Oppo Reno3 Pro review

Design and ergonomics

Built-wise, the Oppo Reno3 Pro is like every modern smartphone out there - glass on the front and glass on the back held by a frame around the sides. The back panel, however, isn't actual glass. It's polycarbonate along with the side frame, which is glossy too. Maybe that's why the phone feels so light. The front panel is protected by Gorilla Glass 5, though.

Anyway, the back sheet is curved enough to provide comfortable, secure grip and also houses a rather big lump with the quad-camera array in the upper-left corner. The module is big enough to make the phone wobble when placed flat on its back, and by "secure grip," we mean as secure as it can get given that it's a glass sandwich smartphone. All glass sandwich smartphones are slippery. And as for the color - we got the so-called Auroral Blue. It looks cool but attracts a lot of fingerprints, which stay visible. They are easy to wipe off, though.

When you turn the Reno3 Pro around, you will be greeted by a tall 6.4-inch display with a dual punch-hole camera in the upper left corner. Oppo says they made it as small as possible, and we can confirm that this is one of the smallest holes we've seen, but we have a different issue with it. We feel like it's been placed too far from the corner of the display, eating away too much screen real estate. Otherwise, the side bezels, along with the bottom lip, look impressively thin - something you'd normally see on a high-end phone. The earpiece on the top bezel can barely fit in the bezel - it's so thin.

The side frame isn't anything out of the ordinary, but we do have to give credit to Oppo's design team for making the seamless transition of the gradient on the back to the side frame. It's a job well done.

So back to the frame, we find the two separate volume buttons on the left accompanied by the SIM card tray while the right side houses the power button. The latter has a beautiful mint-colored accent. The bottom is a bit different in design - it's slightly recessed, with the USB-C connector in the middle flanked by a 3.5mm audio jack and the loudspeaker grille.

All in all, it's not an unwieldy phone, yet it's not a compact one either. Given the size of the screen, the Reno3 Pro has a decent footprint and doesn't weigh that much (175g). The weight distribution isn't ideal - it's a bit top-heavy, and you will find yourself often reaching for the top part of the phone since it's a tall smartphone, but that's par for the course these days. Our only real complaints remain the positioning of the punch-hole and the big bump on the back.