Hands On with the OPPO Reno 10x Zoom: 6.6-inch OLED with No Notch and Popup Selfie Ca

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There are two distinct lines of development in the modern high-end smartphone space: the move to full screen devices, and the premium feature that makes a user go ‘wow’. For the new OPPO Reno series of smartphones, it succeeds on both fronts: it has a no-notch front display, and in order to provide that selfie camera, it has a motorized pop-up camera that comes out of the top. The question is if it is enough to draw users into buying the smartphone.

Please note that the device we are having the hands on with today is a pre-production Chinese variant, with non-final software. OPPO will be sending us updated international versions with updated software soon.

The Economics of Selling Smartphones
For a big portion of users, smartphone sales are either based on brand, or hands on time at the store. If you are sold on a particular brand, it doesn’t matter what the experience is, but if you go into the store, especially a carrier store or a big retailer with designated sections, chances are that an employee will come up to you and tell you about the device they are trying to sell. That employee has, at an estimate, 30-60 seconds to wow the customer with the most premium feature, for that first impression. Out of the two hundred different features a modern smartphone has, choosing that feature is going to be a key metric of how well the device can grab the attention of its users.

In the past those features have included fingerprint scanners, augmented reality, more cameras, even more cameras, speakers, time-of-flight sensors, AI photography, a keyboard, or almost anything else. For the new OPPO Reno series of smartphones, that immediate feature to get the customer talking is the 6.6-inch full screen OLED display paired with the pop-up selfie camera. There’s also a 6x/10x zoom camera too.

The OPPO Reno 10x Zoom

We’ve seen pop-up cameras before, either a square rising out of the device such as with the Vivo NEX, or something that completely slides like the OPPO Find X, or slides and rotates, like the recently announced Samsung A80. OPPO’s solution is somewhat similar to the Vivo NEX design, except that a larger part of the device rises out of the camera in what has been dubbed a ‘shark fin’, or a ‘pizza slice’. The larger implementation allows the slice to have LED flash lights front and rear, but also integrates the top speaker grille which can communicate through a tiny hole in the top when the camera is not in use. This enables the full screen display to essentially become the rest of the phone.

The selfie camera in the pop-up module is going to be slightly limited compared to other notched camera designs, just because the z-height of the slice is a lot smaller than if it was directly integrated into the phone. The camera is a 16MP f/2.0 unit which has a software pipeline through the camera’s Portrait Mode. OPPO states that it rises 11 degrees in 0.8 seconds, and has survived a 200,000 drop test. The device will automatically close the slice if it detects the phone is being dropped – something we confirmed by throwing it up in the air and letting it land on a bed.

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