This year, all the players are relentlessly pursuing an edge-to-edge display on their flagship smartphone. Samsung has been pushing it’s ‘infinity display’ while Apple introduced a notch on their iPhone X. One of the fundamental challenges to building a true edge-to-edge display is finding an appropriate place to house the front-facing camera, along with an array of sensors that are now stapled on every smartphone.
Oppo’s solution is the FindX, which is mechanically intuitive, pulling all the sensors and cameras out and placing them on a tray that electronically slides up from behind the screen when required. This allows the device to boast a record 99% screen-to-body ratio.
The problems faced on the software side aren’t resource-driven – the phone sports a Snapdragon 845 processor with 8 GB of RAM. These are components that have become characteristically flagship and power devices like Samsung’s and Huawei’s top-tier smartphones. Much of the problems in the Find X find their roots in poorly constructed software that cripples the user experience.
Oppo has always touted the cameras on its’ smartphones and the marketing material also pushes the artificial intelligence component of the camera which automatically identifies scenes and adjusts the settings to produce a more real-to-life picture. Despite the 6.2 inch AMOLED display only being able to produce a 1080p picture, the camera can shoot 4K, though color reproduction suffers from under-saturation. More often than not, pictures come out blurry, especially if taken in low-light conditions.
If compared with a mid-range smartphone, the Find X’s cameras would definitely hold their own. However, with a price tag that exceeds every other flagship, the cameras are steeped in miserable mediocrity, and nothing but.
A 3730 mAh battery powers the device well beyond one day. Color OS aggressively regulates background applications in order to maximize battery life. And Oppo advertises its signature VOOC charging which allows the phone to charge to a significant level in a very small period of time. The Find X can achieve a full charge under 30 minutes, which is unprecedented.
Other staple expectations from flagship smartphones are also absent: waterproofing, a fingerprint reader, and wireless charging. Much of the conversation about the Find X finds its start and end at the sliding mechanism that houses all the sensors. This device is a physical testament to the notion that there have to be some compromises with intuitive approaches.
Oppo has been aggressively launching smartphones in Pakistan and has recently launched the Oppo Find X with the retail price of PKR 129,999. This price point exceeds every other flagship smartphone from any manufacturer in Pakistan. Adding the pricing dimension and then re-evaluating the Find X steers the conversation in another direction where the relative gain is minimal.
While the maiden implementation of the slider understandably requires a significant amount of work, there are a lot of areas where the company made poorly thought out decisions which could have been very easily avoided. Its intuitive design is as bold as it’s software quirks are unforgivable.
The Colors OS which is a skin Oppo places on top of the Google Android build is littered with a plethora of bloatware apps that push annoying push notifications to the user. Oppo’s Color OS virtually hides Android Oreo from plain view and forces users to keep Oppo’s own app store which will always display itself in Chinese, even if the phone’s language is set to English.
Oppo calls the Find X a ‘visual revolution’. And that is apt as it is purely a visual revolution, not a practical or feasible one. The Find X is a beautifully designed smartphone, which fails in areas that other companies have, over time, perfected, with a price point that is economically ludicrous.
Should you buy it? Absolutely not.