As OPPO’s premier flagship phone for 2021, the Find X3 Pro that has been launched in Malaysia comes with the latest Snapdragon 888 processor and adds in a few interesting features to woo buyers.
Seeing the prevailing power vacuum in terms of Android flagship phones that are currently dominated by stalwart powerhouses like the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra, the Mi 11 Ultra and the ROG Phone 5, OPPO is throwing their hat into the ring with their Find X3 Pro that sports an RM4,299 price tag while attempting to offer similarly competitive performance.

What’s in the box

On their part, OPPO hasn’t skimped on offering a complete array of accessories with the phone and they’ve included a soft matte black casing, a 65W UK-style SuperVOOC 2.0 charger and paired USB-A to USB-C cable as well as a USB-C pair of headphones to go with it. 

The casing is a welcome touch that saves a bit on buy-in costs and the USB headset is a welcome option though the earbuds are the open-ear type without silicone eartips and poor noise insulation and comfort. On this front, OPPO are certainly generous with the phone.

OPPO Find X3 Pro Review – Design

The phone itself has a striking appearance with a precision glass-moulded backplate that curves all around the chassis and which gently wraps around the rear quad camera array and partially around the sides in a seamless fashion.

Unfortunately, as with anything made of glass, the backplate is astonishingly good at picking up smudges and fingerprints and if used without the provided casing, you’ll likely have to wipe it down every time you aim to use it. On the bright side, the backplate is sheathed in Gorilla Glass 5 for some modicum of durability

Up front, the large 6.7-inch QHD+ AMOLED display curves gently around to the sides and has a 120Hz refresh rate for silky smooth scrolling and navigation. A tiny punch hole in the upper left corner houses the 32MP selfie camera while a tiny speaker grille hides one of a matching pair of Dolby-tuned stereo speakers with the other located in the base of the phone.

The left of the phone features a volume rocker while the right has the power button. On the base, you get a speaker grille, a dual SIM card tray and a USB-C port for charging duties. The top is otherwise bare save for a tiny microphone port.

 

Overall build quality is both elegant and excellent, with the distinctive glass-hewn backplate giving the FInd X3 Pro an easily recognisable design. The phone is also rated IP68 for dust and water resistance which means that it’s able to survive in up to 1.5 meters of freshwater for up to 30 minutes at a time.

OPPO Find X3 Pro Review – Specifications

Here’s what the OPPO Find X3 Pro has under the hood and there is only one configuration available in two colourways which consist of either Gloss Black like our Find X3 Pro review sample or Blue.

Price	RM4,299
Display	6.7-inch LTPO QHD+ AMOLED, 1,440 x 3,216 pixels, 120Hz
Processor	Snapdragon 888
OS	Android 11 w/ ColorOS 11.2
Memory	12GB RAM/256GB storage (no microSD card)
Camera	50MP F/1.8 primary w/ OIS + 13MP F/2.4 x 2 optical zoom + 50MP F/2.2 ultrawide angle +3MP microscope camera [rear] / 32MP F/2.4 [front]
Battery	4,500mAh Li-Po w/ 65W SuperVOOC 2.0
Size/Weight	163.6x 74 x 8.3mm/ 193g

In terms of specifications, the OPPO Find X3 Pro has an impressive array of hardware shoehorned into its 8.3mm glass and metal chassis. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 is currently the most powerful processor in the market and 5G connectivity comes as a matter of course. This is paired with 12GB RAM and 256GB of non-expandable storage. Unfortunately, you don’t have a microSD card tray here and the phone uses a dual SIM card tray.

The display itself is of note, featuring a 6.7-inch QHD+ LTPO AMOLED display sheathed in Gorilla Glass 5 that is rated for 100% DCI-P3 colour gamut coverage, HDR10+ support and a display that, on paper,  can go anywhere from 10Hz to 120Hz refresh rate depending on what you’re doing on screen. It also has an in-display optical fingerprint reader in the lower quadrant of the touchscreen for unlocking the phone.

Purely from a hardware perspective, the OPPO Find X3 Pro is a powerful phone indeed with plenty of pixel-crunching punch under the hood that can match other Snapdragon 888 equipped phones like the recently released ROG Phone 5 and the Mi 11 Ultra.

OPPO Find X3 Pro Performance

The phone scored the following in synthetic benchmarks:

Geekbench 5 Single Core Score	923
Geekbench 5 Multi Core Score	3315
3DMark Sling Shot Extreme Vulkan	Maxed out
3DMark Sling Shot Extreme OpenGL ES 3.1	Maxed out
3DMark Sling Shot Extreme Unlimited OpenGL ES 3.1	6,582
3DMark Wild Life	5,718
3DMark Wild Life Unlimited	5,729
PCMark Work 2.0	10,223
PCMark Battery Life	12 hours 12 minutes

The phone runs Android 11 overlaid with their ColorOS 11.2. Fortunately, they’ve ditched most of the bloatware and the phone bears the more pleasant aspects of their custom overlay with the ability to swap themes around, relax with their O Relax app with some pleasant white noise, stitch together simple clips with their SoLoop app and ownership perks with their My OPPO app.

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Gaming was a pleasant affair and the phone was able to handle Call of Duty Mobile and Genshin Impact on high settings without issue though it does get somewhat warm. Overall performance was smooth on account of its flagship display and it’ll handle everything asked of it without issue.

In terms of endurance, the 4,500mAh battery manages to be sufficient for all day use and the PCMark battery life clocks in at 12 hours and 12 minutes of endurance. 

The provided SuperVOOC 2.0 charger enabled it to fully charge itself in just over 30 minutes; quite a feat but this is only achievable with the bundled charger so you’ll need to carry it with you if want to take advantage of its fast charging speeds.

 

OPPO Find X3 Pro Display

OPPO is particularly proud of the Find X3 Pro’s ‘1-billion-colour’ display and the hype is justifiable here with excellent colour rendition and accuracy, sharpness as well as brightness; no surprise as OPPO claims the panel is capable of displaying 100% of the DCI-P3 colour gamut. Clarity under sunlight is excellent as well.

By and large, the phone defaults to 120Hz when navigating the menus and web browsing. It  dials it down to 60Hz when gaming on the more popular games like PUBG, Genshin Impact and Call of Duty Mobile and YouTube. Oddly enough, even when reading something static like a ePub, the screen refresh rate only goes as low as 60Hz.

The integrated Dolby speakers proved to be pleasantly loud which pairs up well with the excellent display. It isn’t the most detailed speaker we’ve seen on test in a smartphone but it’s sufficient for general listening.

Gaming on the OPPO Find X3’s large, luscious display was a fantastic experience, helped also in part by the aforementioned stereo speakers. Movies, especially Netflix were a delight as well with beautifully deep blacks and brilliant whites onscreen.

OPPO Find X3 Pro Cameras

You get a primary 50MP F/1.8 camera and another 50MP F/2.2 ultra wide angle camera with 0.6x magnification, both of which use Sony IMX 766 sensors and ‘all-pixel omni-direction PDAF’ though only the primary camera has optical image stabilisation. 

Of note here is that the OPPO Find X3 Pro currently has one of the highest resolution ultra wide angle cameras available which is an interesting emphasis on OPPO’s part in their design. Having both a primary and ultra wide angle with the same sensor also ensures consistent performance in terms of colour and detail on both focal lengths which is a welcome feature.

This hefty dual 50MP array is complemented with a 13MP F/2.4 camera with 2x optical zoom and a very unusual 3MP microscope camera with 60x zoom to take truly insane close-up macro shots. 

Bar the microscope camera, the primary camera array lets you capture snaps with the option to capture 12.5MP images, 4K@60fps video and up to 20x digital zoom.  

Up front, you get a 32MP fixed focus selfie camera that can capture up to 32MP mugshots and 1080p@30fps video. Oddly enough, there’s no way to dial down camera resolution and you’re locked into the aforementioned 4K@60fps video for the rear and 1080P@30fps video for the front

Shots taken with the ultrawide and primary camera on auto mode deliver great and consistent results in terms of colours dynamic range and exposure from each other under daylight with fast and accurate autofocus. You also get pretty good results in low light though you’ll need to manually fire up Night mode for best results in dimly lit scenarios where it helps to salvage a bit more detail in darkened areas and better colours.

 

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Unfortunately, beyond this modest performance envelope, the Find X3 Pro’s other two cameras fall short of greatness. Beyond 2x zoom, shots at 4x hybrid zoom and beyond tend to look a bit on the soft side with best results in daylight and low light shots looking decidedly subpar. Seeing as some competing phones offer vastly better optical zoom and even better hybrid zoom, this omission is bizarre.

The microscope camera is an interesting novelty, more so for the fact that there’s nothing else quite like it yet in the market. To ensure a subject is sufficiently well lit, the phone featurings a ring light around the lens of the microscope camera which you have to place right on top of the subject. 

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With this, you’re able to take close-up images of an ant, individual threads on a piece of fabric, the serrated edge of a box cutter and more which results in some very interesting photographs but this is a novelty at best with limited utility beyond a few amusing experiments. Having a phone with decent optical zoom would have been a better proposition but that would have put it head on with other flagships, so the decision is understandable.

Shots with the front selfie camera are good as flagship phones go with the screen flashing white as an ad hoc flash. For videos, the Find X3 Pro’s 4K@60fps footage from the rear camera takes advantage of built in electronic image stabilisation rather than a hardware-based solution and executes it surprisingly well with smooth panning and confident subject acquisition with best results in daylight and decent results after dusk though it doesn’t stand out from other flagship heavyweight phones in this regard.

OPPO Find X3 Pro is it worth buying?

The OPPO Find X3 Pro is a flagship phone that offers an interesting combination of features. You get for your money a complete set of accessories to get started out of the box while the phone packs an ensemble worthy of a flagship phone with a powerful Snapdragon 888 processor, a vibrant, sharp and fast 120Hz AMOLED display and a novel design with a bespoke mirror backplate. 

Unfortunately, the provided microscope camera is a gimmicky feature at best and the phone has unremarkable telephoto cameras with some competing midrange phones featuring better optical zoom.

It’s equivalently priced to the Mi 11 Ultra which has equivalent specs and a more conventional emphasis of a better telephoto camera setup and the ROG Phone 5 which has a far more specialised emphasis on gaming.

That aside, the Find X3 Pro has its charms especially for OPPO loyalists. If you’re looking for a visually distinctive, high-performing flagship phone, you’ll appreciate what the Find X3 Pro has to offer.

OPPO Find X3 Pro review unit courtesy of OPPO Malaysia