All right, look at this thing.
This is the Oppo Find X6 Pro.
Now I've talked about Oppo's Find X Series
smartphones before.
They've made some pretty wild stuff in the past.
This X6 Pro is not even coming to the US,
It's going to be China only,
but I've gotten to use it for about a week,
And it's got me thinking...
Smartphone hardware has gotten so ridiculously capable,
and this being at the top of the heap is so capable
that I think we might be
taking it for granted a little bit.
So, okay, let's back up.
Aesthetically, slab smartphones
have all kind of started to look the same.
We are all on the same page about that.
This one actually kind of manages
to spice it up a little bit
With this half-vegan leather on the bottom,
which kinda of has a little texture to it, which is nice.
And then the top half and the rails
are like this satin metal,
so it is a bit different, and I like it a lot.
But you know, that's the Oppo Find series for you.
They've been good at spicing it up
from the standard slab formula for several years,
and they try all sorts of interesting stuff.
There are some solid-colored versions of this phone as well,
but this is the one that makes a statement.
But none of that is even really what I'm talking about
in this video.
What I am talking about is what's under the hood.
Get it?
Under the hood? 'Cause of the hoodie?
Anyway, yeah.
Under the hood here.
So, Chinese software aside,
I can just tell that because this is a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2
with 16 gigs of RAM,
with fast storage and great other supporting specs,
I feel pretty comfortable saying that it's going to go well.
But there are three main areas
that I just wanna appreciate
with smartphone hard work capability right now.
So the first one is the battery.
Now, okay, here's the way we normally think
of smartphone battery, right?
Like, what was a good smartphone battery life like
eight, nine, ten years ago?
It's like, oh, all day.
If it could last for an entire day of battery life,
That'd be pretty good.
Now, fast forward to 2023,
and what is a good smartphone battery life?
It's one day, all of the day.
Maybe two days if you're lucky.
So it doesn't feel like it's advanced that much.
But of course, you need to consider the amount of stuff
Our smartphones are doing has gotten way more dramatic,
much more powerful processing,
bigger screens, way more radios.
These things are way more power-hungry.
So for those older smartphones, an all-day battery life
meant having a 2000 to 3000 milliamp power battery.
And then even as recently as like, three years ago,
You could either get a 5000 milliamp power battery
with slower charging,
Or you could get a 3000 milliamp power battery
and have blazing-fast charging.
But now it's 2023, we can have both.
Now this one's got a 5000 milliamp power battery,
that also charges at a hundred watts wired,
or even 50-watt wireless charging.
So, with a cable, that 100 watts
will do zero to 100% in 30 minutes.
But even though what they're calling
"AirVOOC Qi Wireless Charging",
'cause they gotta name everything,
with the right accessory,
You can get a 50% charge in 22 minutes
on the wireless charger.
So it's kind of sick.
Plus, there's all the battery extras and modes
to ideally help keep the battery healthy and optimized
so that you can fast charge as much as you want
without damaging a thing.
It learns your schedule and does that whole dance.
This phone even has an ultra-low temperature charging mode.
I think any phone can probably have this mode
if they programmed it,
but basically what this phone is doing is,
if it detects you're in extreme cold,
like zero to negative 25 degrees Celsius.
So, you're freezing.
It's Canada in the middle of the winter, something crazy.
And so it's really cold.
The batteries are cold.
But batteries need to be in a certain temperature range
to charge quickly,
like somewhere around room temperature.
So if you plug it in in that extreme cold
and it needs to rapidly charge,
It will run an artificial load
through the computer, through the processor,
like basically benchmark itself over and over again
to start to generate heat in the computer
to warm up the phone
to get the battery to a better temperature
to charge quickly.
So even at the end of the day,
if it was 10 years ago, "all-day battery life",
and now today it's still "all-day battery life",
I still think it's way more impressive now
Then it was back then.
So that's number one, the battery.
Then number two is this display.
So, you know, watching this through a compression
through a website, on a YouTube video,
and then on the screen of your phone,
You won't be able to tell how awesome this screen is.
Like, you'll just see another phone with thin bezels
and some slightly curved edges
and a hole punch cutout for the selfie camera
It looks pretty normal.
I remember not that long ago
When we were first getting retina displays in smartphones,
We were getting basically
right over the 300 pixels per inch, 300 PPI limit,
where you can't discern individual pixels anymore.
That was back in the iPhone 4S days
where it was like a 60 hertz flat LCD,
but it was like, oh, it's a retina display.
But this screen, this display here in a smartphone,
This is a 6.82-inch diagonal
with a 3168 by 1440 resolution.
That's 510 pixels per inch for anybody counting.
Razor sharp, but you can turn it down to 1080p anytime.
It's also an AMOLED display with LTPO,
so it goes all the way up to 120 hertz,
and down to 1 hertz
when it doesn't need to be moving at all to be efficient.
And it has a 240-hertz touch sample rate.
It's extremely responsive to the touch,
whether it's scrolling swiping around or gaming.
It also has adjustable color settings
to get it looking exactly dialed the way you want.
And by the way,
that has a max peak brightness of 2,500 nits.
So there's pretty much no situation,
Whether it's in the dash of your car
or outdoors in direct sunlight,
There's no situation where
It's not bright enough to be readable, which is dope.
All while housing a pretty standard,
really quick optical fingerprint sensor,
and the hole punch camera you saw with the cutout
for the selfie camera at the top.
Do I wish it was more flat?
Yeah, if I was gonna daily this phone,
I'd want a more flat display than this.
But, I mean, this is the Oppo Find X thing,
that's what they always do,
they try to go a little fancy,
a little spicy with the hardware.
So I almost give it a pass 'cause I expected that.
But this display is world-class.
It's hard to appreciate on the camera,
but if you showed this display
or those numbers to people 8-9 years ago, it'd be nuts.
So that's two.
Then three is the camera.
I mean, you look at a phone like this,
and it's pretty clear what the focus is.
That's a pun.
But the camera system on the backs of these phones
has swelled up more and more over the years,
especially on the flagships.
At this point, it's damn near half the back of the phone.
This one is a triple-camera setup.
So, one standard, one ultra-wide, and one periscope zoom.
Now, those first two categories, display, and battery,
are less software-dependent.
You can brute force your way
into having a good one,
if you just buy a good enough part.
Like, you don't need good software to have a great display,
Just buy a good display.
Optimization helps,
but like, if you buy a huge battery,
you'll have a pretty good battery life.
But cameras are a little different.
Cameras, as we've talked about,
are mostly, I mean it's a lot of software work
that goes into determining the character
of the photos and videos you get
out of a smartphone camera.
It's a computer.
And so to separate yourself
At the very top of smartphone cameras, something like this,
like a flagship,
needs to combine the two.
If you want to give your software
the best chance of succeeding,
you need to give it the best information possible.
And so this is trying to do both.
So let's not even worry about the megapixel count,
but just the sheer size of the sensors in here
and their light-gathering abilities,
and then the quality of the lenses
they're able to fit in front of them.
This is a primary camera that is a 50-megapixel,
one-inch type sensor,
with optical stabilization and a 1.8 aperture.
And so while it still has to be Oppo's software
That does all the processing,
That is most of the work
In creating a photo nowadays,
It makes a big difference
to give that computer as much light
and as much information as possible,
So that's what's going on.
The biggest thing that these huge sensors
tend to struggle with
is minimum focus distance and close-up subjects.
So thankfully, this system also has a massive
1 over 1.56-inch ultra-wide sensor, with an f/2.2 aperture,
and it also happens to have a four-centimeter
minimum focus distance,
so you can take close-up shots,
And it's got this built-in macro mode
to handle most of the weaknesses of the primary camera.
And there's a matching, identical actually,
large sensor behind the 3x periscope camera.
And that one also has an f/2.6 aperture.
So they are all 50-megapixel cameras,
They can also all do a 2x crop and still be very detailed.
So that kind of makes it feel like the 1x camera
is now a 1x and a 2x,
and then the 3x camera is both a 3x and a 6x.
But then, you know, Samsung phones will go the extra mile
and also include a 10x camera,
which can also crop if you want to.
So they'll go like, as much zoom versatility as possible.
But the point is, yeah,
we're throwing hardware at it now, and it works.
It's important still.
Camera systems like this were just kind of
not on the radar a few years ago,
especially because designs wouldn't allow it.
Like, we just kind of got used to gigantic bumps
on the back of phones.
So the downside, or maybe the upside,
depending on how you see it,
is phones today just have bigger and bigger
camera bumps on the back
to house all these massive sensors and big optics.
But this one I don't mind.
Maybe you feel the same way.
They've embraced the Hasselblad branding.
They also put this whole thing in a huge circle.
And then it has this nice neural ring
around the camera circle
that reminds me of those like nice,
especially Hasselblad cameras.
It's got the dot in the middle,
which is typically where you'd line up a lens to put it on.
So it kind of plays it well, it looks fine.
Also, there are a couple of phones with huge camera bumps
I like that the bottom of it
is right in the spot that matches
where my finger rests on the back of the phone.
So I use the camera bump
to hold up the back of the phone comfortably.
And this is one of 'em.
This phone also happens to have the fastest storage
we've seen in Android phones.
It's UFS 4.0 storage.
Has the fastest RAM, the fastest Wi-Fi,
is Wi-Fi 7 capable.
It also has fantastic haptics.
All of that is enabled by hardware.
And this isn't even really the most powerful smartphone out.
Like, let's be honest, it's gonna be the gaming phones again
that level up this chipset,
give it crazy cooling, like overclock it.
They'll do nuts things,
they'll prioritize different things.
They'll have a higher refresh rate screen,
They'll have big front-facing speakers
and things like that.
Others might prioritize design
in a way that's extra thin.
Different phones do different things.
And that's not even touching the whole battle being fought
over how folding phone form factors should work,
because there are a lot of options out there,
and that is all hardware,
and that is all still very interesting.
But just as far as the standard slab smartphone,
These pieces of hardware would be unthinkable
8, 7, 6 years ago.
So that's pretty cool.