Oppo arrives in UK with three new(ish) smartphones

It’s been a while coming but Oppo – one of the world’s biggest smartphone manufacturers – has finally confirmed it will be selling its smartphones in the UK.

After launching in Italy, France and the Netherlands last year, the Chinese company, which numbers among the top five smartphone manufacturers in the world, will bring three of its smartphones to the UK initially with, presumably, more to come later on in 2019.

The phones that will go on sale in the UK, via Carphone Warehouse exclusively, are the Oppo RX17 Pro, which we recently reviewed and the Oppo RX17 Neo, both of which were launched at the November event in Milan, plus the Oppo Find X. The Find X is the company’s flagship smartphone and was, when it launched in Paris in June 2019, the first phone to have an all-screen, notch-free design with both front and rear cameras hidden in a motorised pop-up mechanism.

• The Oppo RX17 Pro will cost £549 from Carphone Warehouse
• The Oppo RX17 Neo will cost £319 from Carphone Warehouse
• The Oppo Find X will cost £799 from Carphone Warehouse

We were impressed with the Oppo RX17 Pro in particular, which comes with a triple camera array on the rear, including a clever time-of-flight camera for measuring things and performing 3D scans. It’s not the fastest smartphone on the block, employing a Snapdragon 710 instead of the Snapdragon 845 of its immediate rivals, but the RX17 Pro hits back with the fastest charging we’ve ever seen in a smartphone, filling the battery from empty to full in 40 minutes flat.

The flagship Oppo Find X is a little more powerful than the RX17 Pro and comes with a Qualcomm 845 processor, 8GB of RAM and a base 128GB of storage. Its party piece is that its cameras (both rear and selfie) are hidden away on a clever motorised mechanism that rises up at the top of the phone when required and slides back away when you’re finished.

That’s pretty slick, and the phone’s other specifications put it firmly in high-end smartphone territory: a 25-megapixel selfie camera, dual 16-megapixel rear cameras and, like the RX17 Pro, dual-batteries and SuperVOOC Flash charging that can charge the phone from zero to 100% in well under an hour. That £799 price looks rather steep, though.

Finally, we have the Oppo RX17 Neo, which is a cut-down version of the RX17 Pro and falls into the same price bracket as the ridiculously good-value Pocophone F1. Alas, the Oppo RX17 Neo isn’t in the same league as the Pocophone when it comes to speed and responsiveness as it’s only powered by a Snapdragon 660 processor.

The Neo’s other specifications are pretty good for a smartphone in this price bracket, though, with a 16-megapixel camera and a 2-megapixel depth-sensing camera for portraits on the rear, a 25-megapixel selfie camera on the front, a 6.4in Super AMOLED screen and 128GB of storage. The RX17 Neo misses out on the RX17 Pro’s super-charged, SuperVOOC charging but, otherwise, it looks like a reasonable stab at the sub-£350 smartphone market.

All three of Oppo’s UK smartphones will be available immediately from all the usual channels, and we expect many more Oppo-branded phones to flood the market in the coming months. Watch this space for our reviews.l