Oppo Find X hands-on review

Oppo Find X hands-on

We've felt a growing sense of boredom with smartphone designs recently, but that went up in a puff of smoke as we took the Oppo Find X in our hands. It's been ages since there was a phone without a camera on its exterior, which makes the design of the X stand out.

Those old phones, the ones without cameras, had kooky designs as their small screens left plenty of free room to work with. The Find 7 is the complete opposite - the design of its front is so stripped down that the wallpaper on the homescreen affects the phone's looks more than its hardware.

A different wallpaper has a huge impact on how the phone looks

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.

Find X and the Galaxy S9+: the featureless back gives the Oppo a unique look

The rounded corners and sloping sides help the special coating on the back to reflect light from different angles, which further reinforces the crystal-like appearance. Two color gradient options are available to choose from: Bordeaux Red and Glacier Blue. We're big fans of the blue version, although as any display piece you should wipe off fingerprints often. The rounded glass doesn't offer a ton of grip either. Or any for that matter.

Find X in Glacier Blue and Bordeaux Red

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.

Curves are the basis of the Oppo Find X design

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.

Slider: retracted • extended • a closer look • from the front

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.

The slider needs to be out to use the 3D face scanning

That comes at a bit of a price, though. The pop-up module needs 0.5s to slide out - that's faster than the vivo NEX S, but that's still time spent waiting each time you want to unlock your phone. That said, the system still works surprisingly fast. A fingerprint reader would have been a welcome fallback, though.

The scanner is used for more than unlocking the phone or securing AliPay transactions. Its output can be fed to an AI for 3D Smart Selfie Capture. The AI will offer suggestions on how to pose and your expression for more natural photos with the 25 MP front camera.

It also enables lighting effects that can, for example, simulate a two-color studio setup - lighting one side of your face with red and the other with blue light. The scanner can also generate animated 3D cartoon avatars, or 3D Omoji, as Oppo calls them. You can create videos of them and send them through chat apps.

The other two cameras on the Find X are mounted on the rear of the pop-up mechanism - a 16 + 20 MP setup. The AI enables automatic scene recognition for over 20 scenarios and over 800 combinations (e.g. snow + pets).

The camera UI • A close look at the 25 MP selfie cam • The dual camera on the rear • Taking a photo

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.

Find X: USB-C port on the bottom • nothing on top

The only hardware controls on the phone are the keys on the left (volume buttons) and right side (power). Opening the slider leaves a small gap on both sides near the the top.

In case you were wondering, no, the slider doesn't need to be out to take a call. While the earpiece itself is on the slider, there's a tiny grille on the front, which lets sound through.