Oppo Find X3 Pro Review

The flagship end of the smartphone game is a tough place where the stakes can be sky-high. Flagship phones must be both innovative and offer up a compelling no-compromise design. It’s also a crowded market where Samsung, Apple, Huawei, Xiaomi, and countless others are all vying for your heart, wallet, and soul.

Oppo is fully aware of this. Their latest flagship, The Find X3 Pro, offers up a unique design, excellent performance and specs to rival the likes of the Galaxy or iPhone. Where Sammy and Apple flagships are a little samey-samey, Oppo has gone for broke with the Find X3 Pro’s design, and they’ve also added a microscope camera, just for fun.

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While you may be tempted to sigh and utter “another glass and metal sandwich… yawn”, you’d be missing out. While it has an under-screen fingerprint sensor and a hole-punch front camera, the similarities design-wise to many other phones ends there.

The review unit I was sent was finished in what Oppo calls Gloss Black. When they say gloss, they’re not kidding. The organic curves of its chassis, along with its glossy finish, made the Find X3 Pro look as if it’d been poured out of the same futuristic mould that The Terminator came from. The result is very pleasing to the eye and makes the Find X3 a pleasure to slide into a pocket or purse. As stunning as its unibody construction is, a protective case is a must. The Find X3 Pro’s glass chassis isn’t likely to bounce if dropped onto a hard surface. In addition to soft, futuristic curves, you also get IP68 water resistance, and Oppo also wins points by bundling a silicone case.

Around the front is a 6.7-inch OLED display. Its resolution is a peeper pleasing 3216×1440, and it can deliver 1300 nits with HDR10+ enabled. The Find X3 Pro can switch screen refresh rates from 60Hz to 120Hz and even drop them all the way down to just 5Hz (which is fine for static images and text). This helps to stretch out battery life. That said, 120Hz makes for silky-smooth scrolling and gaming.

One of the headline features talked up by Oppo is what they call end-to-end 10bit colour. With this, the Find X3 Pro can capture and display a billion colours. In contrast, most other cameras and screens get by with a paltry 16 million. Even though we mere humans can only really see around 10 million colours, the vast colour range of the Find X3 translates into fantastic colour accuracy. Netflix never looked so good. Add in the stunning contrast levels you’d expect from an OLED display, and there is a lot to like.

There are also stereo speakers. These take the form of the earpiece, which is forward-pointing and the bottom speaker, which is downwards firing. Like other phones, you get good stereo, but anyone wanting bass and mids is better off with headphones.

Oppo has also chosen to march to the beat of their own drum when it comes to the Find X3 Pro’s cameras. While most flagships offer several cameras, including a bonkers zoom and wide-angle shooter, Oppo has chosen to make one of its four cameras a microscope. Putting the Find X3 up against things reveals a strange new world you’d never see with a regular phone camera.

As you press the Find X3 Pro up against whatever it is you want a microscopic view of, illuminating everything required that Oppo build a LED ring flash around the microscope camera. It does a good job too. That said, while it is a lot of fun to show off to friends, I’ve yet to find a serious use for it. [Find nits or bed bugs? – Silly Ed]

The other cameras, however, are excellent. The primary shooter and its ultrawide counterpart both use identical 50MP, f/1.8 Sony sensors. In use, this translates into seamless colour, clarity, and dynamic range between both shooters.

The other feature camera-wise that impressed me was its night mode. While no one has yet come close to Huawei’s RYYB sensor, the Find X3 Pro isn’t half bad. It delivers vibrant colours and plenty of detail with little in the way of sensor noise. Daylight photography is bomb-proof, and the portrait mode has a convincing bokeh. All told, the pixel-binned 12.5MP images are right up there with other flagship phones. Around the front, the 32MP selfie camera does a decent job. The skin smoothing option isn’t enabled by default, so you don’t end up looking like a store mannequin when shooting selfies.

The only real downside with the otherwise excellent camera setup on the Find X3 Pro is the lack of a periscopic zoom. Find X2 users got 5x optical and 60x digital zoom, but the Find X3 Pro only gets 2x optical, 5x hybrid and 20x digital. Zooming in at 5x sees digital artefacts soon appearing.

Performance-wise, the Find X3 Pro is a rocket ship, as in there’s more grunt under its hood than a seasoned petrol-head would expect of his “wheels”. This is thanks to eight cores of vitamin Snapdragon 888 CPU goodness, which comes with a plentiful 12GB of RAM. This means multitasking and gaming, plus other demanding apps feel effortless in use. It also means 5G, Bluetooth 5.4 and Wi-Fi 6 is available.

Firing up some GTA fun, I was pleased to note that the Find X3 Pro stayed cool after an hour or so of hard-out gaming. The only negative is the lack of microSD card support, but you get a whopping 256GB of storage, so that’s not a biggie.

I found its 4500mAh battery gave me a full day’s use. Tweaking ColourOS’s many power and display management settings, I could stretch this out for longer. One of the big selling points of Oppo is their Super Vooc charging tech. The included 60W Super Vooc adaptor meant going from 0 to 100% charge took 35–40 minutes. Fast wireless charging is also supported, as is reverse charging.

The Find X3 Pro comes with ColorOS 11.2, which is the latest version of Oppo’s custom Android skin. As I’ve noted with other Oppo phones, ColorOS has come a long way from aping iOS. It is now a well-executed skin that brings many useful features into play. From a design standpoint, the interface feels mature. Its icons are elegant, and the colour palette isn’t too garish. Everything is also sensibly laid out, so finding settings is dead easy.

If you’re thinking I’m smitten with the Find X3 Pro, you’d be right. Oppo has crammed a tonne of functionality into its svelte chassis. It feels very much like a high-end device that’s equal to anything on offer from Samsung, Huawei, or Apple. Its reasonable flagship sticker price is also one of the (many) reasons it earns a 10 out of 10.

www.oppo.com