Oppo, currently the world's No 4 smartphone maker, marked a return of its Find flagship series, with the global launch of the Find X at an event in the Louvre in Paris. Oppo claims the Find series is all about pushing the boundaries of possibilities in smartphones.
While most leaks were on the mark, and the smartphone is a flagship in every way possible and features attention grabbing design, top-notch specs and innovative technology, what was a surprise was the price tag – an eye-popping 999 Euros which works out to approximately Rs 79,000 at current exchange rates.
A co-branded Lamborghini edition, featuring even superior fast charging than the regular Find X, will cost buyers 1699 Euros – around Rs 1.34 lakh.
Oppo and Italian marquee sports car maker Automobili Lamborghini insist the collaboration on this special edition is not just skin deep – besides an engraved version of the famous Automobili Lamborghini logo on the smartphone, both insist they will work closely in the future.
Clearly, the Find X will not sell in the massive sales numbers that Oppo's mostly mid-range smartphones deliver, and is a lot about creating an impact and scaling up the Oppo brand and taking the fight to a segment that Oppo hasn't traditionally played in –the super premium part of the smartphone pie.
At this price point, the Find X is more expensive than Samsung's flagship Galaxy S9+ and the Note 8. And it's about Oppo going global – entering the European (and possibly North American) market and shifting gears from an Asia-only approach.
The Find X is a stunner with gorgeous curves and glass on both sides, and in an era when most flagships have drawn inspiration from the notch on the iPhone X, the Oppo Find X has a striking 6.4-inch Full HD+ OLED screen that's almost completely screen and no bezel, with a market-leading screen-to-body ratio of 93.8 percent.
The company calls it a panoramic arc screen. However, the glossy back clearly is a fingerprint magnet as we witnessed within a few minutes of use. For the camera unit, Oppo has opted for a motorised pop-up module instead of the recent trend of camera and facial recognition unit placed inside a display notch.
The 'Stealth 3D' camera unit does pop up in less than a second when a user facially unlocks the phone or for taking a photograph, but in countries like India that are prone to dust, one might wonder if this approach would result in problems, but Oppo insists that the pop-up module has been tested rigorously and claims it should work smoothly for at least five years without any problem.
The pop-up module includes the cameras and integrates much more, including a flood illuminator, infrared camera, proximity sensor, dot projector, receiver and RGB camera. Incidentally, like the iPhone X, Oppo Find X also doesn't come with a fingerprint sensor and only features an facial unlock system which Oppo terms O-Face Recognition.
Oppo’s success has largely been because of its cameras, especially a high-quality front camera for selfies and the Find X continues that tradition with a 25 MP AI-powered front camera and a AI dual-camera unit at the rear with a 16 MP primary (f/2.0 with optical image stablisation) + 20 MP secondary (f/2.0).
The AI enhancements help in enhancing photographs by automatically beautifying faces, and there are AR stickers along with 3D emojis like on the iPhone X, though Oppo terms them Omojis. The smartphone supports over 20 photography scenarios and 800 scenario combinations like food, pets, snow, etc.
Powering all this is the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 chipset with 8GB of RAM and two storage options – 256 GB and 500 GB. The Find X has a powerful 3,730mAh battery with Oppo’s proprietary VOOC charging technology. On the Lamborghini edition, Oppo offers super VOOC charging which takes its 3,400mAh battery from 0 to full in just 35 minutes.
Support for global LTE bands leads to speculation on whether the Find X is also headed for the North American market. The charging and audio port is USB Type C, and there's no audio jack.
The Find X runs ColorOS 5.1 which is based on Android 8.1 and comes in two colours, Glacier Blue and Bordeaux Red. There was no information on India availability and pricing, but there is speculation that the Find X will be launched on 12 July. There are reports that the phone may be available in August but there was no confirmation. As for pricing, it's highly unlikely that the Find X will be cheaper in India than in Europe.
There was no mention of availability for the Lamborghini version and no information on other differences between the two versions, beside the battery specs and carbon fibre texture on the rear of the Automobili Lamborghini version.
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