Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “This Smartphone Hardware is Getting Crazy!”.
Foreign 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 apparently going to be China only, but I’ve gotten actually 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 actually 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 kind 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 actually like it a lot, but you know that’s the Apple find series for you. They’Ve been really good at spicing it up from the standard slab formula for a number of 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 really makes a statement, but none of that is even really what I’m talking about in this article. What I am talking about is, what’s, under the hood, get it under the hood because of the Good hoodie anyway uh 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 just that I just want to appreciate with smartphone Hardware 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 all for an entire day of battery life. That’D be pretty good, now fast forward, all the way to 2023 and what what is a good smartphone battery life? It’S it’s one day, all of a day, maybe two days if you’re lucky, so it doesn’t feel like it’s. 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 and all-day battery life meant having like a 2000 to 3 000 milliamp hour battery and then even as recently as like three years ago, you could either get like a 5 000 milliamp hour battery with slower charging or you could get like A 3000 milliamp hour battery and have blazing fast charging, but now it’s 2023 we can have both. Now this one’s got a 5 000 milliamp hour battery that also charges at a hundred Watts, wired or even 50 watts wireless charging. So, with a cable that 100 Watts will do zero to 100 in 30 minutes, but even through what they’re calling air vook wireless charging, because I got to name everything with the right accessory.
You can get 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. Does that whole dance, this one even has an ultra low temperature charging mode. I think any phone could 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 0 to negative 25 degrees Celsius. So it’s your freeze, it’s it’s Canada, in the middle of the winter, something crazy, and so it’s really cold, the battery’s really 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 coal, then it needs to rapidly charge. It will actually 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’s still, you know 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 than 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 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 cut out for the selfie camera.
Looking pretty normal. I remember not that long ago, when we were first getting retina displays and smartphones, we were getting basically right over the 300 pixels per inch 300 PPI limit, where you can’t really discern individual pixels anymore. That was back in the like 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 on 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 all the way down to 1 Hertz when it doesn’t need to be moving at all to be efficient and it has a 240Hz touch sample rate, it’s extremely responsive to The touch whether it’s scrolling or swiping around or gaming, it also has adjustable color settings to get it looking exactly dialed the way you want and by the way it 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 gon na 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 because I expected that, but this display is world class. It’S hard to appreciate on the camera, but if you show this display or those numbers, because people eight nine years ago, it would 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 fun, 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 like you can basically 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 and 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 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 basically a computer, and so in order to separate yourself at the very top of smartphone Cameras, something like this, like a flagship, actually 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 absolutely 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 is that these huge sensors tend to struggle with is actually 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 system. 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 the 3x camera is both a 3X and a 6X. But then you’ll know Samsung phones will go to 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 really allowed it like we just kind of got used to gigantic bumps on the back of phones, so the downside or maybe 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 actually don’t really mind. Maybe you feel the same way: they’ve embraced the Hasselblad branding.
Obviously, they also put this whole thing in a huge circle, and then it has this nice knurled 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 It kind of plays it well. It looks fine, also there’s a couple phones with like huge camera, bumps where 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 actually use the camera bump to hold up the back of the phone comfortably, and this is one of them. 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, has the fastest Wi-Fi, as 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 going to 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 like 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 these pieces of Hardware would be like Unthinkable, eight seven six years ago. So that’s pretty cool thanks for watching catch. You guys the next one peace .