Oppo Reno11 F 5G Review: Fast charging, Good Camera

The Oppo Reno11 F 5G is a solid contender in the mid-range space, largely thanks to its very fast charging and decent quality camera array.

Pros	Cons
Very fast charging	Not the most powerful phone at this price
Good camera quality	Lots of bloatware pre-installed
Lots of storage plus microSD expansion	Unclear OS/Security update path

Score: 3/5

	Buy The Oppo Reno11 F 5G!	Buy On Amazon

In this review

Oppo Reno11 F 5G Specifications
Oppo Reno11 F 5G Design
Oppo Reno11 F 5G Camera
Oppo Reno11 F 5G Performance
Oppo Reno11 F 5G Battery
Oppo Reno11 F 5G Conclusion

The mid-range phone space is amongst the most competitive in smartphones right now, with every brand but Apple competing fiercely for more economy-minded phone buyer’s money.

Oppo has long form of providing decent – and sometimes very good – value in this space, and that’s very much the story of the Oppo Reno11 F 5G.

Design

The Reno11 F 5G is built around a 6.7 inch 120Hz capable OLED display with a resolution of 1080x2412 pixels in a 20:9 aspect ratio.

It’s not absolutely borderless, but it’s close, with very minimal bezels and a holepunch array for the front-facing selfie camera. The screen itself out of the box is on the bright side, but that’s because Oppo by default puts it into “Vivid” mode, over-accentuating the onscreen colour tones. One of the very first changes I made to the Oppo Reno11 F 5G was to drop it down into the more pleasant (to my eye) Natural screen mode for a more realistic appearance.

Unlocking is handled biometrically, and while enrolment of individual fingers was easy enough to do, for the first time in a while I did hit some issues with unlocking.

Nothing that stopped me getting into the phone, but I’ve become somewhat used to this particular technology working on demand, so when it fails more than once it’s noticeable.

Controls are otherwise minimalistic, with power and volume buttons on the left hand side and SIM card slot on the right. There’s no headphone jack on the Reno11 F 5G, just a USB-C port at the base for power and data.

Physically the Oppo Reno11 F 5G is a pleasant phone to hold and use; with a carrying weight of 177g it's on the lighter side, and it's also notable for having IP65 water resistance. At this kind of price point, any kind of rated water resistance is a genuine rarity -- though as always, I've got to point out that this is for testing in clean lab water; go reef swimming with the Oppo Reno11 F 5G at your own risk.

In Australia, the Oppo Reno11 F 5G sells in two different colours; either Palm Green or Ocean Blue, which is what I’ve tested with. It appears there’s a third colour variant in some markets, “Coral Purple”, but not locally.

I’m a known fan of blue as a phone colour, but Oppo’s done something genuinely different with the Reno11 F 5G’s colour scheme. It’s not a single colour or colour gradient, but instead a blue colour with a wavelet style pattern embedded in it, which makes it look like you’re staring at the top of a swimming pool or similar.

I can’t quite decide if I like it or would prefer that kind of style for a phone case instead. It’s certainly eye catching and different for sure.

Camera

Oppo often trades on its reputation as a camera phone company, and it very much wants you to know that the Reno11 F 5G is a camera phone, right from the moment you flip it over.

It’s a triple lens phone, but the primary 64MP wide lens is super-accentuated by a design that separates it out in its own circular array while the 8MP ultra-wide and 2MP macro lenses share a ring. At the front, selfies are handled by a 32MP sensor.

While Oppo’s preference is for a display that’s vivid by default, it takes a gentler and considerably more pleasing approach to how it captures and processes images in most situations.

Selfies are nicely handled, though predictably beautification routines rob me of my well-earned stress wrinkles.

If there’s a weakness in the Oppo Reno11 F 5G’s camera game, it’s (predictably) macro, where you’ll have to work hard to get pleasing photos.

It’s very much the story of most of these mid-range phones with 2MP macro lenses.

Being picky (what, me?) there’s no telephoto lens present on the Oppo Reno11 F 5G, but it would be surprising to see one. Instead you get digital zoom, and Oppo pushes it a little further than most of its competition with support for up to 10x digital zoom. So how well does that work?

Here’s an ultra wide street shot, with a bench on the other side of the road that for reasons-not-explained-here, I want to know more about.

The wide shot is fine, though it did capture a little lighter than the corresponding ultra-wide shot:

2x zoom – the phone’s default in-camera zoom – works nicely enough too.

10x zoom does lose detail, as you might expect, though I can see that some irresponsible folks have indeed been littering. Grr.

Overall, the Oppo Reno11 F compares well against what I’ve seen in most other phones in this kind of price space, delivering pleasing results in most conditions within its limitations.

Oppo Reno11 F 5G Sample Photos

Hello, we are Australian stereotypes.

It's cheaper to photograph fresh vegetables than to buy them right now.

The Reno11 F 5G did a decent job here on the wool texture -- and the less-than-adequate lighting in the room, too.

Autumn weather can make photo testing tricky -- but also present some nice photography testing options.

The Oppo Reno11 F 5G's cameras do, indeed, have game.

Performance

The Reno11 F 5G is built around a MediaTek Dimensity 7050 processor with 8GB of RAM and a generous 256GB of storage, expandable via microSD card.

It’s the first Dimensity 7050 based system to pass through my hands – from the looks of it, Oppo and BBK stablemate Realme really like using it on a lot of phones internationally – and I was keen to see how it would compare against what you could get at the Reno11 F 5G’s $599 asking price.

MediaTek’s Dimensity line has tended to punch slightly above its price weight in prior phones… but not so much this time.

Here’s how the Reno11 F 5G compares against phones available around or near its price point at the time of writing using Geekbench 6’s CPU test:

Here’s how it compares using 3DMark’s Wild Life GPU tests:

I’ve included the Pixel 7a in these comparisons because it is still available for the same kind of price as the Reno11 F 5G at the time of writing, though that’s clearly end of line stocks now that the Pixel 8a is here – and sadly that’s a phone that’s nowhere near as competitively priced.

Also Read:
Samsung Galaxy A35 Review
Google Pixel 7a Review
Motorola Edge 40 Review

The Reno11 F isn’t that fast a phone in a comparative sense, but switching to in-use app comparisons, it’s a perfectly suitable workhorse of a phone when it comes to day to day applications and most higher-end apps as well. You’ll never be able to kick the best frame rates in higher-end Android games, but you should 100% expect that from most mid-range phones anyway.

As it does with its Android offerings, the Reno11 F 5G runs Oppo’s own “ColorOS” launcher on top of Android. It’s bright and colourful and still has some of the look of original ColorOS, where Oppo was trying very hard to mimic Apple’s iOS.

That could make it a decent switching point if you were jumping from an iPhone, because a lot of it looks similar, though I am on the record as preferring the look and style of stock Android. Of course, being Android, you can pretty much make the Reno11 F 5G look like anything you want.

Which is not to say that ColorOS is just a visual overlay; it also incorporates elements for game modes and a few OS specific features like a document clipboard called File Dock, though curiously this is disabled by default on the Reno11 F 5G. It could be useful if you’re shifting lots of content between a variety of apps, but a lot of users might never realise that it’s there!

The Reno11 F 5G runs ColorOS14, built on top of Android 14, but it’s not clear at all what Oppo’s update picture for the phone is. At the time of writing security updates went through to April 2024, which is pleasing, but competitors are starting to be considerably more upfront about future OS upgrades and security update schedules. That’s not the story for the Oppo Reno11 F 5G at all.

By default, Oppo also installs a lot of additional apps, over and above the features it throws into ColorOS itself. They’re mostly junky low-rent Android games, as well as a few apps – TikTok, Booking.Com, Spotify, Temu and AliExpress – and I really wish they weren’t there. Yes, I can uninstall them, but this is over and above what other Android OEMs are doing, Oppo. I get that money changes hands for these apps to be there, but that doesn’t make it any less annoying for the end user who has to uninstall them.

As its suffix suggests, the Oppo Reno11 F 5G is 5G capable. Testing on the Telstra 5G network within Sydney, the Reno11 F 5G performed entirely within expectations, hitting a typical 200-400Mbps download rate within my test areas.

5G coverage is far from nationwide, but my own experience really does suggest that it’s far more network than device-dependent at this point.

Battery

The Oppo Reno11 F 5G is built around a 5,000mAh battery, the same as just about every Android phone that doesn’t flip or fold these days.

Most makers tout 5,000mAh as some huge number for battery capacity, but the reality is that it’s absolutely dead average in terms of capacity.

What’s more interesting is how long it will last, and how quickly it can recharge.

To check the former, I first turned to my standard YouTube battery test, taking the Oppo Reno11 F 5G from a fully charged battery and running a YouTube video for one hour to see how it runs down.

It’s a useful comparative score, as well as a decent marker for phones that might struggle to last a day. While usage is variable, I’ve found that phones that drop below 90% on this test tend to struggle to last a day.

Here’s how the Oppo Reno11 F 5G compares:

94% isn’t best in category for sure, but it’s a solid enough score, and it’s one that I’ll back up with more anecdotal testing. I tended to find the Oppo Reno11 F 5G sitting on between 20-30% at the end of a testing day, which is solid. Lighter phone users could pretty easily shift the Oppo Reno11 F 5G into a two-day routine, at which point they would need to recharge.

This is where Oppo’s particular push for fast charging – via its SuperVOOC chargers – comes into play. The Oppo Reno11 F 5G comes with a 67W charger that utterly wipes the floor with anything else in its class when it comes to charging speed.

There’s something that tickles my geeky nerves nicely when I plug in a charger and instantly see percentage point rises (even if they’re decimal rises) to the power straight away.

SuperVOOC charging does make the Oppo Reno11 F 5G a little warmer than standard charging, as you’d expect, but Oppo’s claim is that it does not have a significant effect on long term battery durability.

Oppo Reno11 F 5G: Alex’s Verdict

It's been a while -- for reasons of Oppo's own choosing -- since I've last tested out an Oppo phone, so I can't speak to how well the Reno11 F 5G compares to its predecessors of the last year or so.

What I can compare it to are the phones you can get at this price point, and what that means for its value proposition.

The Reno11 F 5G is a good choice if you want a nicely designed phone -- it really does feel nice in the hand, and while the Ocean Blue finish won't suit everyone, the Palm Green colour appears more sedate -- with really fast charging and a well thought out camera array.

It's not the fastest in its category, but it's got the essential power than most phone users will want, and the inclusion of 256GB of onboard storage is especially welcome at this price.