[OPPO Reno8 Pro (Global/ Reno 8 Pro+ China)] ankitgondalia:
Software & Performance

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OPPO's software has evolved dramatically over the past few years. From once being an unlikeable software skin to now providing a much clean software experience with some handy features.

Starting with the Android version, the phone ships with ColorOS 12.1 based on Android 12L out of the box.

The launcher has a good amount of customization options, from the option to change the icon shapes & sizes, and grid layout, to the option to change transition while switching pages & more.

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Under the personalisations section, you will find a good amount of customisation options such as enabling the always-on function, edge lighting for notifications, changing the font, fingerprint animation, and more.

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ColorOS12.1 also includes wallpaper based theming which also supports Google apps and is not just limited to stock OPPO apps.

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There's a Portrait Silhouette feature that draws an outline around a portrait image you've selected from your gallery and lets you set it as a background for your Always-on display.

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Another always-on feature I liked and personally use is the Omoji. You can set your own custom animated version of yourself and you also have an option to select facial expressions that you would like to set.

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With Android 12 out of the box, the phone also comes with some privacy-related features like providing an approximate location instead of a precise one, a Privacy dashboard to check which apps are using your sensors and other permissions and quick settings toggle to turn off the camera and microphone access altogether.

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OPPO has also implemented some security and privacy features such as requiring fingerprint/passcode to turn off the phone & Smart notification hiding so that only you can read your sensitive notifications when you're in public.

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OPPO has also included Kid Space which allows only certain selected apps that are safe for the kids to use.

ColorOS also includes some handy features such as quick launch by holding fingerprint sensor while unlocking the phone, a smart sidebar to access certain features and apps quickly, flexible windows for multitasking & more.

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My unit wasn't an Indian unit and had a lot of bloatware apps that I'd never even heard of. Here is the list of apps that were preinstalled out of the box.

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Most of these apps can be easily uninstalled which is a good thing although I wouldn't like to have them in the first place.

Another inconsistency I want to address which I also addressed in my X5 review is that the folders do not adapt to the selected icon shape.

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This makes the home screen look a bit inconsistent.

Talking about the update policy, OPPO supports its Reno Series with 2 years of OS updates + 4 years of security patches. Although 4 years of security updates look very promising, I wish OS support was 3 years instead of 2 years since other phones at this price range do provide 3 years of OS upgrades.

Talking about performance, it was very solid with the Mediatek Dimensity 8100-MAX. The Dimensity 8100-MAX SOC is quite a capable chipset and it performed very well during my usage.

The device never slowed down or stuttered nor did it require any force shutdowns. With 12GB of RAM, apps running in the background were always in the memory and never faced and app restart issues while multitasking

Now I test SOC performance based on usage and my own experience and not with numbers. But if you're still curious to know the numbers then here are some Geekbench scores with and without 'High-performance mode' turned off.

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I also ran the CPU throttling test for 10 mins and the device maintained its performance and only throttled to 92% which was quite impressive.

Software experience with ColorOS 12.1 has been mostly positive with the Reno8 Pro 5G. ColorOS12.1 does provide a clean software experience and the included features are quite handy. I do wish the update policy was a little better. Overall performance has also been solid with no thermal throttling issues.