A terrific screen and cool features, but still falls short

The Oppo Find 7, like the OnePlus One, is a Chinese-made phone with plenty of promise, but it comes with a much higher price tag: $599, (£350 or AU$640).

As Chinese phones generally are known for their low cost, the Oppo Find 7 is expensive when compared with its domestic rivals. On one hand, given that it’s the only handset available globally that has a high-resolution 5.5-inch 2,560×1,440-pixel display other than the LG G3 ($690, £490, or AU$799 without a contract), the premium can somewhat be justified. Yet, it’s still quite a hefty price for a display that you may not really need and features that don’t stand out from the competition. And it doesn’t help that for just a dollar more, you can get the Samsung Galaxy S5.

The Find 7 is available to preorder in the UK from Oppo’s European store, where it’s priced at €479 SIM-free, which converts to £380. It’ll ship in early July. You can also buy it now in Singapore. US and Australian availability has yet to be announced.

Oppo’s “Quad HD” Find 7 phone (pictures)
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Design and specs

The Find 7 might remind you of the OnePlus One, if you’ve been following my recent reviews. The two phones are made in the same factory and likely share the same mould. The shape and size are similar, but the placement of buttons differs. The Find 7’s speakers are on the back instead of at the bottom, and the camera is a little lower down the back.

I do, however, like the feel of the Find 7 a little better. The textured plastic rear has more grip, and the metallic bandings around the edges give the phone a touch of class.

The 5.5-inch “Quad HD” display — that’s 2,560×1,440 pixels, the same as four 720p screens — is bright and brilliant, and usable even under bright sunlight. It crams in 538 pixels per inch — far, far more than Apple’s “Retina” displays. That said, the display doesn’t appear any any sharper than a normal 1080p screen of similar size.

Like the OnePlus One, I found the phone a little too large to use comfortably, and I’m guessing most of you will have to use both thumbs to type properly. This is usually the case with phones that have screens larger than 5 inches.

While the Find 7 is larger than the G3, it’s actually only a little bit wider. But I did feel that typing on the G3 with one thumb was a lot easier, so that extra space does make a difference.

Three touch-sensitive buttons are located below the screen, and the phone uses the old-style Android menu button instead of the multitasking button. While these keys are backlit, they are pretty dim, and you won’t be able to make them out in bright light. It also appears you can’t switch to use onscreen keys unlike the OnePlus One, so you’re stuck with the back button located on the right side.

I mostly use phones in my left hand, so it’s quite annoying to stretch out my thumb to hit the back button, only to find that the fleshy bit of my palm has accidentally hit the menu button. It would have been nice if the phone had onscreen keys or the ability to customise where the back button is.

Internally, the Find 7 is powered by a 2.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor, 3GB of RAM, and 32GB of onboard storage. There’s also a microSD card slot located underneath the cover, but you’ll have to take out the battery to swap cards.

Connectivity-wise, it has 4G LTE support, and there are two variants: the international model should work for most countries in Europe and around the world, while the US and Mexico version comes with frequencies tuned for these markets.

Besides LTE, the Find 7 also has quad-band 3G support, which should work on most networks around the world, and the usual NFC, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi.

Software and features

If you’ve read my Oppo N1 review, you’ll be familiar with the Color OS that the Find 7 uses, a skin that runs over Android 4.3 Jelly Bean. It comes with a few innovative software features that you don’t really see in other phones.

For one, the phone has a gesture panel that can be turned on by sliding down from the top left side. Once there, you can draw with your finger to quickly activate apps. The default gestures allow you to draw a circle to open the camera, or a V to turn on the flashlight, for example. You can add your own — for example, a W to open WhatsApp messenger.