Oppo Reno6 5G review

ColorOS 11.3 and Android 11

We reviewed the Reno5 5G a few months ago running ColorOS 11.1, and now, the Reno6 5G launches with 11.3 version of the software, which offers some marginal improvements and bug fixes but no major features. In other words, we already know what to expect from the Reno6 5G in terms of software.

Not exactly clean Android experience by any means. While the company's close siblings, OnePlus and Realme, are going for a bit more stock-ish look, ColorOS is still heavily customized and customizable, too.

You can go for the standard app drawer, which was enabled by default on our phone, the recent apps menu is familiar with an icon row at the bottom, which can be used to quickly scroll between the apps for faster navigation. The notification shade is in typical ColorOS fashion with oval, square icons and the brightness slider at the bottom.

Home screen, notification shade, recent apps, app drawer

Good thing Oppo gives you the freedom to customize almost everything you see on the screen. Most of the options can be found under the Personalizations sub-menu in the general Settings menu. You can set up a theme, icon pack, change the shape of the quick toggles in the notification shade, choose the accent color of the UI elements around the OS, switch the font, and you even have a wide selection of fingerprint reader animations.

Personalization options

The edge lighting has a couple of colors to choose from, while the always-on display feature is highly customizable - a plethora of clock styles, animations, custom text styles, etc. The behavior of the AoD is, of course, adjustable, so the screen will light up only when touched or at a specific time of the day to preserve battery.

Personalization options

You can take advantage of several Home screen features. For instance, pulling down from the Home screen summons a global search, which can be replaced with a pull-down for the notification shade. That's what we prefer too. A double-tap on any empty space would lock the device, and a double-tap on a locked screen can unlock it. Standard stuff.

Except for the so-called Icon pull-down gesture. We liked the feature the first time, and it seems like it's been improved too, or we are just better at it now. It does have a learning curve but what it does is improve one-handed operation. Swiping upwards along the left or right edge of the screen brings down the icons closer to the bottom half of the screen. The highlighted app of your choice launches as soon as you release your finger. We found it to work pretty well, and the gesture is quite responsive.

Home screen settings and Icon pull-down gesture

The ability to reduce animation speed is a nice touch because you don't have to enable the developer options menu. As we stated before, animations do seem a tad slower than they should be, so going for the faster animations might not be such a bad idea. And they will still look smooth at 90fps.

Android 11-intrinsic features such as bubbles, one-time permissions, conversation grouping in the notification shade and the media playback controls are now integrated into the quick toggles menu drop-down instead of taking space in the notification area.

Chat bubbles

Nowadays, everyone is doing their own variation of Samsung's Edge panel feature. Oppo calls it Smart sidebar, and it's a small, movable and customizable area docked to either side of the edge of the screen and gives you access to commonly used tasks or apps of your choice.

Smart sidebar

As before, the fingerprint reader experience is impeccable. It's fast, accurate and works well in all lighting conditions. Our only complaint is about positioning, which we've already covered in the Design section of the review.

Lastly, ColorOS 11.3 brings a so-called RAM expansion feature that everyone is doing lately. It allocates some of the storage space so that it can be used for RAM and keep more apps opened in the background. Its usefulness is arguable since the phone already has more than enough memory - 8GB to be exact. The software allows you to add 2, 3 or 5GB. It's probably more beneficial for phones with less than 6GB.

RAM expansion

Overall performance is great, though, and we didn't find any setbacks, annoying bugs, and we didn't experience any hangs. The software felt snappy. However, we would have liked a bit less bloatware. We found many pre-installed apps on the device, including some games. Luckily, most of them can be removed. The Netflix app and other system apps, of course, can't be removed.

Performance

The handset employs a recent MediaTek SoC that's hard to find on other devices. We are talking about the Dimensity 900 chipset based on TSMC's 6nm N6 manufacturing process. The chip uses an octa-core CPU that consists of 2x Cortex-A78 cores ticking at 2.4 GHz that do the heavy lifting and 6x Cortex-A55 cores running at 2.0GHz. The Mali-G68 MC4 GPU clocked at 900MHz takes care of the graphically-intensive workloads.

GeekBench 5 (multi-core)

Higher is better

• Realme GT 5G
  3555
• Realme GT Master
  2917
• Xiaomi 11T
  2834
• Samsung Galaxy A52s 5G
  2801
• OnePlus Nord 2
  2792
• Oppo Reno6 5G
  2131
• Samsung Galaxy A52 5G
  1820
• Oppo Reno5 5G
  1813

GeekBench 5 (single-core)

Higher is better

• Realme GT 5G
  1139
• OnePlus Nord 2
  814
• Realme GT Master
  785
• Samsung Galaxy A52s 5G
  771
• Xiaomi 11T
  742
• Oppo Reno6 5G
  722
• Samsung Galaxy A52 5G
  636
• Oppo Reno5 5G
  608

AnTuTu 8

Higher is better

• Realme GT 5G
  703986
• OnePlus Nord 2
  512164
• Samsung Galaxy A52s 5G
  429675
• Oppo Reno6 5G
  362450
• Samsung Galaxy A52 5G
  334981
• Oppo Reno5 5G
  317762

AnTuTu 9

Higher is better

• Realme GT 5G
  810433
• OnePlus Nord 2
  598022
• Xiaomi 11T
  590837
• Realme GT Master
  529263
• Samsung Galaxy A52s 5G
  506432
• Oppo Reno6 5G
  430765
• Samsung Galaxy A52 5G
  386474
• Oppo Reno5 5G
  377615

3DMark SSE ES 3.1 (offscreen 1440p)

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy A52s 5G
  5010
• Realme GT Master
  4988
• Oppo Reno6 5G
  3764
• Oppo Reno5 5G
  3208

3DMark SSE Vulkan 1.0 (offscreen 1440p)

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy A52s 5G
  4231
• Realme GT Master
  4020
• Oppo Reno6 5G
  3818
• Oppo Reno5 5G
  3008

3DMark Wild Life Vulkan 1.1 (offscreen 1440p)

Higher is better

• Realme GT 5G
  5872
• OnePlus Nord 2
  4224
• Xiaomi 11T
  4172
• Samsung Galaxy A52s 5G
  2491
• Realme GT Master
  2481
• Oppo Reno6 5G
  2024
• Oppo Reno5 5G
  1658
• Samsung Galaxy A52 5G
  1107

Sadly, the Reno6 5G has to deal with considerably more powerful rivals. The Dimensity 900 SoC is just no match for the Snapdragon 778G, a common chipset in this price segment. There are quite a few running MediaTek's top-shelf Dimensity 1200, too.

However, the Dimensity 900 does offer a noteworthy improvement over the Snapdragon 765G found in the Reno5 5G and manages to beat the Snapdragon 750G as well in CPU, combined and GPU-intensive tests.