Oppo Find X3 Pro review

However, the real icing on the cake comes in the form of ‘Colourful Future’, an exclusive ringtone written by legendary film score composer Hans Zimmer. How many phones can boast that?

It’s not just about the glitz and glamour though, like the entry-level Oppo Find X3 Lite 5G, the Oppo Find X3 Pro comes with a camera with four lenses, fast charging, and, naturally, 5G support.

Make no mistake; the Oppo Find X3 Pro is a seriously good phone. But is it £1,099 good?

Jump to:

• Oppo Find X3 Pro review: summary
• What is the Oppo Find X3 Pro?
• How much is the Oppo Find X3 Pro?
• Oppo Find X3 Pro features
• Oppo Find X3 Pro battery
• Oppo Find X3 Pro camera
• Oppo Find X3 Pro design and set-up
• Our verdict
• Where to buy

Oppo Find X3 Pro review: summary

The Oppo Find X3 Pro is a powerful, polished smartphone for buyers with cash to burn but want to turn some heads. If you want to stand out from the pack and not just pick up the latest iPhone, or Samsung, the Oppo Find X3 Pro is what you should be looking for.

The standout feature here is the display. Mobile phone displays have been excellent for years, with even the cheapest phones coming with Full HD resolution screens these days, so it takes something truly special to stand out from the pack, and the Oppo Find X3 Pro does that, with style. After watching a few shows on Netflix and iPlayer on the Find X3 Pro, you probably won’t want to stream content on anything else.

The cameras are also excellent, and the battery is heroically good, especially when you consider the calibre of the display. The fact that the Oppo Find X3 Pro can be charged up in less than 40 minutes is another selling point.

It is expensive, though; there’s no getting around that, and Oppo’s guarantee to only provide two years of software support diminishes its value. If your budget is tight, but you want a semblance of the Find X3 Pro experience, you’re better off turning your attention to the Oppo Find X3 Lite, which gives you the basics for a fraction of the price.

Pros:

• Fantastically rich and vibrant display
• Long-lasting battery that charges up in 40 minutes
• Camera captures accurate and detailed stills and video

Cons:

• Expensive
• No software support after two years

The Oppo Find X3 Pro is available on the Oppo store and Amazon, priced at £1,099.

What is the Oppo Find X3 Pro?

The Oppo Find X3 Pro is the most expensive phone from Oppo’s flagship Find X3 series.

For your money, you get a dazzling array of powerful and eye-catching features, including a 6.7-inch touchscreen display, a top-of-the-line Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 processor, a huge 256GB of storage, and a massive 4,500mAh battery.

Announced in March 2021, along with the Oppo Find X3 Lite 5G, the Oppo Find X3 Pro is available to buy now.

What does the Oppo Find X3 Pro do?

The Oppo brand has been synonymous with great value budget phones for years, but the Find X3 Pro is a very capable – and expensive – Android phone.

In addition to boasting a high-resolution display with a high refresh rate, it’s a 5G device and features a Wi-Fi 6 antenna, which means it can connect to some of the fastest network and Wi-Fi speeds available. SuperVOOC 2.0 fast charging means that with the supplied charger, you can be fully charged in under an hour, and wireless charging is supported too.

Key features:

• Dimensions: 163.6 x 74 x 8.26 mm
• Weight: 193g
• 6.7-inch AMOLED display with 120Hz refresh rate
• Quad-camera set-up including twin 50MP wide and ultra-wide sensors
• 32MP front-facing selfie camera with facial recognition
• 65W SuperVOOC 2.0 fast charging
• 30W wireless charging
• 10W reverse wireless charging
• In-screen fingerprint scanner
• Type-C USB port – data, charging, and audio through one connection
• NFC included for contactless payments

How much is the Oppo Find X3 Pro?

The Oppo Find X3 Pro is available to buy now SIM-free and unlocked directly from Oppo for £1,099, or Amazon, Carphone Warehouse, also for £1,099.

If you’re less keen on buying the Oppo Find X3 Pro outright, you can pick it up on a range of pay monthly contracts from EE, O2, Three, and Vodafone.

Oppo Find X3 Pro features

The Oppo Find X3 Pro is positively packed with features, but chief among these is the display. Forgive me for waxing lyrical about the display again, but it really is pretty fantastic.

Measuring 6.7-inches, this is an AMOLED-type panel with a resolution of 3,216 x 1,440, which gives you a PPI (pixels per inch) count of 525.

Oppo says that the Find X3 Pro’s display can produce over a billion colours and kick out up to 1,300 nits of brightness. That’s on par with a high-end laptop like a MacBook Pro or Dell XPS. It also boasts a variable refresh rate and is capable of refreshing at a rate of up to 120Hz.

In lay terms, all of this means that images will look detailed, colours will look rich, vibrant, and accurate, and gaming and video playback will look silky-smooth. The high levels of brightness mean you’ll be able to use the Oppo Find X3 Pro anywhere, even on bright, sunny days.

Day-to-day operations are as smooth as the visuals, thanks to the Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 processor. The Oppo Find X3 Pro never feels like it’s struggling to run anything. With 256GB of onboard storage, you’ve got acres of room for photos, selfies, videos, and games.

In terms of connectivity, there’s a Type-C USB port at the base. No 3.5mm headphone jack is present here, sadly, so if you’ve got some old-school headphones, you’ll have to shell out for an adapter or consider picking up some Bluetooth headphones. There’s no slot for a memory card, but the SIM tray has room for two SIMs here if you need to have a business and personal number on the go.

Oppo Find X3 Pro battery

The Oppo Find X3 Pro has a 4,500mAh battery which is easily capable of giving you a day’s worth of juice, and if you pushed it, it could almost last for another one.

After eight hours of typical use, including calls, browsing, social media, and streaming, you can expect to have around 55-60% left in the tank, good going, considering how vibrant the display is.

During testing, the longest I was able to go without reaching for the charger was one day, five hours, and 28 minutes, but that was with me actively using the phone, constantly playing music through the external speakers, or streaming it to a portable Bluetooth speaker. You can enable several battery saving modes that shut down things like GPS and Bluetooth or any applications that are draining resources, so in a pinch, you can buy yourself some extra time if you’re nowhere near a mains socket.

What's really impressive, though, is the speed with which the Oppo Find X3 charges back up – from flat to full in just over 40 minutes, using the supplied 65W charger.

The Oppo Find X3 Pro also supports 30W AirVOOC Wireless Flash Charging, which lets you keep the battery topped up while freeing up that USB port. You can also use 10W reverse wireless charging to keep things like earbuds topped up too.

Oppo’s wireless charging solution is based on the Qi open interface standard, and so it should work with any Qi-enabled charging pads or headphones – not having any of those to hand, I can’t comment on how well this works.

Oppo Find X3 Pro camera

Like the Apple iPhone 12, Samsung Galaxy S21 and OnePlus 9, the Oppo Find X3 Pro’s main camera unit features a cluster of lenses and sensors which allow you to take a wide range of shots, from wide panoramas to super close-up macro shots.

The main wide and ultra-wide sensors are 50MP Sony IMX766’s, which do a very good job of capturing detail and natural colour without everything looking oversaturated. In both well-lit and poorly-lit locations, the Find X3 Pro does a good job of creating natural, balanced shots.

There’s also a 13MP telephoto sensor, which affords you 2x optical zoom, and 5x ‘hybrid’ zoom, which uses software trickery to capture virtually lossless images from a distance. You can push things further – up to 20x – but beyond 5x zoom, all you’re really doing is enlarging the image and not actually zooming per se. Needless to say, at 20x zoom, you lose a lot of detail.

The fourth sensor is a 3MP lens which allows for a fun ‘microscope’ mode – hold the Oppo Find X3 up to leaves, flowers, and pieces of paper, and you’ll be able to take detailed close-ups.

The software is very easy to get to grips with, and there’s an ‘expert’ mode as well, which lets you tinker with things like white balance, ISO (sensitivity), and shutter speed. Other tools at your disposal include a Night mode, panorama, document scanner.

The 32MP selfie camera is good, too, pulling in plenty of information. In areas where there’s low ambient light, the Find X3 Pro will use the phone’s display as an ad hoc light source, filling blank areas of the panel with white pixels, which is actually pretty effective – again, that super-bright display comes into its own.

You can also record in 4K, 1080p, and 720p at 30 or 60 fps (frames per second). Other film modes available to you include slow-motion (720p or 1080p at 30fps), time-lapse, and as with the Oppo Find X3 Lite 5G, dual camera video, which records with both front and rear cameras at the same time.

Oppo Find X3 Pro design and set-up

The Oppo Find X3 Pro is available in two colour versions, blue, with a matte finish, and shiny gloss black – the model I was sent was the latter version.

While the reflective surfaces were pleasant to look at and cool to the touch, like all glossy phones, it has the tendency to pick up fingerprints. Luckily, Oppo includes a protective case in the box to give you some extra protection and grip.

It measures 163.6 x 74 x 8.26mm, which is impressive given all that’s going on underneath the hood, although the camera unit rises up out of the rear surface a bit, which means that the lenses are prone to damage. Again, using a case means that the phone feels flat and uniform, and the lenses are given a degree of extra protection.

Setting the Oppo Find X3 Pro up is a breeze. If you’ve used an Android phone before, you’ll import all your contacts as normal when you enter your Google Account details, and you’ll also be given the option to transfer any previously downloaded apps from your old device. You can also set up things like the Google Assistant voice controls and Google Pay if you wish, but you can skip those if you don’t want to use them.

Our verdict: should you buy the Oppo Find X3 Pro?

The Oppo Find X3 Pro is impressive and powerful. The cameras produce stunning stills, the battery will easily last you all day, and the display is simply marvellous to behold, but it’s expensive, and the fact that there’s no guarantee of support after two years is a strike against it. If you’re the kind of person who upgrades at the end of a 24-month contract anyway, this is less of a big deal, but people who prefer to buy phones outright might think twice.

Rating:

Features: 4/5

Battery: 5/5

Camera: 5/5

Design and set-up: 4/5

Overall rating: 4.5/5

Where to buy the Oppo Find X3 Pro

• Available upfront at Amazon | £1,099
• Available at Carphone Warehouse | £1,099
• Available upfront at Oppo | £1,099
• Available on contract at EE | from £59 a month, £30 upfront
• Available on contract at O2 | from £43 a month, £30 upfront
• Available on contract at Three | from £68 a month, £29 upfront
• Available on contract at Vodafone | from £35 a month, £29 upfront

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