Oppo Find X2 Pro review: a premium flagship in every department

What you should take away from this Oppo Find X2 Pro review is that this phone is still worth buying because it balances price with performance, an impressive camera system and style.

It was one of the best phones you could buy after it first launched, although it has now been overtaken by the next in the series launch cycles, the Oppo Find X3 Pro and Oppo Find X5 Pro. 

Sitting in the crowded upper-mid-range-to-flagship section of the market, the Oppo Find X2 Pro has a lot to prove but it's actually cheaper than ever right now. Up against some of the best Android phones, it takes a lot to stand out… and this phone certainly does. 

You might know Oppo better for its budget and mid-range handsets, such as the Oppo Reno 10x Zoom, but this is definitely built to go head to head with the like of the Samsung Galaxy S21 and iPhone 12. We think it manages to hold its own well, even now. 

Oppo Find X2 Pro review: Price and release date

Having launched in March 2020, the Oppo Find X2 Pro is widely available (and for decent discounted prices, since the Find X3 Pro and Find X5 Pro have arrived). Check the widgets on this page for the latest prices that you can pick up the phone for online.

You can buy the Oppo Find X2 Pro direct from Oppo itself, or from third-party retailers such as Amazon. It's also available to pick up from the likes of EE, Vodafone, and Carphone Warehouse.

Oppo Find X2 Pro review: Design and screen

As soon as you pick up the Oppo Find X2 Pro you know this is a seriously premium-level phone – our review unit came in a rather fetching sage green shade with a faux leather finish, but you can also go for a brighter orange (again with the leather effect) or a more understated and conventional black (with a ceramic finish) if you prefer. It's thin, it's lightweight, and it looks every inch like a modern-day smartphone.

The OLED screen is fantastic too, stretching 6.7 inches from corner to corner, and running at a sharp resolution of 1440x3168 pixels. The screen boasts HDR10+ support as well as a refresh rate of 120Hz (double the conventional 60Hz), which means that animations, menus and webpages look ultra-smooth while you're scrolling and moving around different screens on the phone.

The display uses curved edges, which may or may not be to your liking – we tend to prefer flat edges but the curved option definitely has its own aesthetic appeal. What's most important is that colours are bright, details are pin-sharp, and everything that you bring up on this display looks fantastic: whether it's scrolling through webpages, watching videos, or browsing through social media apps, the Oppo Find X2 Pro screen is one of the best that we've seen recently.

When it comes to detailed dimensions, the Oppo Find X2 Pro measures 165.2x74.4x9.5 mm for the leather phones and 8.8 mm for the ceramic model. The phone tips the scales at 200 grams for the leather models, and 217 grams for the ceramic edition. Those figures are a little heftier than other flagship phones that are on the market at the moment – the standard iPhone 12 handset is 7.4 mm thick, for example, while the regular Galaxy S21 model is 7.9 mm thick.

The back of the phone looks classy and refined too, with a long rectangular camera module tucked away in the top left-hand corner as you look at the back of the device. Even the little mirrored Oppo logo, which might usually annoy us, isn't a problem – it actually adds to the polish of the phone as a whole. Competing with the big players in the market starts with getting the design right, and Oppo has definitely done that here.

In terms of buttons and ports, there's the standard volume controls on the left of the phone as you look at it, the power button on the right, and a USB-C port on the bottom. The phone also has stereo speakers, which we found did a decent job of playing music and video audio in our testing. The Oppo Find X2 Pro also comes with an IP68 rating for protection against liquid and dust – it can survive in water up to a depth of 1.5 metres for up to 30 minutes.

Oppo Find X2 Pro review: Camera and battery

The Oppo Find X2 Pro features an impressive triple-lens 48MP wide + 13 MP periscope telephoto + 48MP ultrawide rear camera. Besides the ultrawide mode, useful for fitting much more in a single shot, the periscope telephoto camera – where the optics are placed vertically inside the case – enables optical zoom up to 5x. If you need to take long distance shots of wildlife, sports or landscapes, then having so much zoom in your smartphone can make a big difference. There's a 32MP wide selfie camera on the front.

Photo and quality is another area where the Oppo Find X2 Pro really shines, with snaps taken by the phone mostly fantastic. Details are crisp and sharp, colours are wonderfully well balanced, shutter speed and focus are both really quick in operation, and as an added bonus there's an expert Pro mode that you can enable to take more control over settings like white balance and ISO speed.

No matter what we were shooting with the Oppo Find X2 Pro, the results were top notch: these are photos that are too good for your social media pages really. Ultrawide, optical zoom and close-up shots look great, with no distortions or variations in colour as you switch through the various capabilities of the rear camera. Everything considered, we'd say it's one of the best smartphone cameras on the market at the moment.

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Even low light can't trip up the phone – it can capture an impressive amount of detail at night, with an impressively low level of noise, and while the night mode means that you need to keep the phone steady for a second or two, it's worth it for the results. When it comes to video, you can record at resolutions of up to 4K at up to 60 frames per second, and again the results are what you would expect from a premium-level phone.

As far as Oppo Find X2 Pro battery life goes, in our two-hour video streaming test, where we ramp the screen brightness right up and put the volume on a low setting, the Oppo Find X2 Pro went down from 100 percent to just 87 percent, suggesting you can squeeze about 14 or 15 hours of video playback out of the phone. That's one of the best results we've seen recently, and it shows the 4,260 mAh battery is able to keep going for a substantial amount of time.

There's no wireless charging here, but you do get super-fast 65W wired charging speeds – the best on the market right at the time of writing – and when you can juice up your smartphone that quickly, battery life doesn't matter so much. In general use the battery holds up well, and you'll easily get through a day and probably to the next morning on a single charge unless you're really pushing the phone in terms of gaming, screen use, GPS location tracking and so on.

Oppo Find X2 Pro review: Specs and features

Take a look at the specs sheet for the Oppo Find X2 Pro and once again the phone's true flagship credentials stand out. The handset runs a Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 processor – pretty much the top CPU for Android phones in 2020 – and pairs it with 12GB of RAM and either 256GB or 512GB of (non-expandable) internal storage. That's a serious amount of power, and you'll be struggling to find a phone that very noticeably outpaces the Oppo Find X2 Pro for some time to come.

Despite our best efforts we were unable to slow down the Oppo Find X2 Pro, no matter how many games we played or browser tabs we opened up. This is a phone that'll breeze through just about anything, as its high scores in the Geekbench benchmarking tool prove – it scored 909 for single-core performance, 3239 for multi-core performance, and 3210 for OpenCL performance in our tests, which is only slightly short of 2021 flagships running the newer Snapdragon 888 processor.

There's no hint of lag or delay on the phone, whether you're flicking through social media or editing photos on the device (the 120Hz refresh rate of the display no doubt helps here too). This phone launched in March 2020, but it has one of the very best configurations of that year, and we suspect that it's going to stay speedy and fast for several years to come yet – the money that you spend on the phone is going to go a long way.

There's 5G here, as we've mentioned, so you can get connected to the next-gen network speeds if they happen to have rolled out in your area, and it adds to the overall appeal of the phone. For the price you're paying for this handset you would expect 5G to be on board these days of course, but it's another box ticked – it's difficult to think of anything that the Oppo Find X2 Pro is missing, unless you need something out of the ordinary.

The Oppo Find X2 Pro comes running Android 10, with Oppo's own ColorOS software on top. Like a lot of Android skins from the Chinese manufacturers, it's a bit too busy and invasive for our tastes, but it's a small annoyance on what is otherwise a great phone. Your mileage may differ, but we're happier using stock Android or something very close to it, without all the (mostly superfluous) extras that Oppo and other manufacturers feel like they have to stick on top.

While ColorOS 11 (based on Android 11) has reportedly started rolling out on this phone, we haven't seen it on our particular device yet. Of the extra apps and features that ColorOS brings that you might find useful, there's Game Space for turning off notifications and managing performance while you're gaming, and Oppo Relax for calming your mind and body with some carefully curated nature sounds.

Oppo Find X2 Pro review: Verdict

We like just about everything about the Oppo Find X2 Pro – in fact, we love it. From the stylish design and the super-speedy screen, to the impressive performance and the quality of the photos and videos that this can capture, it's a fabulous all-round package. It's genuinely as good as the best smartphones on the market from the likes of Samsung and Apple, in just about every department too.

This isn't quite a perfect phone, because the battery life isn't anything to write home about, and we're not huge fans of the ColorOS software that Oppo uses, but we're dealing with very small minuses up against a lot of plus points. On balance, the Oppo Find X2 Pro is definitely going to leave you impressed, and we reckon it's a phone that can carry on impressing for years to come as well.

While the Oppo brand name might not carry the clout of an Apple or a Google or a Samsung, the Find X2 Pro shows that Oppo can make phones to challenge with the best of them, and while there are occasional annoyances when it comes to the software, you can say that about any smartphone. Don't let the Oppo badge put you off from making this your next smartphone upgrade, because it stands up to scrutiny.

The very best aspects of the phone are that big, bright screen with the 120Hz refresh rate that makes just about everything look great, and the results you get from the camera, which we really liked. The Oppo Find X2 Pro brings a level of detail and clarity to the pictures that it captures that not many smartphone cameras can match, and the benefits of that 5x optical zoom shouldn't be underestimated either. Don't forget there's 5G on this phone too, so you're all set for the next-gen networks that are now rolling out.

There's no doubt that this is one of the best phones on the market right now, and the imminent arrival of its successor isn't going to really change that – in fact it might make the Oppo Find X2 Pro even more appealing, if it gets a significant price drop when the newer models show up. It ticks every box you need ticking when it comes to a phone, and shows Oppo ready to compete with the flagship makers at the very top of the tree.