Oppo Find X2 Lite review

Two-minute review

 The Oppo Find X2 Lite is, as its name suggests, the junior and most affordable member of the Find X2 range, sitting below the Find X2, the mid-ranged Find X2 Neo, and the premium Find X2 Pro.

Oppo is clearly pitching the X2 Lite at the ‘affordable 5G phone’ market, and while it’s been beaten to that market by a few devices, namely the Moto G 5G Plus, OnePlus Nord and Huawei P40 Lite 5G, it’s still certainly worth considering if you want next-gen connectivity without breaking the bank.

The Oppo Find X2 Lite isn’t just an outlier from its siblings in terms of price; it misses out on key design elements shared by the other three, including their curved-edge displays and ‘punch-hole’ camera cutouts.

The Find X2 Lite looks very much like your run-of-the-mill mid-range Android phone: it has a ‘teardrop’ notch for the front-facing camera, a noticeable chin, and a screen that’s flat all the way to the edges. That’s not to say it’s boring-looking though – in our time testing it several people admired its silver trim and pearl gradient finish.

Talking of design, the Find X2 Lite was the most ‘compact’ 5G phone as of its release, with a smaller frame and lighter weight than the aforementioned competition. This makes it great for users who aren’t in the market for a larger and pricier phone, of the kind that comprises the bulk of 5G offerings at the moment and just want a handy little device they’ll forget is in their pocket.

The screen here too is a little better than you might find on competing phones. It’s only got a ‘standard’ 60Hz refresh rate, which the Moto G 5G Plus beats with its maximum 90Hz, and its max brightness is a little low, but it’s got a 1080 x 2400 resolution so images are crisp, and it’s an AMOLED display, so colors look vibrant.

The rest of the phone’s specs are fairly typical of a phone at this price. The Snapdragon 765G chipset delivers moderate processing speeds, though we found the phone could be a little slow now and then, and there’s a 4,025mAh battery, which will see you through about a day of use but not much more.

There are four rear cameras, including a 48MP main snapper, and you won’t find pictures disappointing, though two of the snappers feel redundant. 

Specs-wise, then, the Oppo Find X2 Lite sits roughly neck-and-neck with other 5G phones at this price point. It’s a tiny bit pricier than its three close rivals, but its svelte design compared to its bigger, blockier rivals may sway you towards it.

Oppo Find X2 Lite price and availability

The Oppo Find X2 Lite was announced in April 2020 and released a month later in the UK. It’s not on sale yet in Australia (the Find X2 Pro is available in the country though, so we expect the Lite could make its way too), and since Oppo phones are never released in the US, we wouldn’t expect it there.

The Oppo Find X2 Lite price is £399 (about $520, AU$730), so it’s fairly affordable compared to its siblings like the Find X2 Neo at £599 (roughly $780, AU$1,100), the Find X2 at £799 (roughly $1,045 / AU$1,465) and the Find X2 Pro which goes for a whopping £1,099 / AU$1,599 (about $1,450). 

Now let’s look at the phone’s closest competitors. The other ‘affordable’ 5G phones on the market as of this review are the Moto G 5G Plus, which starts at £299 (about $375, AU$535), the OnePlus Nord which starts at £379 (about $480, AU$680) and the Huawei P40 Lite 5G, which costs £349.99 (about $435, AU635).

Design

The Oppo Find X2 Lite is the smallest 5G phone we’ve tested, and we were fans of its lightweight feel.

The phone’s dimensions are 160.3 x 74.3 x 8mm, so the phone is shorter and thinner than most other handsets, including pretty much all other 5G ones, and about average thickness. It weighs 180g, which is on the light side for a smartphone, and it made the phone feel more comfortable to handle or drop in a pocket.

The phone has  USB-C and 3.5mm headphone jack ports. The power button is on the right edge while the volume rocker is on the left edge – we prefer when these are on the same side, as it allows you to rest the phone on the button-free edge  when watching content, so there’s no danger of buttons being accidentally pressed. 

On the back of the phone there’s the Oppo logo, and a vertical camera bump at the top-left. This bump doesn’t protrude by much, but it’s enough that you can’t lay the phone down perfectly flat on a table.

This back is made of glass, not plastic as some other devices at this price point have, with an aluminum frame between the back and the screen.

We tested the Pearl White version of the phone, which features an attractive pink-to-blue gradient on the rear; there’s also a Moonlight Black option.

Display

The Oppo Find X2 Lite screen is 6.4 inches across –– that’s smaller than the screens on the other phones in the Find X2 line, which are all 6.67-inch, but pretty average. However as we’ve said, most existing 5G phones are larger devices and the Find X2 Lite is a relatively small phone in comparison.

The resolution here is a fairly standard 1080 x 2400, and the aspect ratio is 20:9, so the phone is a little longer than some others – 18:9 is more typical. The screen uses AMOLED tech, so its colors are nice and bold, but we did notice its max brightness was on the low side, making it a little hard to see in bright daylight.

Breaking up the screen at the top is a smallish ‘teardrop’ notch – given that most new phones, including the other Find X2 devices, use ‘punch-hole’ or pop-up selfie cams, this feels a little old-school. Unless you’ve got a particularly strong opinion about selfie-cam positioning you won’t mind though, and it only takes up a small amount of screen real estate at the top.

Cameras

Pictures taken with the Oppo Find X2 Lite cameras aren’t the best-looking in the world, but we were happy enough with the quality given the device’s low price. The phone has a 48MP f/1.7 main shooter joined by 8MP f//2.2 ultra-wide and 2MP f/2.4 black-and-white cameras, and a 2MP f/2.4 depth-sensor.

On the front there’s a 32MP f/2.0 selfie camera, and we were fans of pictures it captured – thanks to the snapper’s high resolution they contained lots of detail, and background blurring looked pretty natural. This ‘bokeh’ effect was better in portrait mode, although we found that this mode made bright colors look a little garish– this was a trade-off we had to make when choosing modes, though we tended to prefer portrait.

Pictures snapped with the rear cameras tended to look pretty good – they were vibrant, with a dynamic range you don’t always see in budget phones, and daylight shots looked nice and bright, although some snaps we took in darker situations looked a little dull.

Oppo has showcased some pretty impressive image post-processing software in its other phones, and we expect it’s employed here too.

That said, the contrast could have been better, and high-contrast images lost a lot of detail in darker areas, such as shaded areas in a sunny shot. In addition, the cameras took a touch longer to take a picture after we pressed the shutter button than those on many other phones – we occasionally moved the phone too quickly after pressing the button and ended up with a blurry picture.

We’re not too sure what the black-and-white or depth-sensing cameras are doing here, as there wasn’t much of a depth effect in images taken with the rear camera in either portrait or standard mode, and black-and-white photos looked exactly the same as ones taken from Oppo’s other devices that don’t have the dedicated mono sensor. The mono snapper doesn’t seem to add anything.

There’s no zoom lens, so if you want to zoom in on a subject, which you can do by up to 10x, you’re doing it digitally and rapidly losing image quality – that said, these grainy snaps looked a touch better than we’ve seen from other phones’ digital zooms.

The Oppo Find X2 Lite shoots video up to 4K resolution at 30fps, or up to 1080p at 60fps. There’s also a slow-mo mode, but we don’t have information on the framerate of this; this mode supports 1080p shooting though, which not all slow-mo modes do.

Camera samples

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Specs and performance

The Oppo Find X2 Lite runs on the Snapdragon 765G chipset, which has previously appeared in the OnePlus Nord, LG Velvet and Samsung Galaxy A71 5G. It’s a gaming-optimized processor, although we’ve mainly seen it in 5G phones, and it’s paired with 8GB RAM.

When we put the Oppo phone through the Geekbench 5 benchmarking test it returned a multi-core score of 1827, which is about what we’d expect given that the 765G is a relatively mid-range chipset.

For context, the Moto G 5G Plus, a similar cheap 5G phone with the Snapdragon 765G chipset, scored 1822, and the OnePlus Nord and LG Velvet managed 1877 and 1804 respectively, so it’s a close contest between these affordable 5G phones.

The phone is fairly powerful for its price tag then, and this is evident when you’re playing games. We did find that apps loaded a little slowly though, more so than on the aforementioned phones, and particularly bigger apps or games.

That didn’t happen every time we tried to open an app, so it’s likely that when we did experience this issue it was because we’d bogged the phone down with background processes, but if you tend to use your phone fairly intensively it’s something to be aware of.

The Find X2 Lite got hot pretty quickly too – when we were charging the device, using the camera a lot or playing games for any length of time, it got warmer quicker than many other devices we’ve used. It didn’t stay hot for too long, but again power-users might run the risk of overheating.

Software

The Oppo Find X2 Lite is running Android 10, which is the most recent version of Google’s operating system as of the phone’s release. This has Oppo’s ColorOS laid over the top.

ColorOS is mainly a visual change to stock Android, and ‘color’ is the operative word here. The menus and home screen look very bright and bold – some might say garish, although we didn’t mind as much. There are quite a few customization options in ColorOS if you dig into the menus – you can change the font, icon shape and text size, in addition to the color scheme.

ColorOS has an app drawer, but we found apps also got installed straight onto the home screens, making the existence of an app drawer, the whole point of which is to keep apps hidden away, a little redundant.

Generally, swiping through the menus felt smooth – you wouldn’t think this was a budget phone if you were to just scroll through the menus as it was surprisingly snappy, notwithstanding our occasional issues with opening apps. 

The Oppo Find X2 Lite has face unlocking, which we found very quick to recognize our face – this became our default way of unlocking the phone, rather than using the in-screen fingerprint sensor, which felt slower.

Battery life

At a stretch, the Oppo Find X2 Lite will last you a day on a full charge, but that really depends on how you’re using it. It has a 4,025mAh battery, which isn’t small, but the phone is a bit behind its close rivals, which tend to have 4,500mAh-5,000mAh power packs.

With medium use we found the phone generally lasted us to the end of the day, but we did have to charge it overnight. If we didn’t use the phone much during the day it would just about make it into a second day, but if we used it a lot, for example when we were testing the cameras or streaming lots of video, we needed to charge it before the day was out.

The charging speed is 30W, which is pretty fast for a budget phone. Oppo says it’ll take just 20 minutes to get your phone from empty to 50% charge at this speed, and we’d concur, although it took closer to an hour to get the phone all the way to full.

There’s no wireless charging here, but since that feature has yet to make it to affordable phones, its omission is no surprise.

Should I buy the Oppo Find X2 Lite?

Buy it if...

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• First reviewed August 2020