Oppo Find X2 Pro review - Fast, fashionable, and fantastic. - Android

When Oppo told me it was working on the Find X2 back in December 2019, I was stoked. The original Oppo Find X was one of the biggest mobile innovations I’d seen in years. Surely, the Find X2 would live up to its legacy.

Let’s jump even further back to 2018. There were no foldable smartphones. Phone design was bland. Almost every phone had the same notch and it was hard to tell phones apart in a sea of sameness. So when the Find X launched with a nearly full-screen display and a motorized pop-up camera, something finally felt new. While I was let down by the consistently bad UX across Oppo devices, the sheer gadgetry of the phone overshadowed its downsides.

See also:

Oppo Find X review: Finding space

When we've talked about full-screen phones in 2018, that's meant around an 80 percent screen-to-body ratio with a small bottom bezel and a notch housing the front camera. The front-facing camera is an integral part …

Nearly two years later, Oppo has released the Find X2 and Find X2 Pro. Almost immediately, I can tell you this phone is far from the innovative, gadgetry of its predecessor. But I can also tell you this is one of the best phones I’ve used in the past year — if you’re willing to pay for it.

This is Android Authority’s Oppo Find X2 Pro review.

Design: Clean cut and excellent

The Oppo Find X2 Pro doesn’t have what I would call an innovative design, but it is clearly flagship-class. The display wraps ever-so-slightly around the side of the phone, met by an aluminum frame that is colored gold on my model. The back of the phone wraps around similarly, which results in an undoubtedly classy-looking device.

The selfie camera is a punch hole in the top left side of the display. I have personally always been a huge fan of this configuration. I think it looks premium, and because the camera is about the size of a notification it doesn’t get in the way. On a phone in this price range though, I would have liked to see 3D face unlock or, better yet, the under-display selfie camera Oppo showed me at its innovation day in December. The original Find X had 3D face unlock, which is more secure and allows you to unlock your phone in the dark. There is standard face unlock on this device and it is quite fast, but 3D would be better.

The Find X2 Pro I was sent for review uses a back made of vegan leather, which adds to the premium look of the device. It feels great in the hand. It’s not nearly as slippery as glass, so you don’t have to worry about it sliding off the table. Moreover, if you drop the phone and it lands on its back, you don’t have to worry about the back shattering. The cameras are another story, though.

The Oppo Find X2 Pro has a pretty decently-sized camera bump. It’s not quite as thick as the plateau on the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra, but it does cause the phone to wobble when set on its back. On my leather model, the camera is framed by the same gold accent that dresses up the aluminum frame.

Far below the camera bump, near the bottom, you’ll find an Oppo emblem tacked on. This is unnecessary, but, like the gold trim on the device, it adds to the feeling of luxury. If you’re into that sort of thing.

You won’t find any special ports or sensors on the phone, like an IR blaster or a headphone jack. Instead, you’re greeted with the bare minimum. The power button and volume rockers are on the right and left sides of the phone, respectively, and a speaker, charging port, and SIM card tray are tucked into the bottom. It’s a minimalistic look, but I think that’s what Oppo was hoping to achieve.

Wow this screen is good

The Oppo Find X2 Pro has a curved 6.7-inch AMOLED display with a resolution of 3,168 by 1,440, which makes it pixel-dense at 513 pixels per inch. It is a brilliant-looking screen with fantastic color accuracy and white balance. The display supports HDR 10+, which means it can render more colors, and Oppo claims it can hit a peak brightness of 1200 nits. It’s very easy to see the screen in direct sunlight, which is something that can’t be said of the Google Pixel 4.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 allows the phone to run at a fast 120Hz refresh — even when set to the full Quad HD+ resolution. That’s something the Samsung Galaxy S20 series can’t tout, at least not yet. Both devices have the technical ability to do this, but Samsung restricted 120Hz mode to 1080p, likely for battery life reasons.

The 120Hz Quad HD+ display is a joy to use.

Oppo wanted to make the screen a highlight of the Find X2 Pro, so it included a hardware layer called 01 Ultra Vision Engine. This chip can upscale video to 60Hz or 120Hz, whichever you have the phone set to at the time. In practice, this feature works, but I would not recommend using it for most content. If a video was shot at and rendered in 24 or 30fps, it was likely done for a reason. Until 60fps video becomes more common, I’d suggest leaving this feature off. Currently, 60fps video looks too awkwardly realistic for my taste.

There is an optical fingerprint scanner embedded under the display and it works very well. It’s fast and accurate and has a large surface area.

In the past, Samsung always had the best screen available on a smartphone. The Oppo Find X2 Pro makes me question Samsung’s crown.

Performance: An S20 Ultra rival?

While the Oppo Find X2 Pro doesn’t quite have the 100x Space Zoom or 5,000mAh battery of the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra, it does match or best it in nearly every other department. This means I didn’t notice any hiccups or stuttering.

The 120Hz refresh rate display and 240Hz touch response rate makes this device look and feel wicked fast. Oppo also seems to have adopted the OnePlus style of using faster animation speeds, which increase the feeling of speed on the unit as well.

This device is packed with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 865, 12GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage, easily making it one of the fastest phones on the market. In benchmarks, the Find X2 Pro lived up to the specs it packs, even beating the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra in some benchmarks.

The Find X2 Pro supports 5G through the Qualcomm X55 modem. Though it won’t work on Verizon’s mmWave 5G, I was able to get low-band 5G via T-Mobile at my house in Brooklyn. While 5G isn’t something I would go hunting for in my next phone, it’s nice for future-proofing for when the technology goes mainstream.

The only performance issue I noticed was weak Bluetooth performance. Before the first update, Bluetooth headphone audio was very quiet. Worse, simply holding your hand over the top right side of the phone would cut the signal. Oppo issued an update during the review period that seems to have fixed audio volume, but the Bluetooth signal still cuts out fairly easily. It’s not as bad as it was before the update, but it’s not as stable as it should be.

Charging at the speed of 65 Watts

Though I like a lot of things about the Oppo Find X2 Pro, the 65W charging is probably my favorite feature. I’ll have to see how it affects battery life over time, but the ability to top off the phone in a little over 30 minutes is incredible. In my testing, the phone charged from 2% to 52% in 15 minutes and up to 92% in 30 minutes. That’s fast. Really fast.

Overall, battery life on this device was decent. If I unplugged the phone around 10am it would die around 8:30am the next morning, barring that I didn’t charge it throughout the day. While this isn’t earth-shattering battery life, it is solid considering I had the display set at 120Hz and Quad HD