adm Top specs with a top-end price tag
Short review
In 2019 Oppo released the stylish Reno 10x Zoom, but the company has managed to make that phone look comparatively boring in 2020 with the Oppo Find X2 Pro, which sets a new high bar for good-looking phones from the company.
The Oppo Find X2 Pro is a slightly-specced-up sibling to the Oppo Find X2, which in turn is a successor to the Find X from 2018. Oppo seems to have maxed-out almost every feature of its new phone, from the display and camera tech to the sleek design, making it a true premium contender to rival the OnePlus 8 Pro or Samsung Galaxy S20 Plus.
The display is perhaps the key selling point of the phone, with a big size, high resolution and fast refresh rate, and a few other pieces of tech that make it one of the best screens you’ll find on a phone right now. These good looks are mirrored in the design: this is a sleek phone with a curved screen and a back made of either ceramic or a faux leather leather.
Oppo is making strides in the camera department too, combining top hardware (including some of the proven tech from its previous devices) with software that’s coming close to rivalling that of Samsung’s or Apple’s in terms of post-processing and optimization smarts.
In fact it’s pretty hard to think of any obvious drawbacks to this phone – other than its price, which will shock people who know Oppo for its mid-range and budget handsets. The display tech can drain the battery rather quickly, and there’s no wireless charging, but these are drawbacks that many users won’t care about, if they notice them at all.
The Oppo Find X2 Pro, then, is Oppo’s magnum opus, and the handset that will represent the company with distinction when the dust settles on 2020 and we compare the year’s flagships.
Oppo Find X2 Pro price
The Oppo Find X2 Pro came to the UK and some other countries in June 2020, and we’ve been told that it’ll be released in Australia too. We haven’t heard if it’ll be released in the US too, but since Oppo phones haven’t previously been released in the States, we’d expect that to be the case here too.
As we’ve noted, The Oppo Find X2 Pro is a pricey phone, and you’ll pay £1,099 / AU$1,599 (about $1,450) for the privilege of owning it. For context, the Oppo Reno 10x Zoom was a lot cheaper at £699 / AU$1,199 (about $889), and that was the most top-end Reno phone when the Find X2 Pro was launched.
That makes the Find X2 Pro phone pricier in certain regions than the OnePlus 8 Pro, which costs $999 / £899 (around AU$1,700) for its priciest variant, and the Huawei P40 Pro, at £899 / AU$1,599 (around $1,100).
Design
The Oppo Find X2 Pro is a fairly large phone, as its dimensions are 165.2 x 74.4 x 8.8mm, however as those dimensions show it’s pretty long and thin, so it doesn’t feel too big. Well, those are the measurements of the ceramic version of the phone, but you can also get it in a faux leather finish, which is slightly thicker at 9.5mm.
This is the version we tested out, and it feels truly premium, as it’s easier to grip and more comfortable in the hand than the typical glass most devices are made of.
The ceramic version of the phone has a black rear, whereas the faux leather model is orange with gold highlights. Our review handset was the latter version, as pictured, and we think it looks pretty stylish. There’s also a gray faux leather Lamborghini Edition if you want your phone bedecked in car logos, although we couldn’t actually find which regions this is available in.
While the faux leather version is thicker than the ceramic version it’s also 17g lighter, at 200g.
On the back of the phone is a fairly long, but not particularly prominent, camera bump housing the lens array. On the right-hand edge of the device are the volume rocker and power button, while the USB-C port is on the bottom – there’s no 3.5mm headphone jack here, which may irk users of wired headphones.
For a phone of this size, the buttons are fairly low down on the side, making them easy to reach no matter how large or small your hands are.
The phone is IP68 protected, so it’s safe from dust and water to a high degree.
Wow this screen is good
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.
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.
Camera
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Battery life
The Oppo Find X2 Pro has a 4,260mAh battery, which would normally be pretty standard for a premium smartphone; however, the aforementioned screen tech seems to take its toll, and battery life isn’t fantastic as a result.
Generally, with light use, the phone would last us around a day, although if we were to push it to its limits and game with it, or spend lots of time enjoying the 120Hz scrolling through social media, or shoot a lot of video, then we’d need to charge the phone part-way through the day.
The Oppo Find X2 Pro’s charging speeds make up for its shortcomings in terms of stamina though – the company’s 65W VOOC charging system is startlingly snappy, and at the time of writing it’s the fastest charging speed available on a phone, matched only by another Oppo handset.
When we charged the phone for just 20 minutes from empty it got to 74% power, and it was fully charged after only 35 minutes. The phone didn’t get very warm in this time either, as other phones with fast-charging systems can. It seems, then, that the Find X2 Pro is a great choice for people who just want to top their phone up now and again, rather than having to plug it in for extended periods.
There’s no wireless charging here, however, which is surprising given that almost all top-end smartphones offer this feature, and is likely down to the phone’s rear material given faux leather or ceramic doesn’t conduct power as well as glass. This is perhaps the most glaring hole in the Find X2 Pro’s line-up of features.
Performance
The Oppo Find X2 Pro lives up to its ‘premium smartphone’ billing in the specs and performance department, as the phone is packed with the very best internals that were available when it launched.
The chipset is the Snapdragon 865 from Qualcomm, the top processor available to Android phones at time of release, and which is also found in the OnePlus 8, Xiaomi Mi 10 and certain Samsung Galaxy S20 units (depending on region). This is teamed with 12GB RAM, the most you’ll find on any non-Samsung phone.
When we put the Oppo FInd X2 Pro through a benchmark test it returned a multi-core score of 3295, which is high for an Android phone. In fact, that score beats the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra and Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro, with only the OnePlus 8 Pro, Motorola Edge Plus and iPhone 11 devices achieving better results.Advertisement
This shows the Oppo phone has some top-tier processing speeds, and our experience with the phone backs this up: apps were quick to load, top-end games ran with no issues, and we were able to record plenty of 4K video without the phone chugging. So it seems that whether you’re looking for a great gaming phone, or a handset that will enable you to capture and edit impressive looking videos or photos on the fly, the Find X2 Pro would be a great option.
The chipset is paired with a 5G modem, making this Oppo’s joint-second 5G phone after the Oppo Reno 5G (joint with the non-Pro phone). Most recent top-end smartphones are 5G-compatible, so this isn’t exactly groundbreaking, but if you’re buying a new smartphone in 2020 it makes sense to pick up a 5G model if you want something future-proof.
The phone runs the latest Android 10 operating system, with Oppo’s custom ColorOS UI laid over the top. The main differences here are aesthetic, and whether you prefer this UI to another will be down to personal taste.
Unlike most other third-party UIs, ColorOS lets you customize the shape of icons as well as their size, as well as the background layout and other elements, which is a neat addition that we appreciated.
Other perks include an always-on display that’s more vibrant than those on some other devices, snappy gesture navigation, and a useful real-time network speed indicator in the notification bar that lets you see how fast your internet connection really is. There’s also barely any bloatware – we wish Xiaomi would take a leaf out of Oppo’s book here.
Something worth noting if you regularly use your phone entertainment is that the Oppo Find X2 Pro has dual stereo speakers, one down by the USB-C port and another at the top of the screen. This audio setup makes gaming, listening to music and watching content a treat, and the speakers are pretty good quality, although not as good as those on certain competitors, and at top volumes they could sound a little tinny.
