The general feeling among most industry watchers and smartphone enthusiasts in this part of the world is that you really shouldn’t be going with a telco’s bundled phone + mobile subscription plan option, as you’re getting locked into a two year plan in exchange for what might really be trivial savings. Moreover, the entrance of MVNOs – mobile virtual network operators – and their contract-free and non-bundled plan options that also offer a lot more goodies and bundled data have put a lot of pressure on the traditional telcos in Singapore. So much so that the three big players here are also now offering contract-free plans in the SGD20 range for 15+ GB of data.
With that in mind, I’d pretty much decided not to renew my contract subscription plan with Singtel when it expires this month, and move to either a contract-free plan or one of MVNOs’ offerings. And I was quite happy with my daily driver since Nov last year – the Samsung Note 9 – as well. What I didn’t expect were the goodies that Singtel was going to hurl in my direction just to keep me as their corporate plan customer though. The package included: a $200 discount off a bundled phone, another $100 discount just to renew the plan, and a last $30 bonus if I renewed and picked-up a new phone on the online Singtel Shop. I reckon some variant of the plan also exist for the non-corporate plans, but the corporate plan customers are charged one lower tier when it comes to pricing.
So, if I decided to take-up Singtel’s offer, I basically need to look for a phone that costs no more than $330 with a plan, and I get to keep my Samsung Note 9 and maybe sell it for about SGD530. As it turned out, a new flagship phone had just been released, and getting raved reviews for his combination of top of the line processor, a funky camera implementation, a huge battery, and a screen size that exceeded that of the Note 9. And I’d pay nothing for the phone – in essence a $0 phone if I keep my current plan and pay Singtel the same subscription rate. So, why not LOL. And that phone is the Oppo Reno 10x Zoom – the company’s newest flagship that was announced in April 2019 and released in June.
The spec sheet of Oppo Reno sounds fantastic, on paper at least. It uses the Snapdragon 855 chipset – one of the phone industry’s current top performing processor – and has 8GB RAM and 256GB storage,. It’s incredible the amount of onboard RAM and storage that are on flagship phones these days match or exceed midstream laptops. The amount of storage is particularly nice. My Samsung Note 9 has 6GB/128GB (the more expensive variants of this phone do support larger amounts of storage), which is more than sufficient as a daily driver – I don’t have huge apps or games sitting on my phones, so just about a quarter of the storage space allotted after system and apps – about 30GB – I set aside for a ton of music MP3 files, and also videos of my recent home recordings on the Casio PX870. The remaining space was just enough for 4K 60fps video over the twelve day Taiwan last year. I reckon the 4K video demands on a new video recording device should be less, since I’ve started using the H.265 video codec for the Maldives trip, and the generated video files are significantly smaller and with no perceptible loss of quality. The large 4,065mAh battery looks promising, though how long it’ll run on a charge compared to other phones with similar battery capacity is also significantly affected by a host of other factors, including the display it needs to put-out, software optimisation, and bloat.
Continued in the next post!
Recent comments