The Oppo Find X3 Pro is Oppo’s most premium flagship smartphone of 2021, bringing brand-new features and bespoke tech to a flashy-looking device: this is an instruction in why you should pay attention to Oppo as brand that can go toe-to-toe with the likes of Samsung and Apple.
Launching alongside a low-end Lite and mid-range Neo device – there’s no ‘non-Pro’ Find X3 – the Oppo Find X3 Pro is nothing short of a super-smartphone, rivaling the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra and iPhone 12 Pro Max in features as well as price. It’s also a successor to the Find X2 Pro from 2020, the highest-end device in the Find X2 line, although while it’s an upgrade in many areas, it’s a downgrade in a few too.
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(Image credit: Future)
Price and availability Design Display Cameras Performance and specs Software Battery life Should I buy it?
As with all uber-premium smartphones, our biggest issue with the phone is inescapable: its price. It’s very, very hard to recommend a smartphone that costs as much as the Oppo Find X3 Pro, no matter what kind of specs and features are having a party under the hood, and unless you need a top-spec phone for work or have a lot of cash burning a hole in your pocket, it’s worth checking on the Find X3 Neo, or possibly the Samsung Galaxy S21 or Xiaomi Mi 11 if you’re brand-agnostic.
If you can look past the Oppo Find X3 Pro’s astronomical price, though, you’ll find a phone that’s otherwise hard to fault; in fact, two of the ‘cons’ we’ve listed above – the design and the lack of a periscope zoom camera – are really subjective issues that you might not mind.
Firstly, Oppo has long touted its phones’ good-looking screens, and sure enough the display here looks great, especially thanks to some brand-new software called the Full-Path Color Management System. This ensures that videos or photos you capture or stream don’t get compressed or tweaked as they make their way to the device’s display, so no nasty artifacts here.
Secondly, but perhaps more usefully, the Oppo Find X3 Pro has a suite of genuinely novel cameras – and no, we’re not just saying that in a fit of excitement, these rear cameras really are new. The main and ultra-wide snappers have bespoke Sony sensors that are bigger than your average smartphone sensor, and there’s also a ‘microlens’ camera which can take super-close-up photos of tiny details. See the Cameras section of this review for more about those.
The phone does miss out on the periscope camera certain the Oppo phones, including the Find X2 Pro, touted, and as a result isn’t as good for long-distance photography.
ColorOS, Oppo’s Android overlay, is a treat to use here, mainly thanks to the suite of customization options, which far outstrip ‘stock’ Android as well as many other brands’ alternatives. If you like being able to tweak how your phone looks, this is a great option.
We’ve also got to commend the Oppo Find X3 Pro for avoiding some of the pitfalls we’ve seen with other early-2021 flagship phones: the battery life is fine, the fingerprint sensor works well, and the phone comes with plenty of storage.
Putting aside its price for a moment, the Oppo Find X3 Pro easily earns its place in the big leagues, with very few issues to speak of, and if price isn’t an issue then we can definitely recommend it. For most people, though, that price will be an issue, which is why we can’t give this excellent phone a higher score.
Oppo Find X3 Pro price and availability
(Image credit: Future)
The Oppo Find X3 Pro can be bought in the UK and Australia, but as with all Oppo phones, you can’t buy it in the US.
The phone costs a meaty £1,099 / AU$1,699 (which converts to roughly $1,500), and that makes it one of the priciest smartphones we’ve seen recently. That’s for a device with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, and it doesn’t come in any other sizes.
For some context, the iPhone 12 Pro Max starts at $1,099 / £1,099 / AU$1,849, and the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra at $1,199 / £1,149 / AU$1,849, so the Oppo Find X3 Pro sits squarely in the ‘expensive super-phone’ bracket.
Design
This may be a divisive comment, but we find the Oppo Find X3 Pro less attractive than its Find X2 Pro predecessor, a phone which we said in our review “sets a new high bar for good-looking phones”. Sure, that phone set the bar high, and while the Find X3 Pro doesn’t fall dramatically short, it bumps its head on that bar while trying to clear it.
Why do we say this? The Find X2 Pro was available in faux leather or ceramic, had a dramatic ‘waterfall’ curved-edge screen, and used a complementary two-tone color design – the Find X3 Pro has none of those things. It doesn’t look ugly by any means, and we’d be more complimentary if its predecessor didn’t exist – but it does.
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The Oppo Find X3 Pro weighs 193g, so it’s light by flagship standards, and it’s noticeable when you’re holding it. It measures 163.6 x 74.0 x 8.26mm, so it’s pretty thin compared to some of its rivals too. It’s got IP68 protection, so it’s dustproof and waterproof.
The phone has a glass back, which curves smoothly upwards in the top-left corner to form the camera bump, which has an iPhone-like triangular lens placement. According to Oppo, this curved-glass rear design is an engineering marvel, and it does feel pretty nice, although we think faux leather feels much nicer to hold. The phone is available in black or blue, and as you can see from the pictures, we tested the latter.
(Image credit: Future)
On the right edge of the phone there’s a power button, while the volume rocker is on the left edge – we found the latter a little hard to reach when holding the phone, so you’ll need to use both hands if yours are on the small side. The handset has a USB-C port, but no 3.5mm headphone jack, so wired-audio fans will need to use an adaptor for their cans.
The Oppo Find X3 Pro has a screen that curves at the edges, as with most premium phones, but the edges aren’t as steeply-angled, and the screen doesn’t extend as far down the side, as on its predecessor, which had a true ‘waterfall’ edge. As a result the phone doesn’t feel as good in the hand, although the risk of accidental presses is reduced.
Display
The Oppo Find X3 Pro has a 6.7-inch AMOLED screen with a QHD+ (or 3216 x 1440) resolution and 1300 nits max brightness. We found it looked great, with punchy colors and top contrast.
The refresh rate maxes out at 120Hz, but when you’re choosing the phone’s settings, you’re given two choices: 60Hz, or a variable refresh rate that goes between 10Hz and 120Hz depending on what you’re doing. In theory, purists might find it annoying that there’s no ‘pure’ 120Hz setting, but in practice you won’t notice when it’s lower, as it only switches for things that wouldn’t benefit from 120Hz anyway, and this saves battery life too.
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(Image credit: Future)
Something Oppo has touted widely for the Find X3 Pro display is its colors - it’s a 1-billion-color display, which is better than most competitors, and shows over 100% of the DCI-P3 color gamut, as well as having HDR10+. That’s all to say, it has great color accuracy, and some professionals, as well as prolific media users, might notice the difference. If the beginning of this paragraph is all indecipherable to you, though, it’s probably not a huge selling point for you.
This is where we mention Oppo’s Full-Path Color Management System (what a catchy name) - to cut a long and technical explanation short, this ensures photos you shoot, videos you stream, and files you download don’t get compressed and tweaked too much on their way from their source to the phone’s display.
Like with the display’s wide color gamut, not everyone will really appreciate this new feature, but if you’re using your phone for work or really notice things like this, it’ll be a welcome addition.
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