March 2020. OPPO has just launched the Find X2 Pro and the early reviews are saying something OPPO has not heard before: the camera is the best or among the best available on any Android phone. DxOMark is awarding the Find X2 Pro a score that places it at or near the top of the leaderboard. The primary sensor is a Sony IMX689, one of the largest sensors on a smartphone at that moment. The ultrawide uses the Sony IMX586. The periscope telephoto delivers 10x hybrid zoom. The image processing pipeline has been rebuilt since the Find X series, and the results are visible in the test shots circulating from preview units this week.
The hardware beyond the camera: Snapdragon 865 with 5G, 12GB of LPDDR5 RAM, 512GB of UFS 3.0 storage, a 6.7-inch QHD+ 120Hz AMOLED display with 240Hz touch sampling, a 4260mAh dual-cell battery with 65W SuperVOOC 2.0 charging. The 65W charging takes the phone from 0 to 100% in 38 minutes. 0 to 50% in 14 minutes. This is, by a significant margin, the fastest full-charge speed available on any consumer smartphone in March 2020, extending OPPO’s VOOC lead from 2014 into the 65W tier.
Why March 2020 is a difficult moment to launch a €1,199 flagship
The Find X2 Pro launches during the first weeks of what will become a global pandemic. European retail is beginning to close. Consumer confidence is deteriorating in ways that are difficult to quantify in real time but are clearly visible in the tone of the week’s news coverage. OPPO is launching its most technically accomplished global flagship at the worst possible moment for discretionary consumer electronics purchases above €1,000. The supply chain issues that COVID will generate over the next twelve months are not yet visible, but the demand suppression is already arriving.
This matters for how the Find X2 Pro’s market performance will be evaluated later. A camera-leading flagship at €1,199 that launches in March 2020 is not going to generate the sales volumes a camera-leading flagship at the same price would have generated in March 2019. The product will be judged on sales in a market condition that is fundamentally different from the one the product was designed for. That is not a product failure. It is a launch timing failure driven by circumstances beyond anyone’s control. The distinction matters when the industry eventually does a post-mortem on why OPPO’s European expansion in 2019-2020 did not produce the market share that the product quality implied it should have.
The Hasselblad absence and what it implies
There is no Hasselblad branding on the Find X2 Pro. OnePlus will announce a Hasselblad partnership in March 2021, and that announcement will be positioned as OnePlus’s answer to the camera gap. OPPO’s Find X2 Pro has a better camera than the OnePlus 8 Pro by most benchmark measures in 2020, without any camera brand partnership. The camera quality is the result of hardware investment, ISP tuning, and imaging algorithm development, not a brand agreement. When OnePlus gets Hasselblad and earns enthusiast attention for it, OPPO’s camera engineering team is doing better work with less marketing support. That asymmetry says something about how BBK allocates marketing budget across its brands and which brands it is positioning for which audiences. The Find X2 Pro is OPPO’s best camera work. The Hasselblad badge goes to OnePlus. The community notices, and doesn’t necessarily notice the right thing.
Part of OPPO: The Complete Story, my full history of OPPO from DVD players to the BBK empire.