Oppo Find X3 Pro review - "Premium in more ways than one"

Late last year I reviewed the Oppo Reno 4 Pro, an elegant mid-range Android phone that didn't quite come up with the gaming goods

The Oppo Find X3 Pro sees the brand really cutting loose, with a hefty £1,099 price tag and a distinct lack of compromise on components. Can this stylish flagship stand up to our current favourite Android phone, the OnePlus 9 Pro?

Design and Specs

In terms of design, the Oppo Find X3 Pro is every inch the £1,000+ smartphone. It's one of the sleekest, most attractive phones around, with a distinctive tapering swoop to its shiny glass rear panel. It's fingerprinty, but it sure is pretty.

The display matches the design with barely any bezels and dual-curved edges. This is a 6.7-inch AMOLED of the utmost quality, capable of outputting at a QHD resolution and a 120Hz refresh rate simultaneously. It also gets really bright, right up to 1300 nits when things get sunny.

If all those stats sound familiar, it's because this is pretty much the same component as you'll find in the OnePlus 9 Pro. Oppo and OnePlus are owned by the same parent company, BBK Electronics, and they often share components.

The big focus of the Oppo Find X3 Pro is its camera. Unlike most of its rivals, Oppo has gone for a balanced set-up, with exactly same high-end 50MP IMX 766 sensor for the ultra-wide as there is behind the main wide lens. This means that whether you're shooting normal close(ish) snaps or sweeping vistas, the shots will look similarly sharp and vibrant. Oppo is keen to point out that this is the first phone to both shoot and display up to 1 billion colours.

A 4,500 mAh battery is another spec shared with the OnePlus, as is the provision of 65W wired charging. 30W wireless charging isn't quite as rapid, but is still more than enough. All in all, I could get through a long day with a third left in the tank, but extended gaming will obviously eat into that some more.

Color OS 11.2 isn't the best Android skin on the market, though. It's very tweakable, but a little cheap-looking and rather too busy for its own good. OnePlus's Oxygen OS is generally faster, slicker, and easier on the eye.

Gaming experience and performance

The Oppo Find X3 Pro packs the obligatory Snapdragon 888 CPU, the go-to chip for any 2021 Android flagship. With 12GB of LPDDR5 RAM as standard (you have to pay extra for that in the OnePlus 9 Pro), it's a truly excellent performer. Genshin Impact, PUBG Mobile, and League of Legends: Wild Rift all look and move great on high settings.

Rather bafflingly, the Oppo Find X3 Pro benches a little slower than the OnePlus 9 Pro and other Snapdragon 888 phones in Geekbench 5. We're talking a 10% shortfall. Is the OnePlus 9 Pro better optimised? Is the Oppo being throttled slightly? Or is it just a software quirk? Whatever, it runs current games brilliantly.

I mentioned that the Oppo Find X3 Pro shares a display with the OnePlus 9 Pro, but there is one difference that will be pertinent for gamers: the OnePlus 9 Pro display has a 360Hz touch sampling rate to the Oppo's 240Hz. This means that the OnePlus screen is 50% more responsive, which could prove decisive in fast-paced competitive games.

256GB of storage as standard is nothing to be sniffed at though. You'll be able to pile on the games without making a dent on the phone's capacity - even multi-gigabyte monstrosities like Grid and the aforementioned Genshin Impact.

You also get a decent set of stereo speakers, which make games sound great even without hooking up a set of headphones.

Wrapping up

The Oppo Find X3 Pro is a brilliant flagship phone with top tier performance, a gorgeous design, and a brilliantly balanced camera system.

Games look and move beautifully on its sharp, rapid display, and they're ably driven by a fast processor and stacks of memory.

However, the simple fact is you can get an equally accomplished experience from the significantly cheaper OnePlus 9 Pro, which shares a number of key components. In fact, the OnePlus 9 Pro arguably has the slight edge in gaming terms.

If you can get a good deal on the Oppo, or you like your phones to make a particular visual statement, it won't let you down. But as things stand, it feels like a somewhat overpriced choice for mobile gamers.