Oppo Find X2 Pro
Price: £1,099 from fave.co/2ANcsj1
The Find X2 Pro is nothing more than a statement of intent from Oppo. With Galaxy S20 Ultrarivalling specs – and a price tag to match – this is a company saying: we don’t just make good phones. Or great phones. We make the best phones.
And honestly? It’s not far off. Spec for spec there aren’t many phones out there that can match it, while the design feels premium – if a little pedestrian by Oppo’s usual standards, orange leather aside.
This is undoubtedly one of the best Android phones on the market, so the only question that really remains
is whether anyone in the UK and Europe is really willing to spend as much as they would on a Samsung or Apple flagship for a phone from a Chinese brand they may never have heard of before.
Design
The Find X2 Pro looks great. But it also looks like most other 2020 flagship phones, so don’t expect anything wild like the company’s early forays into pop-up cameras and the like.
You get a big 6.7in curved display with a pinhole selfie camera in the top left, and on the rear the cameras are laid out in a vertical strip, also in the corner. The phone has an IP68 rating, so should be safe from both water and dust.
The main thing that is notable is the finish. You can buy the phone in a standard dark grey ceramic, but our review unit is the much more exciting orange vegan leather option. This isn’t the first phone to use a pleather finish, but we wish more would: it adds a welcome grippiness to the rear, avoids the risk of smashing, and looks a little different to everything else out there.
The vegan leather model does run a little thicker, but lighter, and at 9.5mm and 200g it definitely feels chunky, though not unmanageably so. It also comes with a small Oppo logo in a gold-coloured metal tag on the back, a mildly blingy touch I’d rather the company had left out.
Orange pleather aside, the Find X2 Pro essentially looks good but forgettable. There’s nothing really to criticise here, but not a lot to make it stand out in a
competitive crowd. And it should go without saying, but if you’re not a fan of big phones you should absolutely look elsewhere.
Display
Speaking of size, we’ve naturally got the 6.7in display to blame for that. But honestly? We can forgive it when the display is this damn good.
The AMOLED screen has a resolution of 1,440x3,168 and supports HDR-10, displays over a billion colours, and runs at a blistering 120Hz refresh rate – the same as Samsung’s Galaxy S20 series.
Just a few weeks ago I declared the Galaxy S20’s display to be the best you could buy, but already it’s been supplanted by Oppo’s That’s not least because unlike the S20 it will let you run the phone with both max resolution and the 120Hz refresh rate
simultaneously, making this both the crispest and smoothest screen around at the same time.
The hit to battery life luckily isn’t too bad – more on that later – but if you’re worried you can also set each to an auto option, which will dynamically adjust refresh rate and resolution to suit the current content, ensuring it only uses up the extra battery when you’ll actually see a benefit.
The screen is bright, with vivid colour and fantastic dynamic range. Oppo’s ‘01 Ultra Vision Engine’ chips in to boost both frame rate and colour gamut on compatible video content, though even without its help most things will look great on this phone just by virtue of the display itself. It’s curved on the sides, but fortunately not to the extreme extent of more recent ‘waterfall’ displays from the likes of Vivo or Huawei. It still feels comfortable to use, with impressive palmrejection, so you can enjoy the look of the curved panel without sacrificing usability along the way.
Cameras
If Oppo has gone all out on the Find X2 Pro’s display, it’s just as committed to the camera.
On the back you’ll find a triple camera set-up: a 48Mp f/1.7 main camera with a custom IMX689 Sony sensor that’s capable of taking shots with 12-bit colour – more than can even be fully displayed on the screen.
It’s joined by a second 48Mp lens, using the older IMX586 sensor and f/2.2, which serves as a wide angle. Then you get a 13Mp f/3.0 periscope lens that delivers roughly 5x optical zoom and up to 10x hybrid, capping out at 30x zoom overall.
Photos from the main sensor are bright and vivid, with excellent colour depth and dynamic range, but without the over-saturation that plagues many rival Android devices. Essentially if you want crisp, detailed shots that feel true-to-life rather than over-stylized, the Find X2 Pro will be one of the best options around.
The wide angle delivers solid results, but between the aperture and the different sensor it’s clear that this is still not on a par with the main sensor for detail and
vibrancy – so don’t expect similar results just because of the common megapixel counts. Still, the extra detail is welcome for landscapes, and should pay off in macro shots too.
Finally, that zoom lens. This isn’t Oppo’s first foray into extreme zoom – the Reno 10x Zoom got there last year – but it remains one of the best around. Capping digital zoom at 30x is a smart way to avoid the distraction those very lossy images provide, and instead makes it easier to focus on how great the camera performs at up to 10x. Yes, images lack the phenomenal colour range that the main camera can deliver, but the detail captured here remains really remarkable, and at least on a par with what Samsung delivered in the S20 Ultra. I still don’t know how often most people will use periscope lenses like this, but if you want to the Oppo undeniably delivers.
There’s the usual night mode and portrait options. The former is a solid effort, though I did find that
it tended to overblow light sources, and especially struggled with realistic night skies. It’s good, but far from the best. Portrait mode is also hit-and-miss – the edge detection is pretty spot on, but you lose a lot in dynamic range, especially from the 32Mp f/2.4 selfie lens.
As for video, the big downside is that there’s no 8K recording support here, but I honestly don’t think that will matter to most people – and even on phones that do support 8K, it’s really not good enough yet to miss it much here. Otherwise there’s the usual features, including image stabilization, and the now fairly common option for portrait mode video.
Performance
Just about every other spec on the Find X2 Pro is predictably top-tier. You get the flagship Snapdragon 865 processor along with 12GB of DDR5 RAM and 512GB of ultra fast storage.
The result is blisteringly fast performance across basically anything you’d hope to use it for, including the fastest multi-core processing performance we’ve seen on any Android phone yet – though the Exynosequipped Galaxy S20 phones do beat it at simpler single-core tasks.
Geekbench 5 (multi-core)
Oppo Find X2 Pro: 3,295 Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra: 2,646 Google Pixel 4 XL: 2,435 OnePlus 7T Pro: 2,732 Huawei P40: 3,140
GFXBench Manhattan (fps)
Oppo Find X2 Pro: 58 Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra: 59 Google Pixel 4 XL: 45 OnePlus 7T Pro: 54 Huawei P40: 60
GFXBench T-Rex (fps)
Oppo Find X2 Pro: 60 Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra: 86 Google Pixel 4 XL: 74 OnePlus 7T Pro: 60 Huawei P40: 60
Battery life (hours)
Oppo Find X2 Pro: 8.44 Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra: 8.2 Google Pixel 4 XL: 11.04 OnePlus 7T Pro: 9.17 Huawei P40: 11
Beyond the core internals, you get the likes of stereo speakers, Wi-Fi 6, 5G, NFC, and an optical in-display fingerprint sensor that’s one of the most reliable I’ve used yet.
Battery
Power and charging are two of Oppo’s standout strengths, and the Find X2 Pro doesn’t disappoint here. Even with both 120Hz refresh rate and QHD resolution the 4,260mAh battery comfortably made it to the end of the day, every day, and if you turn
those down (or just switch to the more efficient auto settings) this will last even longer, though won’t quite be a two-day device.
Charging is even more impressive. This is the first phone Oppo has released in the West with its 65-watt wired fast charging, which actually involves splitting the battery into two cells so that it can be charged fast enough.
Oppo claims that the phone will reach a full charge in 35 minutes – and since I got it to 97 percent in our standard 30 minutes charging test (from empty, with the phone off) I’m inclined to believe it.
Setting numbers aside, this is a game-changer in terms of fast-charging – you can now genuinely plug your phone in for ten minutes and get most of a day’s charge back in return, completely removing the need to worry about plugging it in overnight or stressing about lugging battery packs around with you.
The only downside? There’s no wireless charging at all, as Oppo says it couldn’t include Qi support without compromising on those wired speeds.
Software
Finally, software. If you haven’t tried it, Oppo’s ColorOS is one of the better Android skins out there, and the best by far from the Chinese big three: Oppo, Xiaomi, and Huawei. There’s a fairly clean, angular design to the icons and OS settings, but more importantly there’s a huge amount of customisability here. For example, you can set not only the home screen style and number of app icons, but the icon style can also be tweaked to a really granular level, right down to whether the corners
are rounded or how much of the icon box each app logo takes up.
If there’s a fault it’s that there’s so much control that some of the settings menus become a confusion of sliders, toggles and settings, enough so that even Android experts might find the array of options daunting. That’s mostly forgiveable on this phone at least, which is pretty much targeting power users anyway. Beyond that this is mostly a pretty typical Android 10 set-up, with the usual array of digital well-being options and eye care modes, along with a schedulable dark mode – still not guaranteed on Android devices, so welcome here.
Verdict
The Oppo Find X2 Pro is a phenomenal phone by any measure. It packs the best display you’ll find in any
phone right now and backs it up with the fastest wired charging around and a top-tier camera.
You’ll have to live without wireless charging, and the choice between bland grey or garish orange leather might leave some shoppers struggling to find a design that suits their style.
For pure performance though, the Find X2 Pro can’t be beat right now – you’ll just have to be willing to pay the price for it. Dominic Preston
Specifications
• 6.7in (3,168x1,440; 513ppi) AMOLED capacitive touchscreen
• Android 10, ColorOS 7.1
• Qualcomm SM8250 Snapdragon 865 (7nm+) processor
• Octa-core (1x 2.84GHz Kryo 585 & 3x 2.42GHz Kryo 585, 4x 1.8GHz Kryo 585) CPU
• Adreno 650 GPU
• 12GB RAM
• 256GB/512GB storage
• Three rear-facing cameras: 48Mp, f/1.7, 25mm (wide), 1/1.43in, 1.12μm, omnidirectional PDAF, Laser AF, OIS; 13Mp, f/3.0, 129mm (periscope telephoto), 1/3.4in, 1.0μm, 5x optical zoom, PDAF, OIS; 48Mp, f/2.2, 17mm (ultra wide), 1/2.0in, 0.8μm, AF
• Selfie camera: 32Mp, f/2.4, (wide), 1/2.8”, 0.8μm
• 802.11a/b/g/n/ac/6 Wi-Fi dual-band
• Bluetooth 5.0, A2DP, LE
• GPS with dual-band A-GPS, GLONASS, BDS, GALILEO
• NFC
• USB 3.1, Type-C 1.0 reversible connector, USB On-The-Go
• Fingerprint scanner (under the display)
• Non-removable 4,260mAh lithium-polymer battery
• 165.2x74.4x8.8mm
• 217g