Thursday, April 25, 2024

Oppo Find X2 Pro review: Fast, fashionable, and fantastic.

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When Oppo told me it was working on the Find X2 back in December 2019, I was stoked. The original Oppo Find X was one of the biggest mobile innovations I’d seen in years. Surely, the Find X2 would live up to its legacy.

Let’s jump even further back to 2018. There were no foldable smartphones. Phone design was bland. Almost every phone had the same notch and it was hard to tell phones apart in a sea of sameness. So when the Find X launched with a nearly full-screen display and a motorized pop-up camera, something finally felt new. While I was let down by the consistently bad UX across Oppo devices, the sheer gadgetry of the phone overshadowed its downsides.

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Oppo Find X review: Finding space

When we’ve talked about full-screen phones in 2018, that’s meant around an 80 percent screen-to-body ratio with a small bottom bezel and a notch housing the front camera. The front-facing camera is an integral part …

Nearly two years later, Oppo has released the Find X2 and Find X2 Pro. Almost immediately, I can tell you this phone is far from the innovative, gadgetry of its predecessor. But I can also tell you this is one of the best phones I’ve used in the past year — if you’re willing to pay for it.

This is Android Authority’s Oppo Find X2 Pro review.

Design: Clean cut and excellent

Oppo Find X2 Pro back against orage 1

The Oppo Find X2 Pro doesn’t have what I would call an innovative design, but it is clearly flagship-class. The display wraps ever-so-slightly around the side of the phone, met by an aluminum frame that is colored gold on my model. The back of the phone wraps around similarly, which results in an undoubtedly classy-looking device.

The selfie camera is a punch hole in the top left side of the display. I have personally always been a huge fan of this configuration. I think it looks premium, and because the camera is about the size of a notification it doesn’t get in the way. On a phone in this price range though, I would have liked to see 3D face unlock or, better yet, the under-display selfie camera Oppo showed me at its innovation day in December. The original Find X had 3D face unlock, which is more secure and allows you to unlock your phone in the dark. There is standard face unlock on this device and it is quite fast, but 3D would be better.

Oppo Find X2 Pro punch hole selfie cam 1
Oppo Find X2 Pro side gold trim

The Find X2 Pro I was sent for review uses a back made of vegan leather, which adds to the premium look of the device. It feels great in the hand. It’s not nearly as slippery as glass, so you don’t have to worry about it sliding off the table. Moreover, if you drop the phone and it lands on its back, you don’t have to worry about the back shattering. The cameras are another story, though.

The Oppo Find X2 Pro has a pretty decently-sized camera bump. It’s not quite as thick as the plateau on the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra, but it does cause the phone to wobble when set on its back. On my leather model, the camera is framed by the same gold accent that dresses up the aluminum frame.

Oppo Find X2 Pro emblem macro

Far below the camera bump, near the bottom, you’ll find an Oppo emblem tacked on. This is unnecessary, but, like the gold trim on the device, it adds to the feeling of luxury. If you’re into that sort of thing.

You won’t find any special ports or sensors on the phone, like an IR blaster or a headphone jack. Instead, you’re greeted with the bare minimum. The power button and volume rockers are on the right and left sides of the phone, respectively, and a speaker, charging port, and SIM card tray are tucked into the bottom. It’s a minimalistic look, but I think that’s what Oppo was hoping to achieve.

Wow this screen is good

Oppo Find X2 Pro screen standing up 1

The Oppo Find X2 Pro has a curved 6.7-inch AMOLED display with a resolution of 3,168 by 1,440, which makes it pixel-dense at 513 pixels per inch. It is a brilliant-looking screen with fantastic color accuracy and white balance. The display supports HDR 10+, which means it can render more colors, and Oppo claims it can hit a peak brightness of 1200 nits. It’s very easy to see the screen in direct sunlight, which is something that can’t be said of the Google Pixel 4.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 allows the phone to run at a fast 120Hz refresh — even when set to the full Quad HD+ resolution. That’s something the Samsung Galaxy S20 series can’t tout, at least not yet. Both devices have the technical ability to do this, but Samsung restricted 120Hz mode to 1080p, likely for battery life reasons.

The 120Hz Quad HD+ display is a joy to use.

Oppo wanted to make the screen a highlight of the Find X2 Pro, so it included a hardware layer called 01 Ultra Vision Engine. This chip can upscale video to 60Hz or 120Hz, whichever you have the phone set to at the time. In practice, this feature works, but I would not recommend using it for most content. If a video was shot at and rendered in 24 or 30fps, it was likely done for a reason. Until 60fps video becomes more common, I’d suggest leaving this feature off. Currently, 60fps video looks too awkwardly realistic for my taste.

There is an optical fingerprint scanner embedded under the display and it works very well. It’s fast and accurate and has a large surface area.

In the past, Samsung always had the best screen available on a smartphone. The Oppo Find X2 Pro makes me question Samsung’s crown.

Performance: An S20 Ultra rival?

Oppo Find X2 Pro being used in hand

While the Oppo Find X2 Pro doesn’t quite have the 100x Space Zoom or 5,000mAh battery of the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra, it does match or best it in nearly every other department. This means I didn’t notice any hiccups or stuttering.

The 120Hz refresh rate display and 240Hz touch response rate makes this device look and feel wicked fast. Oppo also seems to have adopted the OnePlus style of using faster animation speeds, which increase the feeling of speed on the unit as well.

Oppo Find X2 Pro Geekbench 5 Score
Oppo Find X2 Pro 3D Mark Score

This device is packed with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 865, 12GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage, easily making it one of the fastest phones on the market. In benchmarks, the Find X2 Pro lived up to the specs it packs, even beating the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra in some benchmarks.

The Find X2 Pro supports 5G through the Qualcomm X55 modem. Though it won’t work on Verizon’s mmWave 5G, I was able to get low-band 5G via T-Mobile at my house in Brooklyn. While 5G isn’t something I would go hunting for in my next phone, it’s nice for future-proofing for when the technology goes mainstream.

The only performance issue I noticed was weak Bluetooth performance. Before the first update, Bluetooth headphone audio was very quiet. Worse, simply holding your hand over the top right side of the phone would cut the signal. Oppo issued an update during the review period that seems to have fixed audio volume, but the Bluetooth signal still cuts out fairly easily. It’s not as bad as it was before the update, but it’s not as stable as it should be.

Charging at the speed of 65 Watts

Oppo Find X2 Pro Charging 1

Though I like a lot of things about the Oppo Find X2 Pro, the 65W charging is probably my favorite feature. I’ll have to see how it affects battery life over time, but the ability to top off the phone in a little over 30 minutes is incredible. In my testing, the phone charged from 2% to 52% in 15 minutes and up to 92% in 30 minutes. That’s fast. Really fast.

Overall, battery life on this device was decent. If I unplugged the phone around 10am it would die around 8:30am the next morning, barring that I didn’t charge it throughout the day. While this isn’t earth-shattering battery life, it is solid considering I had the display set at 120Hz and Quad HD+. The battery has a capacity of 4,260mAh, which is significantly smaller than the 5,000mAh cell on the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra, and probably leads to the slightly worse battery life.

That said, if you’re able to charge the phone for even 15 minutes at some point during the day, you should be safe. You could easily top off your battery completely in the time it takes to freshen up at home before an evening out.

65W charging feels like a game-changer.

Sadly, there is no wireless charging on this phone. Oppo says there is no need to have a lower-voltage charging option when the phone charges at 65W, but I say having the option would have been nice, especially on a phone that costs this much.

ColorOS is way better now

Oppo Find X2 Pro screen on couch 1

The last Oppo phone I reviewed was the Oppo Find X. At the time, ColorOS was, simply put, not good. The skin was the phone’s biggest downside. It felt extremely cluttered and unintuitive. Like many Chinese UIs, it just wasn’t made for western users.

When my colleague Ryan Thomas told me ColorOS 7 completely changed his outlook on the software, I was intrigued. To my surprise, it’s every bit as good as he let it on to be.

Oppo Find X2 UI 1
Oppo Find X2 UI 2
Oppo Find X2 UI 3

ColorOS 7.1 feels very similar to Oxygen OS. It’s simplistic and customizable. It lets you change icons, opt for an app drawer, and provides helpful features like easy screen recording. ColorOS has become one of my favorite Android skins in the course of one version update.

The cameras are great

Oppo Find X2 Pro camera module macro

The Oppo Find X2 Pro includes three cameras. The main lens uses the Sony IMX689 sensor, a 48MP shooter that is an update to the popular Sony IMX586 from last year. It bins down by a factor of four to 12MP. Though it doesn’t match the 108MP sensor on the S20 Ultra, the individual pixel size of the X2 Pro is larger. Binned pixels are a bit smaller, but that could be a good thing in this case. The S20 Ultra’s main sensor was almost too shallow, making photos of an object taken close up fall out of focus. The Oppo Find X2 doesn’t suffer from this problem, but it still has a very nice focus falloff. If you’re taking photos of things at a close distance, portrait mode isn’t necessary with this sensor.

Oppo Find X2 Pro review sample images WEBSITE 26
Oppo Find X2 Pro review sample images WEBSITE 39

Color, detail, and sharpness are excellent on this lens. Dynamic range is very good, though slightly more aggressive than I would generally like on a smartphone. Overall though, I am very impressed with this camera.

Oppo Find X2 Pro review sample images WEBSITE 16

The wide-angle sensor is a 48MP Sony IMX586. This lens shows little distortion, which is very nice to see on a smartphone. Color and sharpness are also quite good.

Oppo Find X2 Pro review sample images WEBSITE 40
Oppo Find X2 Pro review sample images WEBSITE 41
Oppo Find X2 Pro review sample images WEBSITE 42
Oppo Find X2 Pro review sample images WEBSITE 43

The 5x prism telephoto lens is where things get interesting. This is a tighter optical zoom than the Galaxy S20 Ultra, which only has a 4x optical telephoto lens. The Find X2 Pro can hybrid zoom up to 10x, then digital crop to 60x. At 5x and 10x though, the quality is excellent. Like the S20 Ultra, 60x isn’t good quality, but it was surprisingly useful if you need to read text from far away.

Oppo Find X2 Pro review sample images WEBSITE 1
Oppo Find X2 Pro review sample images WEBSITE 36

The selfie camera on this phone is 32MP binned down to 8MP, and while color is good, images come out a bit soft. This doesn’t seem to do be due to face softening as you’ll see on other phones, but the images always look a bit out of focus, like the shutter didn’t fire quite fast enough

These are just a few of the sample images I took during my time with the device. If you want to view them all in full resolution, I’ve uploaded a drive folder here.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnfm3tugOWU?autoplay=0&autohide=2border=0&wmode=opaque&enablejsapi=1rel=0&controls=1&showinfo=1&w=100&h=100]

As for video capture, the Oppo Find X2 Pro produced really nice colors and good dynamic range. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 does allow for 8k video recording, but for some reason, Oppo didn’t enable it. The highest quality you can record on this phone is 4k at 60fps. You can also do up to 10x video capture with optical image stabilization which leads to a nice image.

Oppo Find X2 Pro specs

Display 6.7-inch Ultra Vision AMOLED
QHD+ resolution (3,168 x 1,440)
Punch-Hole camera in top left corner
120Hz refresh rate
6.7-inch Ultra Vision AMOLED
QHD+ resolution (3,168 x 1,440)
Punch-Hole camera in top left corner
120Hz refresh rate
Processor Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 Qualcomm Snapdragon 865
RAM 12GB 12GB
Storage 256GB UFS 3.0 512GB UFS 3.0
Cameras Rear:
-48MP primary
-13MP telephoto
-48MP ultra-wide

Front:
-32MP sensor

Rear:
-48MP primary
-13MP telephoto
-12MP ultra-wide

5x optical zoom, 10x hybrid zoom, 60x digital zoom

Front:
-32MP sensor

Battery 4,200mAh
65W fast wired charging
4,260mAh
65W fast wired charging
Audio Dolby Atmos stereo speakers
No headphone jack
Dolby Atmos stereo speakers
No headphone jack
Safety IP68 water resistance IP54 water resistance
Security Optical in-display fingerprint, face unlock Optical in-display fingerprint, face unlock
Operating System Android 10 skinned with ColorOS 7.1 Android 10 skinned with ColorOS 7.1
Dimensions Ceramic: 164.9mm x 74.5mm x 8.0mm, 196g
Glass: 164.9mm x 74.5mm x 8.0mm,
Ceramic: 165.2mm x 74.4mm x 8.8mm, 207g
Vegan Leather: 165.2mm x 74.4mm x 9.5mm
Weight 187g 200g
5G? Sub-6 Sub-6

Oppo Find X2 Pro review: Should you buy it?

Oppo Find X2 Pro back standing up

Should you buy this phone? The short answer is, it depends. At  €1,199, the Find X2 Pro is nearly the same price as the expensive Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra. If you’re deciding between these two devices, I’d personally go for the find X2 Pro. I like it quite a bit more, especially the 65W fast charging and functional autofocus system. If you’re looking for something cheaper, there are an enormous number of options available to you, such as the OnePlus 7T.

If you’re really into the design of the Find X2 Pro, you can get most of its performance from the €200-cheaper Oppo Find X2. That device costs €999, and the only differences are less storage, a slightly smaller battery, IP53 water and dust resistance, a lower-resolution 12MP wide-angle camera, and no periscope telephoto lens. You also can’t get leather with this model. Instead, it comes in ceramic and glass.

If you want to blow some money, the Oppo Find X2 Pro will also come in a Lamborghini edition for around €1,660. All three Find X2 devices will be available from early May.

Are you interested in the Oppo Find X2 or Find X2 Pro? Is it too expensive for its own good? Let us know in the comments down below!



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