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If you want a quick way to illustrate how good Chinese phones have been in recent years, try comparing the Oppo Find X2 Pro with its predecessor. Find X 2018 was a technically ambitious device that combined a still unique motorized slider design with a still rare 3D face unlock system and quirky software.
Find X2 Pro does none of that. Instead, it’s just an incredibly good phone.
Make no mistake, Oppo points directly to the heart of Samsung here. The € 1,099 ($ 1,180) Find X2 Pro rivals the high-end Galaxy S20 phones in design, speed, features, cameras, and price – and in many ways I think it stands out. If you live in a country with a competitive market for Android phones, that is, not in the US. USA, you should take it very seriously, although for me it has only one defect that breaks an agreement.
Good material
- Eye-catching design
- Beautiful display
- Large and versatile cameras
Bad things
- No wireless charging
- Not available in the US USA
- Expensive
As is often the case with Oppo’s flagship phones, the Find X2 Pro shares a lot in common with the The latest high-end OnePlus model, because the two brands share a common supply and ownership chain under a larger Chinese conglomerate. This time, however, that doesn’t extend at all to the design of the phones: the OnePlus 8 Pro is pedestrianized, while the Find X2 Pro is unlike anything else.
My review unit, which is the most popular in Oppo marketing, has a vegan gold and orange vegan leather finish that immediately catches your eye. (There are also ceramic models, but this is clearly the one.) Oppo’s gold logo on the back evokes a luxury bag more than a smartphone. “Vegan leather” is a marketing term for polyurethane, sure, it won’t have a patina over time and it doesn’t smell like anything, but the textured finish really feels great and helps make the Find X2 Pro the smartest phone I ever have. I’ve seen all year.
As good as any screen you’ve seen on a phone
The same goes for the screen, which is very similar to the OnePlus 8 Pro, if not the same part. It’s a 6.7-inch 3168 x 1440 curved OLED panel with a refresh rate of 120Hz, and it’s as good as any screen you’ve ever seen on a phone. It’s striking, accurate, and complete, with subtle curves, a great on-screen fingerprint scanner, and a small cutout for a 32-megapixel selfie camera that turns out to be a minimal distraction.
Curved displays aren’t for everyone, but I had no problem with unwanted touches, and there is less vignetting effect on light backgrounds than you get from more dramatic “waterfall” displays. Like the OnePlus 8 Pro, the Find X2 Pro uses hardware-based image processing for HDR and motion smoothing, and although I left it out most of the time, the scale seemed useful to me sometimes for things like watching sports. (Do you remember watching sports?)
The Find X2 Pro also matches the OnePlus 8 Pro at a key selling point – you can run it with both its full 1440p resolution and 120Hz refresh rate, while Samsung’s S20 phones make you choose one or the other. Both of these characteristics are the kinds of things you don’t know what you’re missing until they’re in front of you. I think 1080p phone screens look good, but I can certainly notice the difference in sharpness with 1440p, particularly when compared to 1080p scaled to a 1440p panel. Meanwhile, there is no going back from 120Hz.
I’ve been leaving them both on, then, and while you think this could set the battery life on fire, that hasn’t been the case for me. Unlike the Galaxy S20, the Find X2 Pro dynamically adjusts the refresh rate based on the content on the screen, which helps with power consumption. And while our current circumstances don’t lend themselves as well to prolonged use of heavy phones away from a charger, I’ve been getting reasonable performance for around five hours of screen time.
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That’s fine as long as you remember plugging it in every night, but that brings me to my biggest criticism of the Find X2 Pro: its lack of wireless charging. This may sound very difficult for anyone using a phone without it right now, but it is a great pain to go back exclusively to wired charging when you have dotted wireless chargers around the house. Particularly now, when I’m barely out, battery life isn’t a total issue for any of the other phones I use because if they’re not in my hand, they’re charging on my desk. That’s not the case with the Find X2 Pro, which simply shuts down and slowly consumes power every time I leave it.
Oppo’s answer is that the Find X2 Pro has super fast wired charging, which is true. The patented 65W SuperVOOC 2.0 system fills the 4,260 mAh battery from zero to 100 percent in 38 minutes, which means you at least don’t have to keep the phone connected to the charger for long.
Back to the good: Find X2 Pro cameras are great. Based on last year’s excellent Reno 10x Zoom, there is a second-generation 13-megapixel 5x periscope camera here along with Sony’s new and larger 48-megapixel sensor for the main camera and an ultra wide-angle that uses the IMX586 from 48 megapixels from Sony last year. It’s a versatile setup that delivers consistently good results, though without necessarily forcing the kind of machine learning magic tricks that Google and Huawei trade with. In my eyes, the photos look “neutral plus one”, as if some solid but flat preset JPEG files have been given an additional notch of vitality. Night mode is good, hybrid zoom can be used up to 20x or so, and the ultra-wide camera is much better than most others.
Everything else about the Find X2 Pro varies from excellent to par for the course. Haptics are very good. Stereo speakers are fine. Oppo’s ColorOS 7.1 has been greatly improved over previous versions, with a simplified design and fast animations. The phone’s performance is as good as one would expect from a Snapdragon 865 and 12GB of RAM. There is no headphone jack. The included USB-C headphones are decent. Really, there’s nothing in this phone that doesn’t scream “expensive high-end flagship” in every respect, aside from the lack of wireless charging.
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Oppo is a major player in the major non-US markets for a reason, and the Find X2 Pro is its most compelling device yet. This would absolutely be my main phone if I could stick it on a Qi pad, and it feels worthy of its € 1,099 ($ 1,180) price. That makes it a direct challenge for the Galaxy S20 Plus, which doesn’t have a periscope telephoto camera. (For that, it would have to go up to the € 1,349 / $ 1,399 S20 Ultra.)
The comparison to the OnePlus 8 Pro in Europe is a little less flattering. That phone starts at € 919 ($ 995), though the base model has 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, while the Find X2 Pro is only available in a 12GB / 512GB configuration. The OnePlus 8 Pro also doesn’t have a periscope telephoto camera. But it has wireless charging.
I don’t mean to over-emphasize wireless charging because I know a lot of people don’t mind. It’s just that it really is my only significant criticism of the Find X2 Pro. This is a phone as premium and functional as anything else in the world, and I think it’s only a matter of time before Oppo gets more widespread brand recognition.
Photograph by Sam Byford / The Verge
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