The best phone you shouldn’t buy

Verdict

The Oppo Find X6 Pro is an excellent phone with one of the best camera experiences on an Android phone. You get a great and bright display, solid performance, great battery life, and super quick charging. It’s only held back by the lack of a global launch. It’s a China-exclusive phone and runs the Chinese version of Oppo’s software, which makes it both difficult to buy and use.

Introduction

Oppo has been making some incredible phones for a while now. Just like its now sub-brand OnePlus, Oppo has a Hasselblad collaboration going on. The Oppo Find X6 Pro is a satisfying culmination of this cross-branding approach and quite possibly the best camera experience you’ll find on an Android phone in 2023.

The problem? The Oppo Find X6 Pro is officially available only in China, starting at RMB 5,999 ($862/£692) for the 12GB/256GB model, RMB 6,499 ($934/£750) for the 16GB/256GB model, and RMB 6,999 ($1006/£807) for the 16GB/512GB model. Colour options include brown (vegan leather), green, and black.

It has the chops to go up against the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra, packing in superb hardware and blazing-fast charging. It’s running the Chinese version of Oppo’s ColorOS, which means it doesn’t ship with Google apps, though they can be side-loaded. Regardless, the phone’s software is geared toward the Chinese market, which seems to be the only thing holding it back.

The Oppo Find X6 is the best flagship phone we have seen from Oppo yet, and a significant improvement over last year’s fantastic Oppo Find X5 Pro – it’s just a shame it’s not getting an international launch.

Design and Screen

• Curved LTPO3 AMOLED with 2,500 nits peak brightness
• Attractive design and colour options
• IP68 water and dust resistance

The Oppo Find series has always had great designs, and the Find X6 Pro is no different. Given that the focus this time is on the camera, you get a massive camera bump at the back of the Find X6 Pro. It’s centred, though, so there’s no wobble you get with asymmetric camera bumps. The camera bump is a part of this phone’s personality, and it’s a personal favourite of mine. 

The colour options are also some of the best we have seen from Oppo yet. You get the classic black with a shimmer reminiscent of the iconic sandstone colourway of the iconic OnePlus One. Then there’s the flagship brown colour, which comes with a vegan leather back as opposed to the standard Gorilla Glass 5 and is easily one of the best-looking colourways I have seen on an Android phone. 

My review unit was the green option, which is more of a rich teal colour, and looks sleek, especially with the glossy colour-matched frame and a curved display. Oppo also includes a colour-matched shell case in the box with a vegan leather back, so you can get that leather feel regardless of the colour you pick.

The screen on the Find X6 Pro is brilliant. It’s a 2K 6.82-inch display, and Oppo promises a peak brightness of 2,500 nits outdoors. The display is an LTPO3 AMOLED, with a maximum refresh rate of 120Hz. The screen can get really bright outdoors and has great visibility. I didn’t test the exact brightness figure, but it was consistently beating my Google Pixel 7 Pro by a considerable margin when outdoors.

The colours are great, and you can select your preferred colour style from the settings. Content consumption on this display was an absolute pleasure.

Not everybody will like the curved screen, but I didn’t find it to hinder my experience at any given point in my usage. I like curved screens, and Oppo’s palm rejection and gestures for navigation worked really smoothly for me. The design of the Oppo Find X6 Pro marries form and function, and the curved screen is a part of that.

The Gorilla Glass Victus 2 protection should relieve at least some of your drop anxiety. IP68 water and dust resistance is also thrown in for good measure.

Camera

• 1-inch type primary camera sensor
• Solid zoom performance
• Consistent performance across all modes

The cameras on the Oppo Find X6 Pro steal the show. It’s clear that Oppo intended this to be a camera-first phone, and the phone delivers on the promise. I’m not someone who takes a ton of photos usually, but in my three weeks of testing the Oppo Find X6 Pro, I ended up taking over 750 photos. The camera outputs some tantalisingly good images.

Part of the camera experience comes from the fact that Oppo has used a 1-inch sensor for the primary camera. It’s the largest sensor you can get on a phone, with 1.6µm pixel size. The main camera takes some fantastic shots in every mode and lighting condition. Photos taken in the daylight are crisp, with solid detail, punchy but not oversaturated colours, and solid HDR processing.

What the Oppo Find X6 Pro’s main camera does really well is portraits. I’m not referring specifically to the portrait mode, but photos where people (or animals) are the primary subjects. I got so many great portrait shots with the Find X6 Pro. It frames the subject perfectly, capturing a solid amount of detail, while the depth of focus brings in a healthy amount of background blur. 

The dedicated portrait mode is among the best I’ve seen on an Android phone as well, with the edge detection coming in just right. Low light performance is impressive, too, and the phone often didn’t even need to kick in the night mode to be able to capture good photos in lower light conditions.

For the ultrawide and periscope telephoto, Oppo uses identical sensors. They’re not quite as big as the 1-inch primary sensor, but all three share a 50MP resolution. This makes for better consistency across the three sensors.

The zoom performance on the Find X6 Pro is excellent. There’s a 2.8x optical zoom with Oppo’s camera app providing 3x and 6x zoom steps, and the digital zoom goes up to 120x.

Zoom photos are great, especially up to the 6x step. Details are maintained, and you can hardly tell that the images are digitally zoomed. As is the case with optical zoom, there are diminishing returns, with the results getting worse, especially past 15x. 

However, overall, the zoom performance is among the best you can get on an Android phone. Macro shots are also pretty decent, although the camera not remembering my preference to turn off auto macro mode was a tad annoying at times.

Video performance is on par with the rest of the camera experience. My only complaint would be the shift in colour temperature while zooming in and out. While it’s not as jarring as on most other phones I’ve used, I would have preferred the tone to be maintained.

The selfie camera is also quite solid and on par with the best. Beauty filters are at play, but you can adjust the intensity (down to zero) to get the perfect shot. The front camera can only do 1080p@30fps video recording, but the output footage is pretty good.

Software and performance

• Chinese version of ColorOS based on Android 13
• Solid all-round performance
• GPU heavily throttles under sustained loads

The Oppo Find X6 Pro comes with top-notch hardware. You get a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip, which is the best smartphone chipset you can get in Android devices right now. Additionally, the storage on board is the blazing-fast UFS 4.0 and 12- or 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM. All of that means that this phone is just as responsive in regular usage as it is under more intense workloads, like gaming.

Day-to-day performance on the Oppo Find X6 Pro is as quick as it gets on a mobile device right now. I experienced virtually no lag. In benchmarks, however, this phone underperformed slightly compared to current flagships. I didn’t feel the phone heat up too much at all, which is an improvement from many last-gen devices at the very least.

I tried playing Fortnite on the Find X6 Pro and the performance seemed pretty solid – I didn’t feel a drop in performance that affected the experience too much. However, 3DMark’s Wildlife Stress Test showed a significant drop in performance over its 20-minute stress test, meaning this phone may not be the best choice for more serious gamers.

The software on the Oppo Find X6 Pro is a bit of a double-edged sword. It’s running the Chinese version of ColorOS 13.1, based on Android 13. While we’ve praised ColorOS on other Oppo smartphones, the Find X6 Pro’s flaws mostly come from the fact that this phone is running software tailored for the Chinese market. 

Admittedly, Google Apps were very easy to install, and uninstalling the China-specific apps was fairly simple, except for a few instances like HeyTap Cloud which are baked into the system. Some software quirks are also present, like having to enter your password any time an app wants to send an SMS for verification. 

My biggest issue with the phone is that due to being a Chinese model, it has some global essentials missing. An example is Android Auto, which needs to be a system app in order to function. You cannot install apps as system apps, which means you will be locked out of a few apps.

It also has an overly-aggressive background optimisation process that can unnecessarily kill apps and stop notifications from coming through – another big limitation of the China-focused software compared to its international alternative.

Can you use the Oppo Find X6 Pro for day-to-day use largely without issue? Sure, but you’ll likely get irritated by the limitations and other oddities of the China-focused software. I’d recommend most Android users look elsewhere for this simple reason, and that’s a bit of a shame.

Elsewhere, the audio on this phone is pretty great with a stereo speaker system. The sound output is loud and crisp, and the in-call sound is crystal clear. Oppo also has an Active Privacy Protection implementation for voice calls, which reduces the sound leakage from the earpiece greatly. 

Battery life

• All-day battery life
• 100W SuperVOOC charging
• 50W wireless charger

The battery life on the Oppo Find X6 is excellent. During my usage, the phone comfortably delivered all-day battery life. The 5000mAh battery, coupled with the efficiency of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, is enough to get you through a day and then some. I ended most days with 20-25% juice remaining. Even on camera-heavy days, the phone managed to hold up really well. 

I use my phone very regularly, but the usage usually includes a light workload, mostly texting and scrolling using Telegram, Instagram, and Twitter, quite a bit of web browsing using Chrome, and some emailing via Gmail, in addition to infrequent calls. The Find X6 Pro served me well over a three-week period that included five flights in one week and didn’t die on me even once. The benchmarks reflect the battery efficiency of this phone.

The only time I managed to run down the battery of the Find X6 Pro was when I travelled for a work assignment that included a lot of photography and some videography. That’s where the ultra-fast charging came in. 

Oppo bundles this phone with a 100W SuperVOOC charger, which can completely top up the phone in about half an hour. The excellent battery life and quick charging made this phone a perfect travel companion. The quick charging does warm up the phone a bit, especially if you’re in a place where the ambient heat is on the higher side, but it was never uncomfortable to hold. You also get 50W wireless charging, which is among the fastest on Android phones.