Pop-up camera phone is a beautiful hassle: Oppo Find X review
Bezel-free handset is great if you can put up with a variety of issues
There are people in the world who enjoy looking stylish, even at the expense of basic practicality or functionality. This is why tiny two-seater sports cars exist, or why hipsters like skinny jeans when relaxed fit pants are so much more comfortable.
The Oppo Find X is for people like that. It is a smartphone that manages to stand out in a crowded market lacking in innovation. It’s a collection of ingenious ideas and state-of-the-art tech, combined into a sleek and gorgeous package.
It’s also, sadly, a hassle to use for casual smartphone users.
Almost truly bezel-less
Ever since Xiaomi introduced the Mi Mix in late 2016, the smartphone industry has been throwing around the term “bezel-less”. But almost two years in, no phone -- not the Mi Mix with its noticeable chin or the iPhone X with its notch -- are truly bezel-less. The Oppo Find X still has a bit of chin bezel (around 3.4mm), but it’s the smallest one in all of Android. And since it has no notch up top, that’s enough to make the Find X the most bezel-less phone yet.
Here’s how the Find X avoided the notch: Oppo built a tiny sliver of an earpiece above the phone’s display that’s virtually unnoticeable unless one is purposely looking for it; it discarded the proximity sensor in favour of software that uses AI to figure out when to turn off the screen during phone calls. And the showpiece feature: The selfie camera is located in a motorised, elevating module that is hidden behind the display panel when not in use.
The idea of using a pop-up module also recently used by Vivo in its (almost) bezel-less phone, the Nex, but that handset only used it for the selfie camera. Oppo took it several steps further by putting the front and back cameras on there, including a front-facing infrared camera used for 3D facial recognition like Apple’s Face ID.
And just like Apple, Oppo is so confident in its face scanning tech that it got rid of the fingerprint reader entirely -- something no other Android phone has dared try yet. Users must use facial scanning or old fashioned PIN input to unlock the Find X.
