Oppo Find X3 Pro Review: Under the Microscope 👀🔬 By Android Central

Last year's find x2 pro was a huge leap forward for Oppo so a year on. How do you build on that? How does Oppo try and bring the heat to the likes of Samsung apple and Huawei? Well, how about a unique first of its kind design, yet more photo and video tricks a better display than ever before and all while, adding more polish and new genuinely useful software features, but as good as the Oppo find x3 pro is there's something about it that feels just less ambitious than its predecessor. So it's time to break down what makes this phone special, where it falls short and, most importantly, of all, whether it's actually worth your money. I'm Alex Madrid central- and this is our review of the opp, find x3 pro so as stunning as the front of this phone is the first thing to catch your eye. When you take the find x3 pro out of its box, is the design of that rear glass in the glossy black color I have here. Not only is it basically a mirror, but the camera bump is constructed a bit differently from your average smartphone see.

This is one continuous sheet of curved glass, a first in the industry, which means there's no bump or metal or break in the flow of the back of the phone. It's an impressive feat, and while I definitely wouldn't want to drop it on one of these raised corners, you can't argue with how nice the back of this phone looks. It's also pretty comfortable and ergonomic, no sharp iPhone, 12 style edges, and it's not a great big tank of a phone like the galaxy s21 ultra is. Instead, you have a lot of smooth curves, a lightweight body and a size, that's sufficiently large to house a big screen, but which is in no way excessively hefty. That big screen is one of the main attractions of this phone, a 6.7 inch panel that ranks among the best of any smartphone up to quad HD plus resolution 1300 nits of brightness 120hz, smooth refresh rate and LPO technology. So it can save battery power by not refreshing at that full 120 hertz, when you're, looking at a stationary image or a video with a lower refresh rate and while there's an ever so slight taper around the edges of the display.

The angle of this curve isn't sufficient to cause any real image distortion, so whether I'm scrolling through twitter at 120 frames per second or watching a movie or YouTube video. I am a big fan of this display in screen. Fingerprint is back once again now situated slightly further down the display than a lot of other android phones, it's fast and as reliable as any other optical in-screen solution. There's face unlock 2, which surprisingly even works while wearing a face, mask not quite sure how I feel in terms of security there, but it is certainly convenient. Otherwise, it's a pretty great software experience, I'm old enough to remember.

Maybe five six years ago, when OPPO's color OS software was just a gigantic Jacky unusable nightmare, but in the past year or so it has improved immeasurably and colors 11.2 builds on that success. Colors has always had some pretty strong design choices but considered as a whole. I actually really like the look and feel of this UI. It's clean and bright, with pleasing animations and physics, and in the new version 11.2 it's grown. Some handy new features it's easier to reach icons on your home screen with this new diagonal swipe gesture, a long press on the fingerprint scanner can now help you open a handful of frequently used apps and there's more Google integration too, with the Google, dialer and android messages being the default phone and text apps.

Along with, of course, google feed integration in the home screen launcher. Meanwhile, full screen translation is supported from within any app thanks to tight integration with Google Translate. There is, however, one google app that definitely has some teething issues on this phone which we'll get to later in this review anyway. OPPO'smultitasking is for sure one of the better implementations I've seen on android the various windowed modes that we first saw in the colors 11 updates for the find x2 pro are back letting you turn almost any android app into a small floating window. It's also pretty useful for forcing a rudimentary picture-in-picture mode in certain video apps that don't natively support it, such as the BBC player here color OS is also endlessly customizable from accent colors to icon styles, to the new, always on display feature which lets you play around with cool kaleidoscope, style, clock patterns, basically colors 11 on the find x3 pro is pleasant to look at performant and builds on top of android, with some genuinely useful new features that smooth performance is helped along by a solid hardware.

Loadout powered by unsurprisingly Qualcomm's top-end, snapdragon, 888, 12, gigs of ram and 256 gigs of storage. Alongside that, you've got all the standard high-end smartphone things like ip68 water resistance and the lack of a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack. The version I've been playing with over the past week or so by the way, is the dual sim 5g variant, and I didn't notice any huge difference in power, consumption or performance, whether I was using 4g or 5g that said battery life in general, with this phone has been at best weirdly, inconsistent and at worst quite disappointing. Considering the phone's 4 500 William hour capacity, like I said before, we're publishing this review with just around a week of use under our belts, but I guess I'd sum up: the find x3 pro's longevity as average or maybe even mediocre. If you push it hard.

What's also weird is that the phone's battery percentage will sometimes stick at 100 for up to an hour after taking it off the charger, but sometimes it won't and the rate at which that percentage readout drops is once again just inconsistent and confusing. This may well just be a software glitch, but it does make battery life difficult to judge throughout the day. So this is at most a one-day phone on a good run. I was looking at around 16 hours off the charger and four and a bit hour of screen on time, and it could be a lot less than that if I was pushing the phone hard using the camera a lot or streaming a lot of video in picture-in-picture mode. On one day in particular, I was reaching the danger zone within just 13 hours of use and three and a half hours of screen on time.

That's not great at all, but again consider the cockiness. I was seeing with that battery percentage readout, so battery anxiety is definitely a thing with the find x3 pro if you're going to be out from morning to night. You'll definitely want to pack a power bank or plan for that early evening recharge, but at least you've got plenty of options when it comes to charging this phone, which, if your usage is anything like mine, you'll, definitely be doing before the end of each day. There's a 65 watt, superfood 2.0, brick included in the box and in a welcome upgrade from the find x2. Now wireless charging is supported as well up to 30 watts through OPPO's air took standard FYI.

This is actually the OnePlus dash charger we're using here, which uses the same technology under a different brand name. Given the battery life isn't exactly outstanding, it's good that at least you've got some choice for superfast charging. To get you back up to speed with the wire charger in particular, you're, really looking at no more than 15 minutes to get out of the danger zone and have a decent level of charge for the rest of your day. So now we get to what makes this phone really special. The cameras, the find x2 pro is a great performer across the board, and so is the find x3, but with quite a different set of priorities where last year's model had an impressive five times.

Periscope super zoom, its successor instead focuses on upping the quality of the ultra-wide camera and in the process also upgrading its video capabilities. So, first up, there's no super zoom anymore and that's definitely a step-down from the find x2 pro for those longer shots. The new two times telephoto works fine up to about five times in hybrid zoom mode, but there's just no getting around the fact that this is a downgrade for the telephoto. That's especially unfortunate because the fourth camera that's been added is basically a total gimmick that you'll use once or twice before, forgetting it exists. This is the microscope camera which lets you take 3 megapixel images up close with a 25 time, zoom level.

That sounds pretty neat, but the practical side of using this is where it falls down. When you fire up the microscope, it activates this little ring around the lens, which is necessary because to get anything in focus, you basically need to hold the phone directly on top of what you're shooting and when you consider the very low resolution and the shallow depth of field, it's just gimmicky and impractical, of course, there's the obligatory front-facing camera as well, which is decent and works well with the HDR feature, though, the angle of this camera isn't especially wide. It also has this virtual ring light thing for taking selfies in darker conditions, which is pretty fun anyway. Let's just accept that the zoom is a bit less zoomy and that the microscope is largely forgettable and move on. Let's, instead tackle the two out of the four cameras that are actually perfect, the main and the ultra-wide both use Sony's new 50, megapixel mix 766 sensors, though only the main camera has optical image.

Stabilization. The ultrawide uses electronic stabilization. Instead, the ultrawide also has a free form lens, which significantly reduces distortion around the edge of the picture. OPPO'snew 10-bit color management system lets it capture more color depth from photos and show these pictures in all their glory on the find x3's, impressive, 10-bit capable display overkill for a smartphone, well yeah, probably, but both of these cameras can manage some pretty great dynamic range with the AI scene, enhancer bringing out some punchy, but not excessively saturated colors and when HDR kicks in. There are no weird halo effects and OPPO's images are generally pretty true to life in darker scenes night mode steps up to the plate and is significantly quicker than the same feature on the find x2 pro I've been pretty impressed with nighttime photos from the find x3 pro, and it seems to handle subjects moving a little better than its predecessor did as well.

Nighttime landscapes, in particular will easily pull in colors and details that your eye can't see an interesting point of comparison here. Is the Google Pixel 5 a much cheaper phone with inferior hardware on paper, while Oppo unquestionably pulls in more fine detail? There's definitely something to be said for Google's color processing, which often creates more natural. Looking hues. Video is another enormous part of this camera experience and an area where those two 50 megapixel cameras really help Oppo pull ahead. The ultrawide camera is your default for video recording, giving you a wider field of view, whichever camera you're using you'll notice, some pretty phenomenal stabilization, even at 4k resolution and even moving with a pretty quick walking pace.

I only really experienced a little of judder with the ultra-wide in much darker conditions and even then it's not particularly noticeable, and you can always switch to the primary sensor to take advantage of the brighter lens and optical stabilization with either sensor. Videographers will also benefit from the AI video highlight feature which avoids blown out looking video when there's a lot of backlighting such as in this sunset photo here. What's also fun is the new film mode which lets you capture ultra-wide scenes and gives you complete control of focus. ISO exposure and the like this is also where you'll find the log mode which captures more mid-tone detail, so it can be processed into higher quality footage later on again, this is probably overkilled for a phone, but regardless of whether you're using log, the film mode is really fun to play around with, especially with the smooth manual focus, control and the level of both that you get from a lens of this size. So it's not quite a blowout success in terms of photography, I would definitely have taken a super zoom telephoto over the largely useless microscope camera, but there's no doubt that, thanks to those twin 50, megapixel cameras, Oppo has made strides here in terms of color image, processing and video couple other odds and ends before we wrap up.

Audio quality has been pretty good, both in terms of calls and the built-in bottom firing speaker, which is paired with the earpiece tweeter up top when you're playing a video that said, the built-in Bobby Atmos support, particularly the smart, sound profile, did cause a few issues for me with certain Bluetooth earphones, making some content sound, echoed or tinny. It's easy enough to turn off those features. If you have problems, though, and while colors itself has been pretty reliable, I did notice some weird bugs with Google photos of all apps on this device. Random stuff like hanging when trying to do basic things like add photos to an album or search based on person or location. It's unclear if this is a Google photos thing or an Oppo thing, but both myself and ac, managing editor Daniel worse have both been experiencing the same issue and only on this phone.

The find x2 pro was one of my favorite phones of 2020 and in some ways the find x3 pro feels like a significant step forward, but in others it's an unfortunate regression which is rare to see from a generational smartphone upgrade I'm a huge fan of this new design and the gorgeous display, but baffled that Oppo isn't getting more life out of its 4500mah battery. I love the excellent new wide and ultra-wide cameras, but I'm missing the great super zoom capabilities of last year's phone and while colors is slick and performant. It's bizarre that Google photos a core pre-loaded app. Has some early issues on the find x3 pro it's possible? The firmware just needs a bit more time in the oven, and we'll definitely revisit this phone in future to see how things improve with further updates. At the moment, though, I would say the find x3 pro slots in between the galaxy s21 plus and the s21 ultra.

It focuses a bit more on video than Samsung's phones and definitely benefits from that super high quality ultra-wide camera and compared to the s21 plus you'll, enjoy a higher res screen with the latest display technology, though you'll trade battery life. For that privilege, the find x3 pro is a worthy purchase, and I've generally enjoyed my time with it. But if you're looking for a more uncompromising, ambitious overachieving flagship phone to tempt you away from the more established brands in the west, then I think it might take another year or so for Oppo to claim that title. That's it for now. Let us know what you think of the Oppo find x3 pro down in the comments and stay tuned for coverage of upcoming flagships like the OnePlus 9 series, thanks for watching, and I'll see you next time.

Source : Android Central