Oppo Find X3 Pro
Expensive, but the Find X3 Pro is a formidable flagship with a stupendous screen and set of cameras
SCORE
PRICE £916 (£1,099 inc VAT) from oppostore.co.uk
The Oppo name is still littleknown in the UK, but this Chinese colossus is now the fourth-biggest phone maker in the world. While it produces phones of all shapes, sizes and prices, the Find X3 Pro is its flagship: and this handset i is just as well-formed as anything Apple App or Samsung can muster.
It’s definitely one of the most striking phones I’ve reviewed, with a mirrored glass back and rounded sides that encase the Find X3 Pro Pro’s s iPhone-like camera cluster. With soft curves around the edge of the slim camera bump, it’s really quite lovely to behold.
This styling continues to the front, where the screen curves slightly around the left and right edges of the handset, with a generous screen-to-body ratio of 92.7%. Oppo positions the 32MP front camera in a small pinhole in the top-left corner of the screen, and a fingerprint scanner at the bottom.
It’s a rugged little thing as well, with an IP68 rating for dust and water ingress and layers of Gorilla Glass 5 on the front and back. Considering all this glass, it’s also relatively thin and light, weighing 193g and measuring 8.26mm deep.
The Find X3 Pro also includes one of the finest screens around: this 6.78in AMOLED panel includes a 120Hz refresh rate and 3,216 x 1,440 (QHD+) resolution. This gives it a quite ridiculous pixel density of 525ppi.
As it’s a 10-bit panel I wasn’t surprised to see superb colour coverage, with four profiles available. “Gentle” mode is the most accurate, with an average
Delta E of 1.01, but its colours are more subdued: it covers 95% of the sRGB gamut with a total volume of 97%. Vivid sacrifices accuracy but covers 96% of the
DCI-P3 gamut with a volume of 102%. The screen is also bright in sunlight, peaking at 556cd/m², and note that it boasts HDR10+ certification for the punchiest possible images when playing back films.
The third phone I’ve reviewed with the new Snapdragon 888 inside, the Find X3 Pro has 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage (which can’t be expanded via a microSD card). I was expecting similar performance in Geekbench 5 to the Snapdragon 888-sporting Xiaomi Mi 11 ( see issue 319, p68), but its results were a closer match to the previousgeneration Snapdragon 865. In practice, however, you won’t notice the difference; it’s still very, very fast.
The Find X3 Pro really starts to shine in games. In the GFXBench off-screen Manhattan 3 test, the Adreno 660 GPU achieved an average frame rate of 172fps. If you download a game that supports high-refresh screens, you should easily hit frame rates above 100fps.
Where this phone falls behinds some flagships is for battery life, lasting 17hrs 11mins in our videorundown test. But it doesn’t need
“If you’re willing to take a step off the well-trodden path, you’ll be rewarded with the very best Android can muster, bar none”
LEFT The camera housing protrudes organically from the Gorilla Glass rear long ng to recharge. With support for 65W 5W fast charging, it goes from zero to o full in only 35 minutes.
The Find X3 Pro uses a quadcamera amera array, which consists of a pair air of 50MP Sony IMX766 sensors (one one is the main camera and the other is a 110˚ ultrawide), as well as a 13MP 3x x optical zoom lens. The fourth camera amera is an oddity. This 3MP (f/3.0) “Microlens” Microlens” allows for up to 60x magnification at close distances, and is used as a semi-microscope to capture apture intricate images of random objects bjects such as single pixels on a TV or strands rands of fabric in a blanket.
The rest of the cameras are exceptional. xceptional. The main 50MP (f/1.8) camera amera captures images with an abundance bundance of detail, with well-judged HDR DR and plenty of contrast. It beats eats the iPhone 12 Pro ( see issue 316, p72 72) in some aspects, with more accurate ccurate shadows and a neutral colour olour palette in low-light conditions. I have no complaints about the ultrawide ltrawide and zoom cameras, either. The he 50MP (f/2.4) ultrawide captures plenty lenty of detail – as does the telephoto sensor, ensor, even at the maximum 5x zoom range.
When it comes to video, the Find X3 Pro can record at 4K resolution at 60fps with optical and electronic image stabilisation enabled. There’s no 8K video option, although I’m willing to bet that you don’t already own an 8K TV or monitor so this feature feels moot right now.
The Find X3 Pro is yet another high-priced tour de force and a further example that there’s no need to stick with the mainstream to get your flagship fix. If you’re willing to take a step off the well-trodden path, you’ll be rewarded with the very best Android phone around, bar none.
The question is whether people will be willing to pay this much for a brand they aren’t familiar with, which is why Oppo would have done well to undercut the price of the iPhone 12 Pro. More attention should have been paid to battery life too, rather than simply relying on fast charging speeds. Despite that nagging flaw, the Oppo Find X3 Pro is a mighty fine phone.
Eight-core 2.8GHz Qualcomm SM8350 Snapdragon 888 12GB RAM Adreno 660 graphics 6.7in 120Hz AMOLED screen, 1,440 x 3,216 resolution 256GB storage quad 50MP/50MP/13MP/3MP rear cameras 32MP front camera Wi-Fi 5 Bluetooth 5.2 5G NFC USB-C connector 4,500mAh battery Android 11 74 x 8.3 x 163.6mm (WDH) 193g 1yr warranty