Product test
Review: the Nothing Phone (3) is hot on the heels of top-of-the-range smartphones
by Jan Johannsen
Reviewing the Oppo Find X2 Pro: a new Apex Predator enters the market
3.8.2020
Chances are that the Oppo Find X2 Pro will become Phone of the Year for 2020. Almost definitely. And any phone of this high a standard deserves its very own puff piece.
Oppo may be a newcomer on the local market, but it’s a top brand in China. Leading in a highly competitive market is no accident. The Oppo Find X2 Pro proves this.
The Find X2 Pro isn't perfect, but it has one advantage over the competition and the only phone that could give it a fair fight: Google Services. Sure, the Oppo phone's camera doesn't quite deliver the performance of a Huawei P40 Pro or Huawei P40 Pro Plus, but thanks to a full dose of Android, Oppo has mass appeal.
Yeah, pretty sure this'll be Phone of the Year.
The little things
The Oppo Find X2 Pro has fit into my everyday life extremely quickly. At home, it's the phone I use to record all my videos. I use it to quickly watch a YouTube video. It's the phone I use to listen to music. The speakers are great, and it goes without saying that the 120 Hz display is too. By the way, the latter doesn't consume as much battery as expected from a screen delivering 120 frames per second.
Still, the screen is the most important interactive element on any phone. You tap on it, read news and visit websites. A screen can determine the usability of your phone. Fortunately, I haven't come across a badly calibrated screen for a long time. All phones in all price ranges have beautiful screens built in. Therefore, the question remains: what use is 120 Hertz?
And for the first time, Oppo really shows what the Find X2 Pro can achieve. We've finally reached a point where I'll have to revise a long-held opinion: Android OEM versions do indeed have a right to exist. Oppo's Color OS, version 7, simply makes Android better. You can adjust the animation speed, icon shapes on your home screen, dark mode, refresh rate and all sorts of other things that are lacking adaptability elsewhere.
That's the way it's supposed to be. This is the way forward. Here and there you'll find small settings that make your phone just that little more personal. I don't like animations when apps are opening. This can be largely disabled. You like them? No problem, there's an option for that. Oppo gives you a lot of freedom in the design, and that's a good thing.
Two batteries for quick charging
When I record videos, every phone battery runs out quickly. Same goes for large cameras. There's hardly anything that eats up as much battery as a video recording. Smaller clips aren't the problem, but longer recordings demand a lot from a smartphone. The phone gets warm and the battery drains very quickly.
As a result, the industry is currently experimenting with charging technologies as only so much can be done with the battery itself. Lithium-ion batteries have reached the end of their technological development. There isn't much that can still be gained from them. Thanks to 7-nm architecture and software optimisations, even a relatively small battery with around 3500 mAh can absolutely be suitable for everyday use.
Oppo has solved the problem simply: the battery is actually two batteries. There isn't one 4260 mAh battery, but two serially connected batteries with 2130 mAh each.
This design is at the expense of wireless charging. That's pretty much the only thing the Oppo Find X2 can't do. It'd be cool if Oppo wireless charging and the double battery could co-exist. In my opinion, I'd rather have the double battery with its charging speed.
Of light grey skies and speeding signs
The camera's good. Very much so. But beware: it'll never be as good as the camera Huawei currently uses in the P40 series. The camera array on the back of the phone promises a lot and delivers:
- A 48 megapixel wide angle lens in front of a Sony IMX 689 sensor, f/1.7, Ultra Steady Video.
- A 48 megapixel ultra wide angle lens, Sony IMX 586, f/2.2, 120° field of view, macro capability.
- A 13 megapixel zoom lens in periscope design, f/3.0, 10x hybrid zoom, up to 60x digital zoom.
All cameras boast something called Ultra Night Mode. Here's what it looks like:
Still, the Night Mode technology in smartphones is impressive. Can't argue with that. My problem with Night Mode is purely aesthetic, not technological.
What does «something with a wide-angle lens» even mean?
Like Huawei and Samsung, Oppo wants to show off the Find X2 Pro's video capabilities. They work. As mentioned before, it's been the phone I've been using for the past few months to record videos in my home studio. Therefore: yes, the videos are good. The picture anyway. The sound is hardly usable even in a quiet workshop, also known as my dining room. A Yeti Podcaster microphone is required.
Oppo boasts additional stabilisation. The image is already stabilised by default, but you can add on Ultra Steady Mode. This makes the picture even more stable. Let's test it out.
The test is set up by sticking a smartphone to my leather jacket with adhesive tape before jumping on my motorcycle with it. This isn't only because I'm on the road with my bike anyway, but also because this lets me push every system to its limits.
With the Find X2 Pro, I went one step further so that I could test Ultra Steady Mode. During a first ride, I aligned the camera so that no roadsides are visible. The camera must therefore rely either on optical image stabilisation or internal sensors and its own discretion.
The second run gives the camera two reference points at which stabilisation could take effect. There's the handlebars, which aren't only a dominant and permanent visual element, but also the roadside.
The microphone system must work independently of this. It has to deal with airflow, engine and other traffic noise. First and foremost: the Find X2 Pro loses this battle. It tries its best, filtering out the engine of my Harley, and sometimes even the wind. The result is about as clumsy as the sentence I used to describe the phenomenon.
Regular Steady Mode
By default, the Oppo Find X2 Pro stabilises video footage. But the Find X2 Pro features something called «Ultra Steady Mode». So I did the test twice.
But as soon as traffic signs or trees appear on both sides of the road, stabilisation is easy.
The focus is annoying when the handlebars are in frame. The AI thinks that I want to focus on the black metal bar, although I'd rather have it on the street. Then there's the fact that the depth of field for the road isn't always blurred, but is adjusted again and again. The handlebars lose their sharpness, and somehow nothing is sharp at all. What is the AI thinking?
Stabilising the image isn't the problem. The conclusion I was hoping for. Deciding between stabilising the handlebars or the road is easy and correct. But focus and stabilisation aren't the same thing and they don't speak to each other as it seems. Or they do and the focus system says «The foreground is what people want to see» while the stabilisation system says «The background is what needs to be stable» and in the end that's what comes out.
The adaptiveness to the lighting conditions is also remarkable. This can be done quickly, but if it's a little darker out, black quickly turns into grey, ugly and flat.
By the way, this also applies to recording in Ultra Steady Mode.
Ultra Steady Mode
Here the Find X2 Pro surprises me.
That means there's a lot more footage. The finished video is only a cut of what the camera records and the AI processes. That's the «something with the wide-angle lens» part.
Why the title?
Apart from its usability, Oppo makes a reasonable and solid suggestion on how to achieve the shortest possible charging time within the framework of lithium-ion technology. The solution may sound simple, but it takes creativity and a bit of cheek in hardware development to implement it broadly and ready for production.
In other words, the Swiss Android market has found a new predator in Oppo. The Find X2 Pro is a vicious animal at the top of the food chain. With good specs, the full Android package and the marketing budget of China's largest smartphone manufacturer – depending on the statistics and data source, it's either Oppo, Samsung or Huawei, but still – rough seas lie ahead for other manufacturers.
That’s all for today. By the way, did I mention that Oppo is encroaching on Huawei and collaborating with Lamborghini? The Lamborghini Special Edition looks really nice.
Journalist. Author. Hacker. A storyteller searching for boundaries, secrets and taboos – putting the world to paper. Not because I can but because I can’t not.
