Month: November 2019

The flood of affordable, well-designed, well-specced phones from the east continues, with Oppo joining the likes of Huawei, Xiaomi, Honor, OnePlus, Vivo and others in sending high-quality Android handsets in our direction. In this case, we’ve got the Oppo Reno 2.

You can think of the Oppo Reno 2 as a less powerful, more affordable variation on the Oppo Reno 10x Zoom – that’s the phone to get if you want the best that Oppo can offer right now, but if you want to save yourself some money, then this might suit you better.

Besides the less powerful processor running everything though, you wouldn’t really know this was a mid-ranger – it’s got a stylish design, an excellent screen, and a quad-lens camera on the rear. It’s even got a gimmick, in the ‘shark fin’ style pop-up selfie camera.

The widgets on this page will show you the latest deals and pricing for the Oppo Reno 2, but officially it retails for £449 in the UK – that’s a sub-flagship price, but it’s not exactly what you’d call budget either. Does it do enough to provide good value for money?

OPPO RENO 2 REVIEW: DESIGN AND SCREEN

The Oppo Reno 2 is a stylish enough smartphone, if a bit on the bland side – there’s nothing really to make it stand out in terms of its looks, unless you’re counting that ‘shark fin’ style selfie camera pop-up – and we think that’s just a bit odd-looking (the OnePlus design is better). Your mileage may vary.

At least the pop-up selfie camera means a notch-free screen, and what a screen – the 6.5-inch, 1,080 x 2,400 pixel resolution, 20:9 aspect ratio, AMOLED display is a real eye-catcher. Fire up something like Netflix on the Oppo Reno 2, and high-resolution movies and shows look gorgeous. It’s probably the high point of the phone, design-wise.

At 9.5 mm or a little over a third of an inch thick, the phone is a little thicker than the best flagships out there, and it feels a little bulkier in the hand than smartphones from the likes of Google, Apple and Samsung. There’s absolutely no problem in terms of the build quality or the finish though.

The four lenses that make up the rear camera are vertically arranged on the back, together with a little bump underneath: apparently it’s there to protect the lenses when the phone is laid flat, but to us it seems a bit unnecessary. Black, blue and pink are your colour choices, though we’ve only seen black and blue on sale in the UK so far.

OPPO RENO 2 REVIEW: CAMERA AND BATTERY

With its four lenses (though one is just a depth sensor), the rear camera on the Oppo Reno 2 packs in plenty of optics – from the 0.5x ultra-wide lens to the 2x telephoto (you can get up to 5x of what Oppo calls “hybrid zoom”, which we found to get mostly good results). Dedicated night and portrait modes are included on the software side as well.

The lenses top out at 48 megapixels, impressive for a camera at this price point, but we found the snaps the phone produced were decent rather than spectacular. It’s not going to trouble the best camera phones on the market – and that’s fine. You do get plenty of detail and accurate colours in good lighting, as well as some respectable results in night mode, if you can hold the phone steady for a second or two.

At least the software is straightforward, which isn’t always the case on phones from Chinese manufacturers. Overall, it’s a camera that’s going to give you good results, most of the time – the results are on a par with the other phones we’ve tested around this price, though we think the likes of the Motorola One Zoom and Google Pixel 3a have the edge here (though the Pixels all lack an ultra-wide lens).

In terms of battery life, that bright, sharp screen does seem to suck up battery juice quite quickly – we still had battery life left at the end of an average day, but it was less than 20 percent usually, so you’re not going to get more than a day out of the Oppo Reno 2. That said, the hour-of-Netflix-streaming test we always run on phones only dropped the battery by 7 percent – from 100 percent to 93 percent – which is among the best results we’ve seen. It may depend on what exactly you’re doing with your handset.

OPPO RENO 2 REVIEW: SPECS AND FEATURES

It’s in the specs rather than the design where the Oppo Reno 2 shows its mid-range credentials. There’s a Snapdragon 730G chipset, 8GB of RAM, and either 128GB or 256GB of on-board storage under the hood, and you can expand that storage with a microSD card – an option we always like to see.

There’s also a 3.5 mm headphone jack here, so the Oppo Reno 2 is one of a dwindling number of options you’ve got left if you want to keep on using wired headphones without the aid of a dongle. The phone isn’t waterproof or dustproof though, and you don’t have the option of wireless charging.

In terms of software, you’re already a version behind, because the Oppo Reno 2 comes with Android 9. Oppo’s own rather forgettable Android skin is put on top of that – it’s fine, but it’s not quite the pure Android experience you get with the Pixel or Nokia phones, and doesn’t match the quality of the best variations on Android on the market (which include Samsung and OnePlus in our opinion).

In use, we didn’t notice much in the way of lag or delays, though occasionally longer loading times and unresponsiveness meant that we were always aware that we weren’t using a blazing fast phone right at the top end of the market. It’s a phone that’ll do everything you need it to, though not at the fastest possible speeds.

OPPO RENO 2 REVIEW: PRICE AND VERDICT

As you may have noticed from recent phone reviews on T3, this is a part of the phone market that’s getting very, very competitive – that space between budget phones and top-end flagships. Perhaps the biggest problem for the Oppo Reno 2 is that there’s so much strong competition at this price, from the likes of Honor and Xiaomi.

There’s lots that we like about this phone. In terms of streaming Netflix movies for example, the Oppo Reno 2 is one of the best handsets we’ve used lately – crisp, bright colours, punchy audio, thin bezels, the whole package. For day-to-day mobile tasks, you’re not really going to notice the less powerful Snapdragon 730G fitted inside this phone.

Despite all those lenses, we’ve seen better camera performance at this price (though there’s not a huge amount in it), and the software on board Oppo phones can be a bit fiddly. There’s no waterproofing or wireless charging, and the Reno 2 is carrying a touch more bulk than some of its competitors too.

Those are minor drawbacks really though, and if £400-500 is your budget for a new smartphone, then the Oppo Reno 2 deserves some consideration. It hits a nice balance between price, performance and features, though if you do like the Oppo approach to smartphones, you might want to save up and get the Oppo Reno 10x Zoom instead.

According to recent official reports, Lenovo is working on a new system that will merge Windows and Android systems. According to a Lenovo official, the “Lenovo One” will merge the smartphone-friendly Android with laptop-friendly Windows. Unfortunately, he did not say how the company hopes to achieve this plan. In fact, we do not exactly know what “Lenovo One” refers to but it appears to be a new system for smartphones in the 5G era.

The Weibo post says “PCs large-screen productivity, meet, 5G era smartphones. What kind of world will be #Lenovo One#…Windows and Android will merge into one”

In the recent Lenovo Yoga conference, Lenovo claimed that “Lenovo One” can break restrictions and achieve cross-device connectivity. It can also achieve mobile screen projection, one-button fast transmission and other functions, similar to Apple Airdrop and Huawei Share. However, the company did not say when this system will arrive.

According to the officially released screenshots, Lenovo One supports Bluetooth quick links, and the computer reversely controls the mobile phone to transfer files at a high speed. The screenshot shows the Lenovo Z6 Pro 5G connected to the ThinkPad X1 Carbon. As of now, the available information on Lenovo One is still sketchy. We will have to wait and see what the company does in the coming weeks.

As leaked by VideoCardz, it appears that AMD has revamped the packaging for its upcoming Ryzen Threadripper 3000-series (codenamed Castle Peak) processors.

The purported packaging looks like a normal cardboard box that’s decked out with fancy graphics, and the concept is similar to AMD’s packaging for the previous-gen of Ryzen Threadrippers. There’s a huge cutout in the middle where you can see the Ryzen Threadripper logo and a preview of the chip. VideoCardz noted that the packaging is numbered, so this would be a limited edition packaging.

The processor itself seems to come inside a translucent black box that allows you to faintly see the chip that’s housed inside. The box is likely made of plastic, although it would be cool if AMD had used tempered glass as it would certainly add a more premium feel to the product. However, tempered glass would unnecessarily jack up the final price, so we’ll settle on plastic. There’s also a button on the bottom that probably opens the box.

In comparison to the current design for Ryzen Threadripper 2000-series, the new packaging looks more compact. Some might argue that the last-gen’s packaging resembles a lunchbox, but the sheer size does make the processor inside look rather imposing, just as we’d expect from the rumored 64-core 128-thread models. 

Google has added virtual desktops to its Chrome OS, used in Chromebooks, enabling users to create multiple workspaces and switch between them.

The virtual desktop feature is the biggest of several updates. Once the update is installed, a New Desk icon appears in the top right corner of the desktop. You can display virtual desktops full screen or side by side, and drag windows between desktops. These operations can be done with touch, mouse, trackpad or using keyboard shortcuts.

Virtual desktops have been available in Windows 10, macOS and Linux for some time so Google is catching up with these established operating systems.

Another new feature is the ability to right-click a phone number in Chrome and send it to an Android phone. This requires enabling sync between the Chrome browser on both devices.

A printer auto-detect feature means that compatible printers will automatically appear in a printer list without needing setup.

Google’s Chrome OS has moved some distance from its original concept of a browser-based operating system when launched in 2011. The biggest changes were in 2016 when Android app support was added, and in 2018, when Linux application support appeared.

Chrome OS uses container technology to run Android and Linux in order to keep the operating system isolated and protected. With Microsoft taking a similar approach to running Win32 applications in Windows 10X, the gap between traditional PCs and Chromebooks is narrowing. You can even run some Windows applications on a Chromebook via the Wine compatibility layer.

Chromebooks have a small market versus traditional PCs. Chrome OS accounts for around 1.6 per cent of active operating systems, according to Statcounter, up from 1.2 per cent a year ago.

That said, Chromebook sales increased by double digits in the first quarter of 2019, according to Gartner, and the devices are particularly strong in education, where the combination of low price and a locked-down operating system is appealing. In early 2018 Google reported over 60 per cent market share in North America and over 30 per cent in the UK.

Less attractive is that a Chromebook is tightly bound to a Google login, raising concerns about privacy and data collection, and devices lose support automatically after a pre-defined period.

Still, with both Apple and Microsoft also increasingly insistent that you sign into their cloud accounts in order to use macOS or Windows 10, Google’s approach is more absolute but, regrettably, no longer so distinctive. 

The Pavilion Gaming 15 series includes 15.6-inch gaming laptops with midrange graphics chips. The series sits below the HP Omen series. Nvidia’s GeForce RTX GPUs are exclusive to the latter, however. Our test device is powered by a Ryzen 7 3750H APU and a GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Max-Q GPU.

The performance of the hardware matches our expectations: All of the games in our database run smoothly. Usually, Full-HD resolution and medium to high settings can be chosen.

Surprisingly, the battery life is very good. The Pavilion lasts much longer than most office laptops. However, the gaming laptop lacks a Thunderbolt 3 port. HP also only grants users a warranty period of one-year.

More information and measurements can be found in our review of the HP Pavilion Gaming 15-ec0017ng.