into a mental health/mindfulness angle: Mind Space and Mind Pilot. 

Mind Space records your previous activities on your phone, to let you retrace your steps. It’s basically the phone version of Microsoft Recall, a highly controversial Microsoft feature found in Windows 11. 

Mind Pilot is a chatbot that prompts you, initially at least, to ask about wellness-adjacent stuff. But it’s ultimately the same LLM chat interface you can find just about anywhere these days. 

Not much specific to love here, and a bit of naff bloat to dislike. But you can delete those apps easily enough.

Camera

• High quality results across all four cameras
• Up to 4K/60 video recording
• Mostly solid images at night

The Oppo Reno 16 Pro has a good camera array that doesn’t fill any of its three rear cameras with rubbish hardware just to make up the numbers. It’s one of the phone’s strongest elements.

There’s a 200MP primary sensor, a 3.5x 50MP “zoom” and a 50MP ultra-wide. Don’t get too hung up on those megapixel counts, though, as all three cameras take pictures in the 12-megapixel range unless you tell them otherwise. And the “high res” mode involves a de-mosaic process because these camera sensors are not really intended to capture pics at their stated native resolution. 

This is mostly fun camera to use. The Oppo Reno 16 Pro feels responsive, and lets you take pics in fairly quick succession without using the long-shutter-press burst mode. 

There are few major complaints to be made about the 200MP primary camera. It takes lush-looking images that don’t try too hard to wow the eye with over-done colour. Dynamic range is great, although with some scenes I’ve deliberately upped the exposure to make sure darker parts aren’t too dim. 

The phone often sides with retaining contrast rather than lifting shadows so much the picture ends up flat-looking. A perfectly fine choice. 

Night-time images taken with the main camera are good too. They can typically take a couple of seconds to capture, but have good shadow detail and dynamic range without going too intense on scene brightening. 

The 3.5x zoom and ultra-wide don’t show themselves up either, even if neither is quite a match for the wide on the quality of hardware. 

Ultra-wides look detailed in daylight but you lose fine detail integrity and dynamic range in very dark scenes, despite the longer shoot time. This is standard stuff, and the ultra-wide shots can still look good when you’re capturing, for example, a street scene punctuated by lights. 

The zoom, always a personal favourite in phones like this, is hugely useful despite not being a periscope design or having as sharp a lens as the 200MP lead camera. You can even head to the 7x preset and not be left with pics that immediately look like digital crops.

Shots taken at 3.5x zoom will sometimes not actually be taken with the zoom, though. Very low-light images can at times be crops of the primary camera, and this happens too if the Reno 16 Pro determines your subject is too close for the telescopic lens. Be mindful to get the best results here, but I’ve been impressed by the phone’s hit rate.

It very rarely spits out a dud image, colour tone is pleasant in pretty much all scenes. And while intensely zoomed images can appear a little “basic” down at pixel level, the imaging engine treads the line between zapping noise and retaining detail pretty well.

Video quality is good too, although predictably you don’t get some of the niche modes seen in top-tier phones. You can shoot 4K/60 video with stabilisation, a must-have at this price. But if you want faster frame rates for slo-mo, the maximum resolution drops to 1080p — 480 frames per second is the ceiling at 1080p, 960 frames per second at 720p. 

There is no 8K mode, although I’ve always found its usefulness pretty limited for most people. And its output can be a pain to handle for many laptops. 

The Oppo Reno 16 Pro front camera has a another 50MP sensor for selfies up front, and this is capable of taking extremely detailed images, for a selfie camera.

Oppo makes decent use of the high sensor resolution here, by offering three fields of view — three digital crops — for the one cam. These are 0.6x, x1x and 2x views. And even at 2x, which actually uses a drastic crop of the camera’s “real” 0.6x field of view, well-lit images hold up pretty well even to close scrutiny. 

This is a well above average selfie camera, topping off a pretty compelling little set of cams all-round. 

The one part Ive found annoying is you can be left waiting for what feels like an eternity before photos are actually done and dusted in the gallery. Not only does this delay you checking them out, it also delays sharing them on platforms like WhatsApp. 

This is likely because Oppo, sensibly, parks the processing part so you can shoot more images without pausing or seeing slow-down. But you tend to see less of this effect in super-powered step-up phones. 

Battery life 

• High battery capacity of 6700mAh
• … but real world results are a little less impressive
• 80W charging, but not the fastest to charge

The Oppo Reno 16 Pro has a 6700mAh battery, a particularly high capacity for a relatively small-footprint phone. Like so many recent Oppos, it uses silicon-carbon technology to help increase the milliampere hour figure per square inch. 

It will outlasts a Samsung Galaxy S26 pretty comfortably, based on my experience. Although once you’re spoilt by a 7500mAh phone like the Find X9 Pro, it’s surprisingly how quickly 6700mAh capacity like the Reno 16 Pro’s can start to seen ordinary. And I don’t think this is just down to battery size.

I was still able to drain it on a day that included a bunch of time working outdoors on a sunny day, pushing the OLED screen hard and consume a lot of battery. I hoped for better, even if the Oppo Reno 16 Pro still should comfortably outlast most of the 5000mAh crowd. 

I’ve never had that much charge left by the end of the day, and have often topped up before an evening out. It’s not what I expect from a 6700mAh battery. This situation may improve with successive software updates, as it’s likely a power management issue.

The Reno 16 Pro charges at up to 80W, and includes such an adapter in the box. But despite that high wattage figure, it still takes a while to reach full charge. It hits 50% in 35 minutes, 100% in 71 minutes. I found the wattages oddly conservative (using a power meter) despite using the fastest charging mode (one that warns you may feel device heat-up when using it).

Part of this will be down to temperature control, so quick top-ups can still be effective. 

The Reno 16 Pro does not support wireless charging, but can be used for reverse cabled charging — handy for true wireless earphones. 

Should you buy it?