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Oppo’s latest flagship is sleek and luxurious

If you want a quick way to illustrate just how good Chinese phones have gotten in the past couple of years, try comparing the Oppo Find X2 Pro to its predecessor. 2018s Find X was a technically ambitious device that paired a still-unique motorized sliding design with a still-uncommon 3D face unlock system and wonky software.
The Find X2 Pro does none of that stuff. Instead, its just an incredibly good phone.
Make no mistake, Oppo is aiming straight for Samsungs heart here. The 1,099 ($1,180) Find X2 Pro competes with the high-end Galaxy S20 phones on design, speed, features, cameras, and price, and in many regards I think it comes out on top. If you live in a country with a competitive market for Android phones i.e., not the US it should be taken very seriously, even though for me it has a single deal-breaking flaw.
As is often the case with Oppo flagship phones, the Find X2 Pro shares much in common with the latest high-end OnePlus model, due to the two brands sharing a supply chain and common ownership under a larger Chinese conglomerate. This time, though, that doesnt at all extend to the phones design the OnePlus 8 Pro is pedestrian, while the Find X2 Pro looks like nothing else.
My review unit, which is the model that appears most in Oppos marketing, has a unique gold-and-orange vegan leather finish thats immediately striking. (There are also ceramic models, but this is clearly the one to go for.) The gold Oppo logo on the back evokes a luxury handbag more than it does a smartphone. Vegan leather is a marketing term for polyurethane, sure it wont get a patina over time and it doesnt smell like anything but the textured finish really does feel great and helps make the Find X2 Pro the sleekest phone Ive seen all year.
As good as any display Ive ever seen in a phone
The same goes for the screen, which is very similar to the OnePlus 8 Pros if not the same part. Its a 6.7-inch 3168 x 1440 curved OLED panel with a 120Hz refresh rate, and its as good as any display Ive ever seen in a phone. Its punchy, accurate, and all-around gorgeous, with subtle curves, an excellent in-screen fingerprint scanner, and a small hole-punch cutout for a 32-megapixel selfie camera that proves to be minimally distracting.
Curved screens arent for everyone, but I didnt have any problems with unwanted touches, and theres less of a vignette effect on light backgrounds than you get with more dramatic waterfall displays. Like the OnePlus 8 Pro, the Find X2 Pro uses hardware-based image processing for HDR and motion smoothing, and while Id leave it off most of the time, I found the scaling to be useful sometimes for things like watching sports. (Remember watching sports?)
The Find X2 Pro also matches the OnePlus 8 Pro in one key selling point you can run it at both its full 1440p resolution and 120Hz refresh rate, whereas Samsungs S20 phones make you choose one or the other. Both of these features are the kind of thing where you dont know what youre missing until theyre in front of you. I think 1080p phone screens look fine, but I can certainly tell the difference in sharpness with 1440p, particularly when youre comparing it to 1080p scaled up to a 1440p panel. Meanwhile, theres just no going back from 120Hz.
Ive been leaving both switched on, then, and while youd think this might torch the battery life, that hasnt been the case for me. Unlike the Galaxy S20, the Find X2 Pro dynamically adjusts refresh rate based on the content on the screen, which helps with power consumption. And while our current circumstances do not lend themselves so well to extended heavy phone use away from a charger, Ive been getting reasonable performance of around five hours of screen time.
Thats fine as long as I remember to plug it in every night, but that brings me to my biggest criticism of the Find X2 Pro: its lack of wireless charging. This might sound nitpick-y to anyone who uses a phone without it right now, but its a huge pain to exclusively go back to wired charging when youve dotted wireless chargers around the house. Particularly now when Im barely going outside, battery life is just a total non-issue for any of the other phones I use because if theyre not in my hand, theyre charging on my desk. Thats not the case with the Find X2 Pro, which just idles away and slowly drains power whenever I put it down.
AGREE TO CONTINUE: OPPO FIND X2 PRO
Every smart device now requires you to agree to a series of terms and conditions before you can use it contracts that no one actually reads. Its impossible for us to read and analyze every single one of these agreements. But we started counting exactly how many times you have to hit agree to use devices when we review them since these are agreements most people dont read and definitely cant negotiate.
To use the Oppo Find X2 Pro, you need to agree to:

  • Oppos user agreement
  • Googles privacy policy and terms of service
  • Google Plays terms of service

There are also several optional agreements that you can allow or refuse during setup:

  • The privacy statement for the optional User Experience Program
  • Google services including location, Wi-Fi network scanning, sending diagnostic data, and automatically installing updates and apps
  • Automatic system updates

In total, thats three mandatory agreements and six optional agreements.
Oppos answer is that the Find X2 Pro has super-fast wired charging, which is true. The proprietary 65W SuperVOOC 2.0 system fills the 4,260mAh battery from zero to 100 percent in 38 minutes, meaning you at least dont have to keep the phone tethered to the charger for long.
Why not both, though? Oppo announced its first phone with wireless charging this month, which is encouraging, but a device as expensive as the Find X2 Pro really shouldnt have been allowed to ship without it. Most flagship phones, even including the OnePlus 8 Pro, now offer fast wireless and wired charging. This might not be a deal-breaker for you, but it is for me.
Back to the good stuff: the Find X2 Pros cameras are great. Building on last years excellent Reno 10x Zoom, theres a second-generation 13-megapixel 5x periscope camera here along with Sonys new, bigger 48-megapixel sensor for the main camera and an ultrawide that uses Sonys pretty big 48-megapixel IMX586 from last year. Its a versatile setup that turns in consistently good results, though without necessarily pulling the kind of machine-learning magic tricks that Google and Huawei trade on. To my eyes, the photos have a kind of neutral plus one look, as if some solid but flat default JPEGs have been given just an extra notch of vibrance. The night mode is good, the hybrid zoom is usable to 20x or so, and the ultrawide camera is much better than most others.
Everything else about the Find X2 Pro ranges from great to par for the course. The haptics are very good. The stereo speakers are fine. Oppos ColorOS 7.1 is much improved on earlier versions, with a stripped-down design and snappy animations. The phones performance is as good as youd expect from a Snapdragon 865 and 12GB of RAM. There is no headphone jack. The bundled USB-C in-ear buds are decent. Really, there is nothing about this phone that doesnt scream expensive high-end flagship in every aspect apart from the lack of wireless charging.
Oppo is a major player in major non-US markets for a reason, and the Find X2 Pro is its most convincing device yet. This would absolutely be my main phone if I could stick it on a Qi pad, and it feels worthy of its 1,099 ($1,180) price. That makes it a direct challenger to the Galaxy S20 Plus, which doesnt have a periscope telephoto camera. (For that, youd have to step up to the 1,349 / $1,399 S20 Ultra.)
The comparison with the OnePlus 8 Pro in Europe is slightly less flattering. That phone starts at 919 ($995), although the base model has 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, while the Find X2 Pro is only available in a 12GB / 512GB configuration. The OnePlus 8 Pro doesnt have a periscope telephoto camera, either. But it does have wireless charging.
I dont mean to harp on about wireless charging too much because I know a lot of people dont care. Its just that it really is my only significant criticism of the Find X2 Pro. This is a phone thats as premium and performant as anything else out there in the world, and I think its only a matter of time before Oppo gets more widespread brand recognition.
Photography by Sam Byford / The Verge
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