Oppo Find X

LOOK MA, NO NOTCH!

WITH EVERY VENDOR trying its darndest to reduce the notch size at the top of the screen, Oppo is the first we’ve seen to eliminate it altogether. The Find X whittles away the bezels typically found around the display, resulting in an unprecedented 93.8% screen ratio.

Oppo has managed this trickery by housing the front and rear cameras on a panel behind the phone, and this slides up quickly and smoothly whenever you launch the camera app or need to unlock your phone using the 3D facial recognition system. The dual 20MP and 16MP cameras on the rear are decent, but won’t blow your hair back like the Google and Huawei phones. Movement and low-light scenes in particular see them struggle to capture a sharp pic, and they have a tendency to over-sharpen photos at the expense of detail.

In other respects, the Find X is a corker of a phone. The glossy, pebble-like exterior feels great (albeit slippery) in the hand, and the bright 6.4-inch AMOLED display is a dream for watching Netflix and YouTube. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processor paired with 8GB of RAM returned an outstanding performance, going toe-to-toe with the Razer Phone for gaming but behind the Apple, Samsung and Huawei for everyday computing. Battery life was also great, with a hefty 3,730mAh battery that lasted us the whole day and into the next.

There are a few features that have been left off the menu, namely waterproofing, wireless charging, and oddly NFC (which means no tap-and-pay for mobile banking apps). And while we’re nit-picking, the haptic feedback from the software keyboard makes the screen vibrate unpleasantly (although you can turn it off), and it’s still running the older Android 8 Oreo operating system.