Verdict

The Oppo Find X2 offers largely the same experience as the illustrious Oppo Find X2 Pro for £300 less, with one of the best screens on the market, faultless performance, and an appealing design. The existence of the OnePlus 8 Pro – a very similar package with several notable advantages – tempers our enthusiasm somewhat, but the Oppo Find X2 remains an easy phone to like.

Pros

• Fast 65W charging
• Brilliant 120Hz OLED screen
• Much cheaper than the Pro

Cons

• Camera decent but doesn’t compete with best
• OnePlus 8 Pro offers similar but slightly better package
• No wireless charging

The Oppo Find X2 is the reasonably priced flagship phone we craved after the brilliant but expensive Oppo Find X2 Pro. It’s arguably the better pick for most people, but its standing is somewhat weakened by the existence of another close relative.

With a listed SIM-free price of £799 (though it’s an O2 contract exclusive at UK launch), the Oppo Find X2 undercuts the Oppo Find X2 Pro by a not inconsiderable £300. You’d expect some serious compromises as a result, but all you’re really getting is a downgraded camera and half the amount of internal storage.

Given that the Find X2’s triple camera still passes muster, and that its 256GB of memory remains ample, it represents much better value than its Pro brother.

If it weren’t for the OnePlus 8 Pro, the Oppo Find X2 would be an unqualified recommendation. Even as things stand, though, it’s a very good phone indeed.

Design and screen – The Oppo Find X2 is one sharp looker

While it doesn’t have the Oppo Reno 10x Zoom’s eye-catching notchless display and pop-up selfie-cam, or the Oppo Find X2 Pro’s striking vegan leather option, the Oppo Find X2 is a handsome phone to look at.

There’s a sense of understated class to its dark metallic rim and black ceramic back. The latter boasts a subtle wavy visual effect across the right three quarters of the phone, with the remaining strip of purely reflective material playing host to the Oppo logo and legal blurb.

It’s distinctive without being ostentatious, and it’s arguably prettier than the blank canvass OnePlus 8 Pro. That said, the latter can boast an IP68 dust and water resistance rating, while the Find X2 can only stretch to IP54.

You do pay a weight penalty for that choice of ceramic material, too. At 209g, the Find X2 is 17g heavier than the plain glass model available elsewhere, and 10g heavier than the OnePlus 8 Pro.

A pronounced dimple on the bottom edge makes for a comfortable pinkie-propping point, though your holding thumb won’t get anywhere near the top third of the phone. This is a large phone, and Oppo’s software tricks – swipe up on the right edge for the app tray and down for universal search – aren’t quite reliable enough to make for a viable one-handed experience. But show us the Android flagship that is.

Talking of edges, Oppo has gone with the same kind of pronounced dual-curved approach as the OnePlus 8 Pro and the Huawei P40 Pro. Like those phones it looks great, but has limited practical value, and it actually makes the phone a little trickier to wield. Video content also tends to experience awkward distortion effects where the screen bends.

That can pretty much be forgiven, though, when you turn your attention to the screen itself. It’s an absolute stunner – 6.7-inches of prime OLED, with a QHD+ resolution, vibrant yet accurate colours, HDR10+, and a peak brightness of 1,200 nits.

Oppo’s 01 Ultra Vision Engine will do its best to upscale lower frame rate and non-HDR content to be worthy of this wonderful screen. It works with the likes of Netflix and YouTube.

The screen’s headline feature, though, is a super-smooth 120Hz refresh rate. You’ll have to force it to that in the Settings menu if you want the full 2X experience all the time, as it’s set to automatically scale by default. But it won’t prove an unreasonable strain on battery life if you do.

If this screen seems familiar to you, that’s because it’s more than likely the exact same unit as the OnePlus 8 Pro’s. The two phones share an awful lot of DNA, as Oppo and OnePlus are owned by the same company. In this respect at least, we’re very glad of the duplication.

Performance – The Oppo Find X2 is fast and responsive as they come

Another way in which the Oppo Find X2 shadows its cousin the OnePlus 8 Pro is when it comes to performance. With the exact same Snapdragon 865 CPU (a feature it shares with most other current flagships) and 12GB of LPDDR5 RAM, it’s just about as fast as a baseline as any Android phone gets in early 2020.

Coupled with that 120Hz display (and zippy 240Hz touch refresh rate), the Oppo Find X2 feels fast. While ColorOS isn’t our favourite UI, it doesn’t hinder that sensation of speed and fluidity at all.

That feeling is carried through to intensive games such as Juicy Realm and CoD Mobile. You can go all in on maximum settings, and the Find X2 will take it all in its stride. Oppo has included a Game Assistant too, which can overlay or block messaging apps, block calls, show you your frame rate and more.

You’ll have plenty of room for storing such apps and games too. While only it’s only got half the allotment of the Pro, 256GB is still nothing to be sniffed at, even without expansion potential.

An average Geekbench 5 multi-core score of 3227 and single-core score of 906 places it on a par with the Oppo Find X2 Pro and OnePlus 8 Pro, as you’d expect.

It’s also worth mentioning that there’s an in-display fingerprint sensor here, and while the technology still feels like a work in progress, this is one of the quicker and more reliable examples we’ve tried.

Camera – Fine, but doesn’t keep pace with its contemporaries

Oppo has made some incredible camera phones in recent years, including 2019’s Oppo Reno 10x Zoom and this year’s Oppo Find X2 Pro. The Oppo Find X2 doesn’t match either for pure wow factor, but it’s perfectly decent. Whether ‘perfectly decent’ is enough at the £800 price category is up for debate, but we’ll get into that.

This is a triple camera offering with a 48-megapixel f/1.7 main sensor, a 13-megapixel f/2.4 telephoto, and a 12-megapixel f/2.2 ultrawide. The first two sport optical image stabilisation.

The results of this set-up were generally positive. The Find X2 takes good, detailed, well-balanced shots in good lighting. It also employs auto-HDR well when there’s excessive shade, though it can struggle with overexposure on particularly bright days.

The telephoto camera does well to give you reasonably crisp 2X shots, but there is no periscope lens like the Find X2 Pro and the Reno 10x Zoom. As a result, the 5X shots involve a lot of cropping and some noticeable noise.

Portrait shots are crisp, with the subject really standing out from the blurred background, though it’s not immune from blurring out stray hair clumps and other edge elements. The 32-megapixel selfie camera is a strong performer, too.

In all this, though, we have to come back to those like-for-like comparisons. The Oppo Find X2 uses the same Sony IMX586 main sensor as the OnePlus 8, the Xiaomi Mi 9 and the Oppo Reno 10x Zoom. This sensor is older and markedly smaller than the Sony IMX689 used by both the Oppo Find X2 Pro and – crucially – the OnePlus 8 Pro.

This makes it good but not cutting-edge tech. Of course, we praised the Oppo Reno 10x Zoom for getting more out of this sensor than its immediate rivals. But that was a year ago and £100 cheaper. The competition and expectations faced by the Oppo Find X2 are much steeper, with the OnePlus 8 Pro and the Samsung Galaxy S20 offering you more performance for the same money.

In its favour, the Oppo Find X2 seems to experience fewer focusing errors than the OnePlus 8 Pro, which can be a little temperamental. But there’s no denying that the otherwise similarly specced OnePlus 8 Pro takes flat out better photos in most situations. They’re brighter, better-lit, and downright sharper than the Oppo.

Check out some image samples below:

Software – Slightly less busy than before

ColorOS 7.1 on the Oppo Find X2 isn’t the total eyesore it used to be. In Oppo and Realme phones past, we often lamented this custom UI’s heavy-handed nature.

It might well be ameliorated by the slick display and speedy performance of the phone, but we enjoyed using ColorOS on the Find X2 way more than before. It’s not as stuffed up with pointless duplicate apps and services, or a secondary App Store that no one asked for.

It’s not entirely likeable, though. There are still a fair few custom preinstalled apps, like a video editor (Soloop) and a chintzy relaxation tool (Oppo Relax). Scroll to the left, meanwhile, and you get a widget-filled Smart Assistant in place of the usual Google Feed. We can actually conceive of this being more useful to some, but having the option would have been welcome.

The menus, too, are a little gauche and nannying, never shy of asking you the same thing repeatedly. Like when adding all your games to the Game Space launcher, and being asked each time to confirm the flicking of a toggle.

But as we’ve already stated, everything moves along at an appreciable lick, making it well worth your time enabling that permanent 120Hz refresh rate. Indeed, you can customise the look and feel of the Find X2 to a considerable degree here.

We’d still take the stock Android experience as offered by the Pixel 4, or the lighter and more tasteful efforts of OnePlus, Motorola, and Sony as a matter of preference. But ColorOS on the Oppo Find X2 is perfectly usable.

Battery Life – Solid stamina and extremely fast charging with one glaring omission

The Oppo Find X2’s battery situation is largely good news, with a small but potentially significant down side.

First, the good stuff. This 4200mAh battery is more than up to the task of powering that large, bright, sharp and responsive display. We were able to get through a day of fairly heavy usage and well beyond with moderate usage. We recorded screen on times of five to six hours in between charges.

Media consumption didn’t overly tax the Oppo Find X2 either. An hour of Netflix, with the screen set to half brightness (which is still pretty bright), sapped just 7% of a charge.

Oppo’s top of the line SuperVOOC 2.0 Flash Charge technology and bundled 65W charger offer some of the fastest charging we’ve seen. We put the Oppo Find X2 on charge with 15% left in the tank, and just 15 minutes later we were up to 73%. After another 15 minutes, it had hit 99%. From red lining to nigh-on full in half an hour is extremely impressive stuff.

Which makes it slightly disappointing to note that the Oppo Find X2 doesn’t have wireless charging. Practically speaking, this won’t be much of an issue for a lot of people, but wireless charging is now virtually universal at this end of the market.

An Oppo representative told us that the omission came down to the fact that no wireless charging standard could stand up to their own rapid VOOC charger in terms of raw speed, and that they wanted to perfect any such wireless standard.

If they can capture even a slice of that VOOC magic in a wireless setting for future phones, we’ll be in for a treat. Watch this space.

Should you buy the Oppo Find X2?

If the Oppo Find X2 comes to you as a contract option, you can feel confident taking it up without hesitation. It’s a really well built phone with largely top of the line components at a competitive price.

Its screen, in particular, is one of the best you can get. You can add speedy performance and super-fast wired charging to the package, and all for a price well south of the Pro.

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There are a couple of notes of caution, however. The Find X2’s camera, while far from bad, is well shy of the top tier, and the omission of wireless charging is an odd choice. ColorOS isn’t the cleanest take on Android, either, and you don’t get the comfort of IP68 water resistance certification.

If such things are an issue for you, then you’re better off with the OnePlus 8 Pro, which has almost all of the good points of the Find X2 and none of the drawbacks. Otherwise, buy with confidence.

Trusted Score