Oppo Reno 16 Review

Design

• 8.4mm thickness
• IP68/69K water resistance
• Aluminium sides 

The Oppo Reno 16 is something like a smaller, lower-cost alternative to the Oppo Find X9 series. But its first impression is not of a super lithe and light phone, in part thanks to its hefty 8.4mm thickness. 

This is a chunky one. 

It does have what, on the surface at least, appears to be a no-compromise build. The Oppo Reno 16 has excellent IP68/69K water resistance, uses glass front and rear panels, and aluminium sidewalls. 

There’s no extensive use of plastic, which would be a bit of an eyebrow-raiser at £699 — but we’re likely to see more of it going forward thanks to intensifying cost pressures on manufacturers.

The phone comes in just two finishes, white and black, and uses an unusual lenticular style layer under the rear glass. A shooting star graphic appears to animate as the phone is turned in the hand. It’s a bit different to the norm, but it won’t be to all tastes. 

Elsewhere, the Oppo Reno 16 has a fast in-screen fingerprint scanner, non-expandable memory and an IR blaster. This lets you use the Reno 16 as a universal remote, with the help of the IR Remote app. 

The speakers are solid too. They’re loud and form a stereo array, only lacking some of the extra bass beefiness of the best. 

Screen

• Rich colour
• Good brightness
• Moderate-sized OLED 

The Oppo Reno 16 has a 6.32-inch OLED screen that is fairly similar to that of the step-up Reno 16 Pro – and I have the two side-by-side right now. 

It’s an OLED panel display of 2640 x 1216 pixels. While far closer to an elongated 1080p rather than 1440p, it still appears very sharp thanks to the smaller scale of the panel. 

Display colour can be accurate and relatively subdued, or embrace the full-bore vibrancy of the OLED panel. You pick the mode. 

The Oppo Reno 16’s brightness is good too. Oppo says it reaches 600 nits normally, and 1800 nits in its high brightness mode – used when the ambient light sensor notices you are in a bright location. My colorimeter measured 580 nits, 1200 nits under intense light, rising to 1700 nits when playing HDR video. 

It has a maximum 120Hz refresh rate, which is the one key way it varies from the Reno 16 Pro’s 144Hz screen. But it’s not obviously different in person.

Performance

• Weaker GPU than last generation
• Acceptable normal performance in this class

The Oppo Reno 16 has a processor from the most desirable range, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon. But it’s far from Qualcomm’s best. The Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 is a frequently used chipset among mid-tier phones.

It has solid CPU power, but its graphics capability is not close to that of the top-flight Snapdragon processors. These SoCs are best suited to those who may demand good everyday performance, but aren’t out for radically competitive gaming power.

For that, you should look to something like a model from the Xiaomi Poco series – like the Poco F8. 

From that phone, you get roughly triple the gaming performance of the Reno 16 and double the CPU performance. It is a real outlier on the punch-to-price stakes, though. 

The Honor 600 uses the same Snapdragon 7 Gen 4, as do the Motorola Edge 70 and Nothing 4a Pro. Guess what? The more aggressively price-conscious brands here charge less for the same hardware – Honor and Nothing – while Motorola charges the same amount.

Oppo’s Reno 16 processor may not be all that exciting, but it is about right for the money in 2026. But you know the real odd part? The Reno 16 is weaker for gaming than the Reno 13 from 2025. Its MediaTek Dimensity 8350 has loads more GPU power.

Still, this can handle Fortnite just fine; you’ll just see its limits if you try to max out the visuals, with clear drops from a 60fps frame rate, particularly when there’s more landmass in the frame. As we’ll see later, the most obvious performance sacrifice is seen in the camera, not necessarily in day-to-day navigation or gaming.

Software

• Some app bloat
• Uninspiring extra AI apps
• Reassuringly familiar interface 

The Oppo Reno 16 runs Android and has a ColorOS software layer on top. Unfortunately, one of the more notable things about it is that it loads up the phone with a bunch of apps you can only imagine earn Oppo a few pennies. 

There’s AliExpress, Amazon Music, a low-quality ad-serving game called Block Blast! and a few others. You can delete these so it’s no big issue, but loading up a phone with these third-party apps is not the classiest move – if a common one. 

Oppo also has its own take on the techy trend du jour, applications of AI. These are found primarily in Mind Pilot, a chatbot interface, and Mind Space. This collates your previous actions, to act as a memory jog of something you may have forgotten, and to help you organise your life. 

That latter feature has been pretty controversial in other areas of tech, like Microsoft Recall. But there’s no obligation to use it if you’re concerned about your data being harvested or find the whole idea a bit off-putting. 

This is ultimately a familiar and easy-to-use interface whose more contentious parts can either be deleted or ignored. 

Camera

• Start-up can be slow when multi-tasking
• Can handle all sorts of scenes
• High-res selfies 

One of the cuts Oppo makes to the Reno 16 from the Pro is in the camera, but interestingly, it’s not in the one I’d normally expect. 

Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of dramatically downgraded zooms. Sometimes they will even be replaced by a cheap and usually pretty useless depth sensor. But the Reno 16 has a lower-spec main camera than its Reno 16 Pro sister, while the 50MP 3.5x zoom, 50MP ultra-wide and 50MP selfie cameras from the Reno 16 Pro remain intact with what appears to be the same hardware. 

The Oppo Reno 16 main camera has a 50MP sensor too, while the Pro version has a 200MP one. 

There is, of course, a difference, but that lower-res camera can still take detailed images, including solid ones at night. It’s a reminder that software has a big hand in end results, alongside raw hardware capability.

The zoom is a real highlight here too. It’s not a periscope-design lens setup, where the optical elements are “folded” to extend the light path along the frame, but images hold up well at 3.5x zoom and even a bit beyond. You’ll just see them get softer and more processed-looking more quickly when zooming into the pixels. 

I have noticed there’s a fair bit of difference between the pixel-level character of zoom photos taken with the Reno 16 and its Pro sibling – and they have different processing profiles. The Pro pics can often look a little more perfected, if also a little more digitally manhandled. And I find the standard Reno 16 a bit less forgiving, with multiple shots or a steadier hand required to get the most detail out of zoomed pics. 

I can’t tell whether this is actually a result of the imaging engine and OIS (optical image stabilisation, found in both phones’ zooms) or just purely anecdotal, but it’s something I’ve noticed in testing. 

In general, though, the Oppo Reno 16’s camera is mostly fun to use, and offers flexibility only obviously beaten by the very most expensive phones out there. 

On the video side, the Oppo Reno 16 shoots at up to 4k resolution, 60 frames per second in its normal mode. It generally looks great, with well-resolved detail and fairly low noise even when shooting with imperfect light indoors. 

Video has a “pro” mode too, which lets you avoid the jarring auto-shifts in exposure and so on when taking video. There’s no Pro-style photo mode, though – you have exposure control and a few other bits, but there’s seemingly no way to manually focus. 

I have a couple of other camera complaints, though, and they are both somewhat related to performance. The Reno 16 takes a while to finish processing photos, which affects how quickly they can be shared. 

The start-up speed of the camera app can also be terrible if you’re doing as much as listening to a podcast or a streamed radio station at the same time. I’ve missed a photo opportunity a bunch of times I because the camera just took so long to get fired-up properly.

Switching between camera fields of view can also be slow, particularly when you have other processes going on in the background. It’s not something I noticed as much in the Oppo Reno 16 Pro, and it is disappointing in a £700 phone when the camera is otherwise strong.  

Battery life

• High battery capacity…
• But not that much to show for it
• Slow charging given its 80W top rate

The Oppo Reno 16 has a large 6000mAh battery, one that uses silicon-carbon battery tech to fit more milliampere-hours into each cubic millimetre. In some territories, this phone uses an even larger 6700mAh battery, so check what you get before you buy. 

Much like the Reno 16 Pro, which had a 6700mAh battery in the version reviewed, I have found real-world battery life here OK rather than great. I have not had remotely close to 50 percent charge left by the end of the day, which I consider a real gold standard for super-capacity phones. 

Instead, it has delivered a far more ordinary experience – one closer to what I’d expect from a 5000mAh phone. I don’t find it too hard to run the Reno 16 down in a day, and I have occasionally given it a top-up before a night out. 

You may have better results in the less sunny months, when the Reno 16 screen shouldn’t have to work so hard so often. But I advise tempering your expectations before assuming stamina is going to be world-changing. 

Get this: I’m writing this at 5:25pm, and the phone is already down to 19 per cent. I haven’t spent all day watching YouTube either. 

The phone supports (and includes) an 80W charger, but I found the charging rates a little slow considering what I’ve seen in the past from lower-power charging standards. On its first charging test, the Oppo Reno 16 took 37 minutes to reach 50% charge, and 78 minutes to reach 100%. 

This is a bit of an eyebrow-raiser not only because it’s a fairly long time in fast-charging stakes, but you’d also usually see far more of a pace drop-off in the second half of a charge. However, it’s perhaps more a sign of how sensitive the Oppo Reno 16’s charging is to heat, as this was on a hot day. 

For the sake of science, I retried charging while the phone was kept in a fridge. In this case, the Oppo Reno 16 took just 21 minutes to reach 50% charge, and was at 67% by the 30-minute mark. 

Better, but this still isn’t hugely fast given the stated 80W charge power, but it is indicative of how sensitive the charging system is to raised temperatures – which are problematic for battery health.

It doesn’t support wireless charging, and the Reno 16 Pro doesn’t either.  

Should you buy it?