Oppo Find X

A Panaroamic Design, Out of the Ordinary

Love 'em or hate 'em, notches spread like an infection from one phone to another. Now there's a cure - pop-up cameras. The Oppo Find X is the second phone in as many weeks to feature one and it's even more elaborate than what we saw on the Love 'em or hate 'em, notches spread like an infection from one phone to another. Now there's a cure - pop-up cameras. The Oppo Find X is the second phone in as many weeks to feature one and it's even more elaborate than what we saw on the Vivo NEX S.

The Handset

Oppo Find X smartphone was launched in June 2018. The phone comes with a 6.42-inch touchscreen display with a resolution of 1080 pixels by 2340 pixels. The Oppo Find X is powered by 2.5GHz octa-core processor and it comes with 8GB of RAM. The phone packs 256GB of internal storage. As far as the cameras are concerned, the Oppo Find X packs a 16-megapixel primary camera on the rear and a 25-megapixel front shooter for selfies.

Instead of a small slide out, the whole top side of the phone moves up to reveal the dual camera on the rear and the selfie camera on the front along with other elements. And it needs just half a second to do so. When the slider is retracted, the bezels are quite thin, even the bottom one (Oppo boasts 93.8% screen to body ratio). The 6.4" AMOLED screen is left with a regular outline - the familiar rounded rectangle. Taking a cue from the Galaxy flagships, the left and right side of the screen are curved, which helps keep the phone narrow enough to handle comfortably despite its screen size.

But we have to admit that it's a unique solution, even when you look at the NEX S from sister company vivo. This mechanism provides extra security for the camera - it keeps it from being scratched and if it senses that you dropped the phone, it will automatically retract to prevent damaging it. The Oppo Find X is a curious contradiction of featureless and elaborate. We don't mean "featureless" as a bad thing, the clean glass-based design looks both futuristic and natural. The elaborate part is the slider - it's one of a kind in a sea of lookalikes.

Panoramic Arc Screen A visual revolution

On an iPhone X you always have the notch on top, on the Galaxy S9 there's an array of camera, earpiece, iris scanner, etc., on this Oppo flagship there's... nothing. We wish that the back didn't have logos stamped on, it would have made the glass back look almost like a natural crystal. The curves are not just design oriented, they are part of the Panoramic Arc Screen too - its left and right edges are curved. This keeps width in check, which starts becoming a problem with screens this size. It also enables edge lighting effects similar to the Galaxy phones.

Specifically, the AMOLED panel measures 6.4" with 1,080 x 2,340 px resolution. The display looks quite stunning in person. It has rounded corners and (drum roll, please) no notch. We don't know if selfie cameras can be placed under the display like some recent fingerprint readers, but if they can be, this is what future phones will look like.Or maybe pop-up cameras are the way forward as they avoid the issue of taking a high resolution photo through the display. And it's not just the cameras either, there's plenty of hardware that wants to live on the front.

3D Face Recognition : Instantly and securely unlock

It all starts with the 3D facial scanning tech on the Find X, which is the real deal. Not an iris scanner, not a camera-only solution, Oppo uses structured light like the iPhone X does. It projects 15,000 dots that help it read your face in three dimensions with "millimeter-level" accuracy. The company calls this O-Face (not the best name if you ask us).

Oppo boasts about the reduced false positive rate compared to fingerprint readers - 1/1,000,000 instead of 1/50,000. That's the same rate as Apple claims, even though Oppo's phone uses only half as many points.

Anyway, this mini Kinect tech is what makes the iPhone X notch one of the widest on the market. Some makers made fun of Apple and claimed their notches are narrower, but Oppo just one-upped them all.

Features that boasts themselves

All of this AI stuff runs on the Snapdragon 845 chipset, which is paired with 8 GB of RAM and 128 GB storage (with an option for 256 GB).

While Oppo heavily customized the OS (Color OS 5.1 based on Android 8.1 Oreo), it left Google Assistant a touch. There's a low-power DSP module listening for the wake up command, which helps the phone hear you even in loud environments, without killing the battery.

The 3,730 mAh battery that is. We would have thought that the slide-out mechanism will reduce the internal volume left for the battery, but capacity-wise the Find X is better than most flagships. And Oppo's VOOC fast charger always wows with its speed.

The charger connects to the USB-C port on the bottom of the phone - the company moved away from microUSB just recently. The port is flanked by the loudspeaker on one side and the dual SIM card slot on the other. There's no microSD to extend the storage and no headphone jack.

An innovation in itself : The Stealth Camera

So far we've only talked about how the cameras are attached to the slider, but haven't gone into much detail on the cameras themselves.

The dual camera on the back of the slider has one 16 MP half (f/2.0) and one 20 MP half (f/2.2). The 16 MP module is the main shooter and has OIS, the other one will kick in for depth effects and in low-light. In between the two camera modules is a dual LED, dual tone flash. The main camera records 2160p video at 30 fps.

Going around the front, there's a 25 MP (f/2.0) selfie cam. The 3D facial scanner works even better than a dual camera setup when you want separation between your subject (that is you) and the background as it measures depth much more accurately. Taking a page from the iPhone X, the Oppo Find X camera will render advanced lighting effects thanks to the 3D scanner.

Oppo Find X Automobili Lamborghini Edition

This special edition is a showcase of Oppo's Super VOOC. It has a slightly smaller battery (3,400 mAh), but it can charge it fully in just 35 minutes. A typical fast charger usually gets up to 50% or so in that much time. The ALE is a pricey halo phone - €1,700 - and at least some of that is due to the 512 GB storage. And much of that is the Lamborghini badge, though the car maker didn't contribute much to the design aside from the carbon fiber. Lambo does have a proud history of using composite materials, though, so it's a nice throwback.

WRAP UP

From teasers and rumors we suspected we’d like the Oppo Find X, but we ended up liking it even more than expected. That said, the €1,000 price tag seems a little ambitious. There is hope for a slightly more affordable version – the thousand euro is for the 256 GB phone and there’s definitely a 128 GB model, though our impression is that it will be available only in China (Oppo hasn’t said anything official on that front).

As for the 256 GB model, it will be available in August. It will be officially sold in France, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands. The phone will be available in North America, just not in the US (exact details should be revealed later).

Anyway, the Find X is a return to form for Oppo, which had settled on making premium mid-rangers for the most part and leaving OnePlus to act as the flagship version of the R-series. The Find series always managed to shake up the market (the Find 5 was the original flagship killer) and we think the X might do so too.

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