July 2012. OPPO has just launched the Finder X907, and it is the world’s thinnest smartphone at 6.55mm. Not by a specification rounding trick. Genuinely 6.55mm, edging the Huawei Ascend P1 S by 0.03mm and the iPhone 4S by 2.75mm. The Finder runs Android 4.0 on a Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8620 dual-core processor, carries a 4.3-inch Super AMOLED+ display, and has a camera that OPPO is marketing as physically capable of being used as a hammer in a pinch. The “hammer test” demonstration video, while not the kind of feature that appears in serious spec comparisons, tells you something real about how OPPO is thinking about brand presence in a crowded market: do something specific and memorable enough that people share the video.
OPPO’s first Android phone is not their best work by any benchmark that matters to the Western tech press. But it is evidence that OPPO has made a platform decision — Android, Qualcomm, globally competitive display specifications — that positions the company to compete on the same hardware axis as Samsung, HTC, and the emerging Chinese competitors that are about to define the next five years of the smartphone market.
ColorOS and the software question
The Finder ships with a custom Android skin that OPPO is developing internally and has not yet named publicly. By 2013, this will become ColorOS, the software platform that now runs on more than 600 million devices globally. In 2012, it is still finding its voice: feature-rich by Chinese market standards, unfamiliar to international reviewers accustomed to stock Android or Samsung’s TouchWiz, and carrying the characteristic assumptions of Chinese Android software about what users want from a phone interface — more customization options, more bundled applications, more visual density than Western minimalism prefers.
ColorOS in 2012 is not the product it is today, and the gap between what it is and what OxygenOS (its descendant, built for the same hardware infrastructure) will become in 2015 under the OnePlus brand is the gap between a product designed for the Chinese mass market and a product designed for the international enthusiast community. That gap is why Pete Lau will argue for a clean Android experience as the founding philosophy of OnePlus, and why the eventual re-merger of OxygenOS and ColorOS in 2021 will be controversial: the two approaches to Android are genuinely different, serving genuinely different users, not just cosmetically distinct.
What the Finder signals about OPPO’s ambitions
The world’s thinnest smartphone is a vanity metric that OPPO is deploying deliberately. In a market where most Chinese Android manufacturers are competing on price and specification density, “thinnest in the world” is a design achievement that carries brand premium implications. Apple’s entire identity in this period is built on exactly this kind of material and form factor prestige. OPPO is attempting to claim a piece of the same premium positioning — not through retail presence or marketing spend, which it does not yet have at scale in international markets, but through the product itself doing the talking.
The Find 5, announced in December 2012, will go further: the first smartphone with a 1080p display, competing with HTC’s Droid DNA by days and arriving in a global market months before Samsung’s first 1080p flagship. OPPO is establishing a pattern of hardware firsts that will define its brand identity more than any marketing campaign: not the cheapest, not the most marketed, but consistently the first to implement specific technical achievements at consumer-accessible prices. That pattern is the OPPO competitive advantage in embryonic form, visible right here in July 2012, in a 6.55mm phone with a hammer-proof marketing video.
Part of OPPO: The Complete Story, my full history of OPPO from DVD players to the BBK empire.