Oppo Find X Lamborghini Edition review

Oppo Find X Lamborghini Edition battery life

One of the big deals about the Lamborghini Edition Oppo Find X is its SuperVOOC fast charging. But before that, let's go over the battery life. Now, while most of the hardware of the Lambo Edition is the same as on the regular Find X, the battery capacity isn't - instead of the 3,730mAh of the vanilla model, the special edition only gets 3,400mAh.

That's not really all that bad though - the Galaxy S9+, for example, has only a marginally smaller display and a marginally larger battery. The Pixel 3 XL makes do with a barely noticeable 30mAh more (for an admittedly smaller display made even smaller by the huge notch - we just couldn't help ourselves). Meanwhile, the Xperia XZ3 packs 100mAh less juice than the Oppo, though its display is somewhat smaller.

How does all that translate into battery life? Pretty decently, actually. In our testing the Lamborghini edition returned mostly proportionate numbers to the regular Find X - logical given the similar hardware.

As with most phones with OLED displays, we measured a longer endurance when watching videos than browsing the web over Wi-Fi. The Find X LE could loop videos for close to 15 hours - an awesome result, yet 2 hours short of the plain Find X. Almost an hour less on our web browsing script meant the Lambo Edition could still pass the 10-hour mark comfortably too. At close to 25 hours on a 3G call, the exclusive Find X is predictably a couple of hours short of the less exclusive version's 27+ hours. Overall, the Find X Lamborghini Edition posted an 82h Endurance score. Not a record setter, but wait until you see how fast this thing charges back up.

Our endurance rating denotes how long a single battery charge will last you if you use the Oppo Find X Lamborghini Edition for an hour each of telephony, web browsing, and video playback daily. We've established this usage pattern so our battery results are comparable across devices in the most common day-to-day tasks. The battery testing procedure is described in detail in case you're interested in the nitty-gritties. You can also check out our complete battery test table, where you can see how all of the smartphones we've tested will compare under your own typical use.

SuperVOOC is gamechanging

Oppo's VOOC was introduced back in 2014 on the Find 7 as an alternative to competing fast charging technologies that relied on cranking up the voltage to increase charging speeds while keeping current at or below 2A. VOOC, instead, maintains the voltage at 5V but ups the current with the cap set at 4A. This requires both a proprietary adapter and cable.

What if... you have two separate batteries that you can charge at 5V/4A? Or even 5V/5A? Well, you get SuperVOOC. The Find X Lamborghini Edition has 2 batteries inside - 1,700mAh each for a total of 3,400mAh. Add the necessary controllers and circuitry to a) split the current coming in so that you can charge the batteries in parallel, and b) making the phone recognize and use the combined capacity, and you get super fast charging. Again, you can't get around the proprietary peripherals.

With all of the stars properly aligned, that is to say, with the SuperVOOC charger and cable, the Find X Lamborghini Edition charges from flat to full in 35 minutes. At the 30-minute mark where we usually time all phones, the battery indicator reads 95%, while a 15-minute stint leaves you with 57-ish percent. Amazing stuff.

Now, if you don't have the SuperVOOC peripherals on you (understandable, given that the charger is a proper brick and weighs 95g without the cable), you're stuck with whatever's available.

That's more often than not some form of Qualcomm QuickCharge so we timed the Lambo with a QC3.0 compliant adapter we have at the office. That took 2:29h for a full charge, with just a 25-percent charge 30 minutes into it.

We figured we'd give it a go with a non-Super regular VOOC charger to see how that affects charging speeds too. A full charge took 1:53h - still not amazing, but considerably faster than with the QC3.0 adapter. The phone showed 31% at the 30-minute mark. Mind you, VOOC and SuperVOOC cables are interchangeable.

We had to try Power Delivery too. We took out a Pixel charger and timed the Lambo once more, this time shaving off a few more minutes off the full charge - it took 1:44h. 30 minutes into it, the battery was at 33%.

All this goes to say that SuperVOOC is nothing short of amazing in terms of top up speeds. However, if you don't have all the SuperVOOC peripherals on you, you'd be stuck at regular people's charging speed. Particularly time consuming would be the Qualcomm QuickCharge scenario, and most chargers nowadays happen to be QC ones. Let's hope that Power Delivery adoption speeds up, at least.