Review | World’s most bezel-less phone, Oppo Find X, is a truly daring device and good performer, but may have gone overboard
The Find X smartphone from Chinese tech firm Oppo takes the pop-up camera concept seen in the Vivo Nex to the extreme, resulting in a stunning-looking device that also performs well. But will its mechanics stand the test of time?
Just a week after Vivo launched its notch-less Nex phone with a pop-up camera, Oppo (owned by the same parent company, BBK Electronics) unveiled its own device: the Find X, which follows a similar concept but takes it to the extreme. Let’s take a look.
Design and hardware
The Oppo Find X, with its 93.8 per cent screen-to-body ratio, is even more bezel-less than the Nex, at 91.2 per cent. This slight difference is noticeable only when you place the two phones side-by-side; the Find X’s chin is maybe 2mm slimmer, but in the cutthroat smartphone market where millimetres matters, that makes it the most bezel-less phone ever made.
Just like the Nex, the Find X uses an elevating module to house its front-facing selfie camera, thus eliminating the need for a notch (that tiny black cut-out on top of the edge-to-edge screen pioneered by the iPhone X). But while the Nex only pops-up a small module, the entire top of the Find X rises, revealing a chunk of forehead that houses not just the front-facing camera but also an additional infrared camera for facial scanning and, on the back, dual “main” cameras.
But – as with the Vivo Nex – having a mechanical moving part in a phone could backfire, no matter how well-built. A camera module that moves up and down over and over has a higher chance of malfunction than a camera that does not move.
That concern is at least tripled with the Find X. The phone has no fingerprint reader at all; facial scanning is the only form of biometric security available, which means every single time a user unlocks the Find X, its top will rise up. That is also the case every single time both the front and back cameras are used.
On the Nex, only frequent selfie takers would have to worry about the mechanism wearing down. On the Find X? Users are going to be popping that thing up and down at least 80 times a day, and that’s a conservative estimate. For what it’s worth, Oppo claims that it has tested the Find X’s mechanism 300,000 times with no issue.