Oppo Find X2 Pro review

Where to buy

Oppo hasn’t been afraid to experiment in the flagship phone space in recent years, with phones that debuted the idea of pop-up cameras, multi-lens arrays and more. For its 2020 flagship Find X2 Pro, it’s going for a rather more sedate approach, but that doesn’t mean it’s snoozing when it comes to delivering a compelling flagship device.

The Find X2 Pro isn’t a phone with a truly wacky design or some new twist on how a phone operates. In a market where we’re seeing so many flagships push north of $2,000 outright, it provides superb value in its own right, despite a few charging oddities.

Design

Design

• Ceramic Black or Vegan Orange Leather finish
• Significant camera bump
• No headphone jack

• Read our full review of the Oppo Find X2 PRO's design

  Oppo was the first flagship maker to really push the idea of pop-up cameras on its phones to maximise screen space, but for the Find X2 Pro it’s stepped back from that idea. The Oppo Find X2 Pro features a 6.7 inch 3K QHD (3168×1440) display with a 120Hz refresh rate and a punch hole style camera behind a pre-installed screen protector. Like the recently reviewed (and much cheaper) Oppo A52 there’s a slight offset between the camera hole and the screen protector which is just that little bit more noticeable than I’d like, but that’s a very minor criticism.

  120Hz displays are the fashion item for this year’s run of flagship phones, but most default to 60Hz most of the time, or limit your resolution when you push them to 120Hz. That’s not what Oppo has done with the Find X2 Pro, which can run at full resolution and at 120Hz at the toggle of a switch if you want it permanently on. 120Hz isn’t needed for everything, however, and there’s also an option to have it dynamically kick into gear when you’re using relevant content, while leaving it at 60Hz otherwise.

  Oppo also provides options for what it calls its “Ultra Vision Engine”, a range of utilities to enhance HDR content and shift 30fps video into 60fps within the handset itself. There’s something of a taste test effect here, with some content looking great when pushed to higher frame rates, while others can end up looking very artificial. Still, it’s great to have the option to really push the screen hardware and get the most out of it as suites your personal tastes.

  Oppo produces the Find Pro X2 in two very different styles. The review model was in “Ceramic Black”, which is your standard glossy black design, but you could alternatively opt for a model with a “Vegan Leather” Orange finish. It’s certainly eye catching, and the two models do differ physically as well. The Ceramic Black version is a little more slippery than the Vegan Leather Orange, and it’s also a tad heavier at 217g to the leather model’s 200g. Conversely – and oddly – the grippier finish of that orange leather model is a little thicker than the Ceramic Black model.

  Either way, you’re going to be looking at a vertically arranged camera array at the back with a fairly significant camera bump. As is common for most of Oppo’s phones you’re provided a simple clear plastic case in the box which does reduce the wobble factor of that camera remarkably. You won’t find a fingerprint reader on the side or back, with Oppo instead going down the familiar route of providing an in-display fingerprint reader instead. Sadly, you also won’t find a headphone jack either anywhere on the Oppo Find X2 Pro.

Camera

Camera

• Triple rear cameras shoot great images
• Top-notch video shooting but only at 4K
• 60x zoom is useless

• See sample photos and read our full review of the Oppo Find X2 PRO's camera

  The Oppo Find X2 Pro’s cameras are a key selling point, but in a flagship market where we’re seeing a lot of quad camera arrays, the Find X2 Pro makes do with just a triple rear lens system. The primary lens features a 48MP f/1.7 Sony IMX689 sensor, next to a 48MP Ultrawide Sony IMX586 f/2.2 120° lens. Both sit underneath a periscope-style 13MP f/3.0 5x optical zoom lens.

  Like its competitors, Oppo offers a “hybrid” zoom mode, pairing up that primary sensor to give it an effective – and very good – 10x hybrid zoom. Less useful – but also covering the prevailing trends in flagship 2020 handsets – is the ability to push it out to 60x digital zoom. Like every other ludicrous digital zoom length, it’s a fair party trick, but not one that gives you useful photos, even when used with a tripod.

  That’s the only real weak point in the Oppo Find X2 Pro’s camera array, however, because otherwise this phone shoots as well as any other I’ve tested to date in just about every circumstance you’d care to name.

  Night shooting modes work well and pick up a good level of detail, although Huawei’s still got an edge here in pure detail terms. The hybrid zoom modes make grabbing effective photos of further away targets simple; I had an enjoyable brief period capturing native birds in my local park that I simply couldn’t have gotten as close to without the Find X2 Pro’s exceptional zoom capabilities.

  On the video front, I’ve rarely been that impressed with Oppo’s output, but the Find X2 Pro does shoot very pleasing video at up to 4K resolution. Yes, that’s not quite at the 8K level of the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra, but then this is a significantly cheaper handset, and one that makes it very easy to capture stable video even while handheld with its inbuilt ultra-steady optimisation.

  The Oppo Find X2 Pro might not look like a competitor if you just glanced over its camera specification sheet, but it’s easily amongst the best camera phones I’ve used to date, with plenty of photographic power and a camera app that makes it easy to get creative with your shot selection.

  Oppo FIND X2 PROsample photos

  

  

  

  

  

Performance

Performance

• Snapdragon 865 plus 12GB of RAM is very nice indeed
• No storage expansion
• 5G ready

• View test results and read our full review of the Oppo Find X2 PRO's performance

  The internals of most Android flagships right now rest on whatever the best that Qualcomm can bring to market is, and in 2020 that’s the Snapdragon 865. Oppo throws a Snapdragon 865 behind the Find X2 Pro’s display, along with 12GB of RAM to really give it plenty of performance potential.

  The Oppo Find X2 Pro has 512GB on board as standard, which is great at this price point, although it’s notably bereft of any microSD storage expansion. It’s 5G ready, but comes with only a single SIM card slot onboard. I guess you’ll never have to worry about which SIM slot supports which network bands, but it’s a little disappointing not to have the flexibility of storage expansion or dual SIM operation on what’s meant to be a flagship phone.

  Still, that recipe of the Snapdragon 865 and 12GB of RAM, a figure usually only seen on the priciest variants of flagship phones is a great one, and it’s reflected in how well the Oppo Find X2 actually performs. Here’s how it compares to current flagship devices using Geekbench 5’s CPU test:

  Apple’s inhouse silicon still trumps anything on the Android side of the fence, but Oppo has brought the Find X2 Pro ready to fight. It’s the same story in graphics performance, where its Adreno 650 GPU performs very well indeed. Here’s how it compares using 3DMark’s Slingshot Extreme benchmark:

  The Oppo Find X2 Pro is an Android 10 phone, but like every other Oppo phone it’s also running Oppo’s own ColorOS launcher. Over the years Oppo has gradually shifted away from what ColorOS used to be – a shameless iOS clone launcher — to a more useful set of applications and overlays on top of Android.

  It’s still not my personal favourite approach, especially because most of Oppo’s apps ask for alarming levels of permission before they’ll actually work. I still can’t work out why the inbuilt voice recorder might need to access my phone calls, for example. Your own tolerance there may vary, but I’d prefer a cleaner Android UI if I had the choice.

  Still, this is an Android phone, and that means that you can generally set it up how you like it to run, with almost endless configuration choices open to you if Oppo’s own apps aren’t to your taste. Having used the Oppo Find X2 Pro as my daily phone for a couple of weeks now, I’ve got no issues with is performance across a wide range of apps, and unlike Huawei, Oppo’s still able to provide full Google app access and updates down the track for its phones.

Battery life

Battery life

• 4,260mAh battery life is only average
• Insanely fast wired charging
• No wireless charging

• View test results and read our full review of the Oppo Find X2 PRO's battery life

  If Oppo had managed to crack exceptional battery life for the Oppo Find X2 Pro, there’s little doubt in my mind that it would be the Android flagship to buy in 2020.

  Sadly, however, that’s not quite the case. Its 4,260mAh battery capacity is on par with many flagships, but certainly not world beating in that sense. A 120Hz display can have a significant effect on battery life, and to test that out I ran the Oppo Find X2 Pro through our standard battery life test, streaming a YouTube video full screen and at full brightness for an hour at moderate volume from a full battery. Impressively, even at 120Hz there wasn’t a perceptible drop in battery life, which was pleasing, but actual battery life drop was a different story. Here’s how it compared against a range of flagship devices.

  That figure sits it just above the range of phones that under sustained load can’t last a single day’s usage, and that concurs with my anecdotal usage of the Find X2 Pro over the past couple of weeks. On days where I used the Find X2 Pro a lot, I’d often find it very low on power before I went to bed, and on more moderate days it’d last through overnight even if I forgot to plug it in. Still, in the flagship space it’s not particularly strong in terms of battery life.

  Oppo’s rebuttal for this would presumably rest on its SuperVOOC 2.0 Flash Charging technology, which can boost the Find X2 Pro’s battery to full in just over 30 minutes. It’s an impressive bit of charging technology, and quite welcome if you do forget to top up your phone up. However, what you don’t get at all on the Find X2 Pro is any form of wireless charging at all. That might make some sense for the Vegan Leather model, where power transfer might be tricky, but less so for the Ceramic Black model. More to the point, it’s pretty much an expected part of any flagship phone these days, and even some higher-end mid-range phones too. Maybe the Find X3 Pro will have it, Oppo?

Verdict

Verdict

• A great value flagship phone

Should you buy it?

We live in a time when flagship phone prices nudged towards $1200 nervously, then jumped straight over it. Yes, I’m looking right at you, Samsung and Apple. The Oppo Find X2 Pro is a direct attack on that particular pair of market dominating giants, delivering most of the features of a flagship phone, including great camera quality and superb app performance for a price that’s a lot more palatable. It’s a pity the battery life isn’t just a tad better, and wireless charging is missed, but this is still easily one of the year’s top phones to date.

Pricing and availability

AmazonHarvey Norman

Specifications

Images: Alex Kidman

Note: We tested the Australian version of this product which is identical to the local model.