Oppo Find X2 Pro Review: The X’tra Fast Flagship

When Oppo launched the original Find X series in 2018, it caught the eyes of many for the ahead-of-its-time design language. Perhaps the specifications, which were flagship level, were the most boring part of the smartphone.

Two years down the line, Oppo has brought the second generation of the Find X series, namely the Find X2 5G and the Find X2 Pro 5G. This time around, the company has opted for a more-practical design considering the feedback it has received from several users.

The Find X2 series focuses on ticking the right boxes that are required to be eligible for a flagship recommendation. The six pillars mainly include the design, display, cameras, processor, battery, and software.

We have been using the Find X2 Pro 5G for more than a week. If we were to keep it short, Oppo’s latest and greatest flagship is one of our favourite smartphones so far in 2020. Why do we say so? Read more to know.

OPPO FIND X2 PRO REVIEW

Upon looking at the Find X2 Pro, you will notice the Eye-catching Design it offers, and when you hold it, you are bound to get a premium vibe. Internationally, the Find X2 Pro comes in two variants — Vegan Leather and Black Ceramic. Only the latter is being made available in India, and we wish if Oppo also brought the Orange colour option that it sells in select markets.

The Black Ceramic variant has a glossy mirror-like finish on the back. To complement its premium aesthetic, Oppo has ensured that the branding and other details are very minimal and blend in with the colour. The branding is so subtle that you may not even notice it in the first place. What you will see is that thick camera bump on the back. It packs some solid hardware with big sensors that take in a lot of space on the inside, hence the bump. Even with the case packed with the smartphone, the device will rock on flat surfaces, but you will at least protect it from the fingerprint smudges on the glossy back panel.

At the bottom edge, you get the USB Type-C port sandwiched between the speaker grille and the dual SIM-tray. The right edge houses a power button, whereas the volume keys are positioned on the left edge. Despite the tall 19.8:9 aspect ratio, you can easily reach out to these keys.

Worried about carrying the smartphone during monsoons or in a pool? The Find X2 Pro features an IP68 certification for water and dust resistance, which means you can stay 1.5 meters deep underwater for 30 minutes, without causing any harm to your smartphone.

Switch to the front side and you will appreciate the Gorgeous Curved Display.

There’s a lot to mention about the display. We admit that we had some second thoughts initially about Oppo opting for a curved display, but that changed over time. What’s good about the 6.7-inch tall AMOLED display is that Oppo did not try to be very aggressive like the Waterfall display and instead only curved the screen enough to offer a more bezel-less look on either side. Even the chin bezel, which is only 2.9mm thick, is perhaps one of narrowest that we have seen on any smartphone to date. This, coupled with a QHD+ resolution, aids in offering an immersive viewing experience while you are watching videos or playing games on the Find X2 Pro.

You will notice a slight vignetting on the curved part of the display, but that is very minimal and should not bother you during content consumption. There’s also the 32MP selfie camera in the punch-hole cutout on the top-left corner which is so small that you probably won’t even notice it.

The in-display fingerprint scanner unlocks the device instantly, and you can also use the 3D face unlock as an alternative.

For an enhanced visual experience, the Find X2 Pro’s display has HDR10+ certification and a peak brightness of up to 1,200 nits. Depending upon the ambient light, the auto-brightness is automatically adjusted, thus allowing to use the screen without any issue even in direct sunlight. The screen is also well-calibrated to offer vibrant, punchy colours with a balanced tone.

In case you want to get into the technicalities of it, Oppo Find X2 Pro features a 10-bit colour depth screen, or a True Billion Colour display, similar to what you see on the OnePlus 8 Pro. The company claims that this display offers a wider colour gamut and is one of the most richly-coloured smartphone screens available to date. There’s also a DisplayMate A+ rating, which is awarded based upon several performance tests on the screen. For end-users, it simply means that you get to use the best of smartphone displays available out there.

Oh, by the way, there is choose to enable 60Hz or 120Hz refresh rate even at QHD+ resolution. This is unlike the Galaxy S20 Ultra, which only allows either 60Hz at QHD+ or 60Hz/ 120Hz at FHD+ resolution.

There’s also an ‘Auto Select’ option in the Find X2 Pro’s display setting that optimises the refresh rate depending upon the kind of tasks performed at that moment. This means that the if you have 120Hz enabled and are just calling someone, the display will switch to 60Hz. It will switch back to 120Hz when you are playing a game that supports the high refresh rate.

What we did not like much is the O1 Ultra Vision Engine that offers HDR and Video Motion enhancements. The HDR video enhancement option will convert an SDR video to HDR, therefore widening the colour gamut and offering a more detailed output. We weren’t a fan of the Video Motion enhancement, which offers to boost the frame rate of a 30fps video to 60fps or 120fps. There were times wherein due to the forced boosting, frames would skip and you will notice a slight choppiness in the video playback. Of course, you can disable these options individually in the display settings.

The second thoughts were about the accidental touches, which did not bother in most cases, except for a couple of times when we unintentionally touched the curved part of the display that triggered the ‘Settings’ option in PUBG and got us killed during combat. So yes, take note.

While we are at PUBG, let’s discuss how the smartphone performs in day-to-day life.

Silly Fast Performance 

Being a flagship smartphone in 2020, the obvious performance unit would feature a top-of-the-line processor. The Find X2 Pro gets powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 chip under the hood. Needless to say, you are bound to get a smooth, lag-free experience on the Find X2 Pro without breaking a sweat. Games like PUBG Mobile and Call of Duty can be played at the highest settings. 

We prefer playing games in HDR graphics with Ultra or Extreme frame rate. There wasn’t a single instance of lag when we played games on the Find X2 Pro. In fact, the combination of a tall curved display coupled with a powerful processor made us want to play more games for hours during the weekend and sometimes even in-between work hours at home. I sincerely hope my boss is not reading this!

During most part of the Find X2 Pro review period, we had kept the refresh rate set to 120Hz at QHD+ resolution. As we are staying at home during this pandemic, our smartphone’s usage has also increased significantly.

The smartphone, on an average, offered close to 4.5 hours of screen-on time with the highest display setting that was also set to full brightness in most situations. We also switched to FHD+ resolution at 60Hz for a day and got nearly five and a half hours worth of juice from the 4,260 mAh battery. If you ask us, that 30-60 minutes extra would feel like a compromise mainly because of two reasons — 120Hz and that Blazing 65W Super VOOC 2.0 fast charging.

When you start using 120Hz, there is no going back as it offers a very smooth user experience. Regarding the 65W Super VOOC 2.0 fast charging, Oppo is probably playing it safe by claiming to charge the device from zero to 100 in 38 minutes. During our review period, the device charged insanely fast from zero to 40 percent in 10 minutes, zero to 80 percent in 28 minutes, and zero to 100 in 35 minutes. This was not a one-time thing as we did get similar results multiple times during our review period.

You can switch to FHD+ resolution + 60Hz refresh rate and probably squeeze out more battery life from the device when you may not have a charging socket accessible during outdoor commutes.

You do miss out on wireless charging, which is a shame. Yes, we may look like we are nitpicking, but other competitors and even OnePlus offers wireless charging on the OnePlus 8 Pro.

If a smartphone can offer a lag-free performance during intensive usage, it is guaranteed to offer a much smoother experience in regular tasks as well. There is 12GB of LPDDR5 RAM and 512GB of UFS 3.0 internal storage on the Find X2 Pro. You can seamlessly multitask and switch between apps with ease and breeze.

In case you fear some graphics-intensive app might shut down in the background, you can always lock the app using one of Color OS 7.1’s features. In the multitasking window, tap on the three dots on top of the app widget to lock it.

Color OS 7.1 has come a long way. The Oppo custom skin, based on Android 10, is unlike its previous versions. Color OS 7.1 is much refined over time and now offers a clean, lightweight software experience. The smartphone does not come preloaded with many third-party apps, which has been our constant complaint on many other Oppo smartphones and other devices running on some form of Color OS. There’s also Digital WellBeing that analyses and displays the activity details that the user performs on their smartphone. The software also offers features like Focus mode, which lets users select apps and restricts them from using it when they want to focus on work or simply just avoid using the app.

Another nifty feature that you can make use while appreciating the curved screen is the app shortcuts slider on the right edge. You can pin some of your apps in this shortcut and opens them from any screen. Shoutout to Oppo for ensuring that flagship smartphones don’t deserve a poor software experience.

Coming to the highlight and one of the most important features of the Find X2 Pro — Cameras

Oppo Find X2 Pro has a total of four camera sensors — three at the back and one inside the punch-hole display.

The rear camera setup houses a 48MP f/1.7 Sony IMX689 1/1.4-inch sensor, a 48MP Sony IMX586 sensor, and a 13MP periscope lens with up to 10x Hybrid zoom and 60x digital zoom. 

Shots clicked using the main 48MP sensor are bound to give you a detailed output. The colours are vibrant and you get an ample amount of detail. The highlights and shadows are well exposed too. Even the dynamic range is excellent. If you like slightly oversaturated colours with a lot of vibrance, you can use the Chroma Boost feature located on the top of the camera app. We personally like our photos to be captured as close as it is to the real world, hence we chose not to use the Chroma Boost feature. There were some images wherein the greens and reds were slightly oversaturated, even when the Chroma boost feature was disabled. This could be due to the AI-based software processing that boosted the colours to offer more details.

In low light, the camera performs quite well. While the camera app does support night mode, chances are you won’t need to use it very often, thanks to the wide aperture and the sensor size. In fact, we liked a couple of images that were shot using the normal mode, instead of the night mode on the Find X2 Pro.

In total dark conditions though, Night Mode helps the camera shine.

You will get better-exposed images, and the camera ensures to capture enough detail for the software to adjust the highlights and the shadows. We did notice that some regions of select photos shot in low light blew out the highlights and had some noise in the shadows. However, the same frame when shot using the night mode offered a balanced photo, fixing the issues we mentioned.

Even the ultra-wide camera offers close to crisp images when you compare it to the primary camera. The colour temperature between the wide and ultra-wide camera does vary slightly, as the latter offers a slightly cool colour tone. There is some loss of detail along the heavily-distorted edges of the ultra-wide images. It also doubles up as a macro lens, which ensures you get sharp, detailed close-up photos of the subject with a shallow depth of field.

Oppo began offering its 10x Hybrid Zoom with the original Reno 10x Zoom Edition (Review). Since then, the hybrid telephoto mechanism, which uses both hardware and software to click zoomed photos, has improved quite a lot. Images are best at 1x and depending upon the lighting conditions, you will notice the loss of details and sharpness as you begin to zoom further. We were quite impressed with the camera’s output even at 10x zoom, where it tried to maintain the level of sharpness and detail as close to the primary photo shot at 1x zoom. The photos we shot at various focal lengths also matched very closely in terms of colour temperature and were quite usable. 

Using the 60x zoom feature totally depends upon how far the subject is from the smartphone camera. We are going to be blunt here and just recommend you not use the 60x zoom feature for clicking far-off subjects. Even if you do, chances are you will get grainy, blurry images. However,  you could use the slider to switch between various focal lengths up to 60x to try and get the best-detailed shot.

For selfies, you get a 32MP front camera. Disable all the beauty mode tools and you will get detailed images with close-to-real skin tones. Portrait mode has excellent edge detection. However, the bokeh felt artificial in some images.

Check out the Flickr slideshow below to see how the Find X2 Pro camera performed during our review period.

Verdict 

We already mentioned at the very beginning of this review that the Find X2 Pro is one of our favourite flagship smartphones of 2020. The smartphone ticks the right boxes for being a flagship contender and also performs like one.

The Find X2 Pro is, by-far, Oppo’s best smartphone to date. We would not mind calling the Find X2 Pro the Lamborghini of smartphones.

It sports an eye-catching ceramic design and offers a gorgeous curved 120Hz QHD+ display. Even the cameras perform excellently. However, if you compare the Find X2 Pro’s primary camera with the likes of the iPhone 11 Pro (review) or the Galaxy S20 Ultra (review), you may see some room for improvement on the camera’s software processing. 

Oppo Find X2 Pro is silly-fast and performs without breaking a sweat. To add compliments to its performance, the Find X2 Pro is the fastest charging premium smartphone with its 65W charging technology.

Unfortunately, the Find X2 Pro will not be on sale in India. As a token of gratitude, Oppo has partnered with Forbes for its 'Ultimate 120' initiative, wherein it will gift the Find X2 Pro to 120 corona warriors in India.

The company has certainly stepped up its flagship game and we expect even more with what Oppo has in store in the premium smartphone category.