Oppo Find X3 Pro review: one of the best Android flagships you can buy

The Oppo Find X3 Pro is the new 2021 flagship from Oppo, and a successor to the very impressive Oppo Find X2 Pro. Like its predecessor in the Oppo range, the Find X3 Pro throws together just about everything you could want from a top-tier smartphone.

From the glossy, premium design and powerful specs, to the very capable rear camera array and high refresh rate display, it's a flagship phone by whatever criteria you want to use. It aims to take on the likes of Samsung and Apple as one of the best phones of 2021.

In this comprehensive Oppo Find X3 Pro review, we'll guide you through everything you need to know about the phone and what it's like to use. By the time you've finished reading, you should have a very good idea of whether this is the right handset for you.

Oppo Find X3 Pro review: price and availability

The Oppo Find X3 Pro goes on sale in the UK from 14 April 2021 and can be yours SIM-free and unlocked for £1,099 – that gets you 12GB of RAm and 256GB of internal storage. Most networks and retailers should be stocking the phone, and you can also buy it direct from Oppo if you prefer. It's a steep price, but we think the phone is just about worth it.

Oppo Find X3 Pro review: design and screen

Image 1 of 2

In our opinion the Oppo Find X3 Pro is a fantastic-looking smartphone, with its glossy, mirrored back and refined curves – even the camera bump looks stylish. It's fair to say that the rear of the handset is something of a fingerprint magnet, and somewhat slippery to hold, but in terms of its pure aesthetics it's really impressive. We reviewed the gloss black colour option, but there is a blue alternative that gives a more matte finish, which might appeal more to you.

The phone is nice and light and streamlined, weighing in at 193 grams and with a thickness of just 8.3 mm (that's 0.33 inches). It feels very much like a premium, flagship phone when you pick it up and use it, and one that's definitely able to hold its own against handsets such as the iPhone 12 Pro and the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra. The glass is nicely curved at the edges of the display, and the aluminium frame is a classy touch as well.

In terms of the Oppo Find X3 Pro display we've got a vibrant, sharp 6.7-inch AMOLED screen here capable of displaying some 1 billion colours: it runs at a resolution of 1440 x 3216 pixels and can reach a maximum refresh rate of 120Hz, and it's difficult to find display specs that are better than that on the market at the moment. Images, videos and websites all look superb on this screen, and thanks to that high refresh rate, everything moves super-smoothly on screen as well.

The screen is more than bright enough to use comfortably outdoors, and the bezels around the sides are hardly noticeable. There's a single punch hole notch up in the top left-hand corner of the screen as you look at it, which is the only interruption to the clean lines of the display, and like the phone as a whole the screen is one that wouldn't look out of place next to some of the best panels on the market at the moment.

The phone comes with a power button on the right as you look at it, and volume controls on the left. You get stereo speakers, plus the now standard USB-C port for charging and data transfer, and there's a fingerprint sensor embedded under the display that we found to be accurate and fast in use. Rounding off the design specs, the phone is IP68 rated for water resistance, which means it can stand being submerged at depths of up to 1.5 metres for up to 30 minutes.

• These are the best Android phones you'll find

Oppo Find X3 Pro review: camera and battery

Oppo likes to pay a lot of attention to the cameras on its handsets, and that's in evidence again with the Find X3 Pro. As well as a 32MP wide selfie camera, around the back the handset carries a quad-lens 50MP wide + 13MP telephoto (2x optical zoom) + 50MP ultrawide + 3MP macro camera that comes with a rather neat party trick: a 60x microscopic mode that lets you take an ultra-close look at fabrics, surfaces, skin, paper, phone screens, or anything else you like.

Admittedly, it's a bit gimmicky, but it's also kind of cool – and we had plenty of fun with it, even if it might be the sort of feature you forget about after the first few days. It's certainly different, and we've included some samples below. Otherwise, this is a very capable rear camera, capable of capturing images in an instant that turn out well balanced, punchy and crisp in most situations.

The 2x optical zoom and 5x hybrid zoom (a mix of optical and digital) work well at getting you closer to your subjects without much (or any) degradation in the quality of your photo, and it's the same with the ultrawide mode – you can rely on it to fit more into a frame without the distortion or colour shift that can creep in with some cheaper phones. Pictures do occasionally come across a little over-saturated, but on the whole we found ourselves very impressed with picture quality.

Image 1 of 20

The Oppo Find X3 Pro copes well with low light situations as well, even if you don't turn the dedicated night mode on – it'll often capture decent shots in the dark, without too much noise or blurring. With the night mode you have to keep the camera steady for longer, but it proves very capable at brightening shots in low light without making them look unnatural. It's another tick in the positives column for the handset.

In terms of how much time you get between battery charges, we ran a two-hour video streaming test on the phone, with the screen set to maximum brightness and the volume at a low level. The level of the 4,500 mAh battery only dropped from 100 percent to 90 percent, which suggests you could squeeze as much as 20 hours of movie watching out of this phone before you'd have to recharge it again – that's definitely up there as one of the best results we've seen from this particular test.

In more general use, the Oppo Find X3 Pro was also impressive in terms of the battery life it offered. This is one of those handsets that can genuinely get through not just one day but two days on a single charge, as long as you're not heavily using it – and if you add in super-speedy 65W wired charging and 30W wireless charging, battery life isn't going to be a problem for you on this phone. 10W reverse wireless charging for your smaller gadgets is also supported.

• Check out our picks for the best smartphones

Oppo Find X3 Pro review: other specs and features

If you want one of the fastest smartphones in the business, then the Oppo Find X3 Pro is going to serve you well: it comes carrying a Snapdragon 888 processor from Qualcomm – the top CPU for Android phones this year – as well as up to 12GB of RAM and 256GB of internal storage (you can't expand that with a memory card, but then again you probably won't need to). Rounding out the rest of the specs, there is of course 5G here.

In short, it's a powerhouse of a phone: that's backed up by Geekbench 5 scores of 924 (single-core), 3373 (multi-core) and 4594 (OpenCL). In terms of that benchmark at least, this is a handset that's on a par with the very best that 2021 has to offer in terms of smartphones – think the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra, for example, which carries the same Snapdragon 888 chipset in the US. Games and demanding apps are no problem for this handset, and so it proved in our testing.

No matter what we threw at the phone, it blazed through it with an impressive level of speed and responsiveness. We've got to the stage now where the best phones on the market offer significantly more power than a lot of apps are ever going to need, and that's certainly the case with the Oppo Find X3 Pro – and that also means it's going to be a long time before you need to upgrade as well.

Even with dozens of browser tabs and multiple apps open, the handset didn't miss a beat during our testing, though we can't of course speak to what it's going to be like a year or two down the line. It's a particularly good device for mobile gaming purposes, because there's a gaming optimisation utility on board – and the combination of the internal specs, the large screen and the high refresh rate add to the appeal for gamers.

The Oppo Find X3 Pro comes with the latest Android 11 on board, with Oppo's own ColorOS on top of that. The own-brand software isn't the worst we've seen, but we prefer the clutter-free experience of stock Android, on the whole. There are a few unnecessary extras, including a phone manager utility and a photo gallery that isn't really required when Google Photos is around, but we can certainly live with it (and as this is an Android phone, you can easily customise it to suit your own tastes).

• All the best gaming phones together in one place

Oppo Find X3 Pro review: price and verdict

There's no doubt that the Oppo Find X3 Pro is going to cost you a significant amount of money: £1,099 in the UK at the time of writing, though if you check the offers embedded on this page you might be able to pick it up for less online right now. That sort of price can be a hard sell, especially with so many top-quality mid-range Android phones available on the market at the moment.

However, you certainly get plenty back for the money that you're spending: while the rear camera on the phone doesn't go overboard in terms of its zoom capabilities, it is one of the best mobile snappers that we've seen lately, and the microscopic capabilities are certainly something different if nothing else. A lot of people are looking for a top-quality phone camera, and the Find X3 Pro provides it.

In terms of the power under the hood then you'll struggle to find anything to beat this handset during 2021 – it's one of the best Android phones of the year when it comes to performance. Add in 5G and IP68 waterproofing and you're ticking just about all the boxes that you need to tick when it comes to a top-tier smartphone. Battery life is good as well, and charging speeds (both wired and wireless) are excellent.

Phone design is always going to be something of a subjective assessment, but we find ourselves drawn to the polished curves of the Oppo Find X3 Pro – and there's little doubt that the 120Hz, 6.7-inch display is one of the best in the business at the moment. It's difficult to find anything major to complain about on this handset, even though you may baulk at the price.

Finally, it's perhaps worth mentioning the other phones in the series, just so you can be sure that you're buying the right one: there is no standard Oppo Find X3 handset (at least not yet), but you can get variations on this particular theme from the mid-range 6.55-inch Oppo Find X3 Neo and the budget 6.4-inch Oppo Find X3 Lite (which both dial down the specs in terms of internals and the rear camera).

• Pick one of the best cheap phones from this list