Fight For My Love Mom and Dad! - OPPO Find N
ShortCircuit
·ShortCircuit
·2022-05-05
·
2,483 words · ~12 min read
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- Well, that's over. Time to show you guys this thing.
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OPPO says that once you go foldable, you will never go back.
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And honestly, so far for me, that's been true.
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I've enjoyed my last six months daily driving
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the Galaxy Z Fold3, but that doesn't mean I'm not ready for some fresh ideas.
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I've had a number of issues. Hello, this pull tag, oh.
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Oh, I see.
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I've had a number of issues with the Z Fold3, including its sort of unwieldy form factor.
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This super tall form factor, which can make it a little bit difficult to handle
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in folded mode as well as some software anomalies,
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like YouTube, which I consider to be a pretty fundamental mobile app,
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doesn't include the stories feature. Okay.
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The crease has been more noticeable than I initially allowed myself to admit.
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And battery life has not been amazing.
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With that said, I'm clearly still daily driving it.
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So am I a believer in foldable devices? Absolutely.
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And, at least on paper, I might just be a believer in the Find N as well.
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OPPO has sought over the apparently six internal generations
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of hinge designs to address pretty much every complaint
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that I have. And there's some that I have a lot of hope about and some that I have a little less hope about.
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So right out of the box, one of the things I noticed was that the fingerprint sensor,
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it's in about the same location on the right-hand edge.
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But if you notice, on my Z Fold3, for whatever reason,
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Samsung hasn't seen fit to wake the device simply
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by touching the fingerprint sensor, you actually have to press it,
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kind of like a phone from many years ago. OPPO does away with this.
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You simply touch the fingerprint sensor and boom. You're off to the races.
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I love the hinge. Listen to that.
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Ooh. And it actually feels as good as it sounds.
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Compare that to the Z Fold3, which in fairness has been daily driven for a while now,
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but it's just not the same experience.
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One issue with foldables, by the way, that I've experienced over the last little while is that it's really hard
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to keep the center screen clean. Normally, it's just kind of a,
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you slide things in and out of your pocket. They can't get that dirty.
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But my center screen gets really, really dirty.
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It's not quite flat. It's one of those stupid little things.
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It doesn't really matter. Obviously, I'm still using it.
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But it's not ideal. You can see that, right? - [Mark] Yeah, yeah.
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- It's just a couple of millimeters. But honestly, I think it more than makes up for it
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in the aspect ratio. Because while the Fold Z3 is this kind of weird, tall,
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hard-to-type-on thing, this, especially if you're someone
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who used a candy bar phone way back in the day before the iPhone, it's actually kind of familiar.
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It's got kind of a my old Blackberry vibe. And aside from not being a huge fan
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of the included keyboard, I didn't find the prediction very useful, the actual ergonomics of typing are great.
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I can't believe it took me this long to pull out the banana. Okay.
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So the Z Fold3 is about 3/4 of a banana. And we've got the Find N,
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it's about half a banana in height, okay, lttstore.com.
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Oh, and this video is brought to you by VOLTA.
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3:30
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3:35
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3:39
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to get your VOLTA Spark cables risk-free with VOLTA's lifetime warranty
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and 30-day money-back guarantee. Now, of course, you don't buy a foldable phone
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for the outer display. Let's talk about the inner one.
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It's 7.1 inches. It's LTPO OLED, which basically means
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that they've sourced it from Samsung, including their ultra-thin glass.
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What do they call it again? Whatever. OPPO's marketing name for it is Flexion UTG.
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And in a nutshell, it means it's .03 millimeters thick,
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which is what allows it to fold, and it uses the same LTPO OLED panels that Samsung is using
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for their own devices, which means it gets nice and bright. It'll do up to a 1,000 nits, and it's able to operate
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at variable refresh rates up to 120 Hertz, giving it a very smooth feel.
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The first thing I noticed though wasn't the refresh rate. It was the lack of visibility of the hinge.
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The Fold Z3, it's fine, but it is not on this level.
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Look, if I try to catch the light... Here, you see that?
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OPPO's hinge is really cool.
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So they've got this internal shot in their press materials that shows you what they've done.
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Samsung, okay, so they've actually got,
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see, they've got a gap in the phone there. What OPPO's done instead is they've taken that,
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probably realistically, same bend radius, and they've built it into their hinge
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in this kind of teardrop shape inside the hinge hardware.
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So not only does it make the phone sort of flatter
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when you hold it, but it means that foldingness, that hinge is spread out so much more
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that it is basically impossible to detect,
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except when you go out of your way to catch the light, kind of like what I'm doing right now.
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Okay, here's another cool thing. That was muscle memory from using the Z Fold3,
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where I would open up a full screen content and immediately go like this in order to make the most
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of my screen size. But on the Find N, you don't actually have to do that
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because it's immediately open to landscape mode when you unfold it, thanks to their form factor.
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So it definitely has a screen size disadvantage compared to the Z Fold3.
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But from a usability standpoint, I gotta be honest with you guys,
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I probably do 75% of my use on the front display,
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messaging with people, making phone calls,
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doing normal things like that. I do another 20% of my use here where I'm remoting
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into a computer or looking at a big spreadsheet or something like that.
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And then, on those rare occasions that I'm consuming content, it's now a couple of extra interactions to get
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that couple of centimeters of extra screen diagonal. This is a lot more natural feeling.
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It really is, even in the couple of short days
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that I've been using it. It's also way more pocketable.
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Look at this. Oh, oh, this is something really cool.
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Check this out. So on the Z Fold3, you can set your apps to carry over to the front display.
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And that's something that you can do on an app-by-app basis. Plex, if I am watching something and I close it,
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it will automatically open up on the outer screen.
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OPPO, in my opinion, actually has a better approach to this.
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So if you wanna continue what you're doing, you close the device, see this...
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Boom, you swipe up. So you don't have to just decide
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on an app-by-app basis what you want the behavior to be. You can decide
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on a use-by-use basis what you want the behavior to be.
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Super cool. The multitasking, also really neat.
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So you can throw any app into a floating version of itself.
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Oh, this app does not support floating Windows. Okay, well, supported apps can be opened
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in a floating window. Fine, whatever. Play Store, there you go. So there's your floating window.
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Stop, stop. I've seen this before. You can drag it around on the top and this is really neat.
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Okay, for whatever reason, I need my clock. So draw this down the center.
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There, I've got my docs open on this side. Super cool, right?
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Cool, right? I mean, I think it's cool, whatever. - [Jono] They did better than Samsung.
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- Oh, you feel like they did it better than Samsung? Well, the other shoe is about to drop
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because there are definitely some issues compared to Samsung, shorts and stories.
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All of my features are here in YouTube. But then, watch this.
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Just because my YouTube app works perfectly doesn't mean I'm gonna have a perfect experience
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in every app. Oh, what was that? Hold on, let's try another one.
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Let's open up YouTube.
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Why is my shit sideways?
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It turns out that whether this is an Android developer best practice
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or whatever the case may be, the default behavior for many apps is
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to open in portrait mode, and it seems like they detect that based on the pixel count
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in either direction, instead of being based on how the device reports it's portrait mode.
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So instead of having to rotate your phone for the rare occasion where you're consuming media,
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now you actually have to rotate your phone to just use normal apps on the inside display,
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which I personally did not find to be better.
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Honestly, I didn't cherry pick those too. I've only been using it for a couple of days.
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So there you go. There's another one. I have not tried mobile band-aid on this yet.
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Spotify? Okay, Spotify manages to open in the mode that I'm in.
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Awful, awful foldable instrumental experience. Okay, that's that's bad on any foldable device right now.
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Another issue I ran into was handle ability. While I really like the shape compared
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to the Z Fold3, this finish, gorgeous.
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OPPO calls it glittery glass, I think, and it's... Man, you can't appreciate it properly
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until you've looked at it up close. From the distance, it's just matte black and it looks great.
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Close up, it's gorgeous. Unfortunately, it's slippery enough that,
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especially on a device like this, that's got a lot of weight hanging off of your hand.
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I had major concerns about dropping the device
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and it's the kind of thing that I would like to cover with a dbrand skin or other similar electronic sticker,
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rather than leave naked. OPPO's also behind the competition
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in terms of their IP rating. They don't offer any kind of certification for dust
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or water resistance for this device. And this is something that is perhaps built into it,
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as we saw on the OnePlus factory tour that we did a number of years ago.
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But the fact that they're not certifying it, it means that I wouldn't, with confidence,
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take this and put it next to my bath to watch TV
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while I'm sitting in the tub or whatever the case may be. Now, I actually have not used the speakers much,
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'cause I just paired my ear phones to them. But apparently they're Atmos.
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There's two of them. That's a plus.
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Let me hear it. Let's rave it up. (upbeat music)
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Those are great. And honestly, the rest of the hardware is pretty great too.
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It's using a Snapdragon 888. It's got 12 gigs of RAM, a 4,500 million power battery.
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That is very close to what is in the Z Fold3,
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which, actually, I have battery life issues with.
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And it has support for OPPO's dash charge, or rather SuperVOOC, I think is what they call it
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under the OPPO brand. It comes with a 33-watt charger.
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It supports 15-watt wireless charging with 10 watts of reverse wireless charging
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and has triple rear cameras with Sony's IMX 766 sensors.
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I did notice that whether it's a processing lens or a sensor issue, the main shooter, is markedly...
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Ha, ha, get it? Markedly (clears throat), less noisy than the others.
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But your mileage may vary on that one. Look how washed out this zoom-in looks.
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It's not even dirty.
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I mean, you're not buying a foldable phone for the camera quite frankly anyway.
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So don't consider this a full review. But unlike most short circuits,
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I did spend a couple of days using the device and learning its ins and outs
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because I did intend to do a full LTT video. I just ran out of time before the embargo lift,
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which means I want to share a few deeper thoughts with you. On the hardware side, I love it.
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I think they have done an absolutely fantastic job. The only things I could really ask for are an IP rating,
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a microSD expansion slot. I mean a little thinner, a little bigger battery,
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all that usual stuff. But overall, I think they've done just an outstanding job
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of the hardware. It's on the software side that OPPO has to really step up
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to impress me, especially if they want to sell this thing outside of China. This thing is chock full of just apps
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that I have no idea what they do. I have absolutely no way to remove them that I can see,
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other than just denying the notifications. There was no obvious way to change my voice assistant
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from whatever this is to Google Assistant.
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You saw on the Play Store, I searched for Netflix. It didn't bring anything up. That's because, out of the box, Netflix isn't compatible
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with this device. That's probably something that I could solve
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by sideloading it, but that's a hassle. That's a hassle that most people don't wanna deal with.
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And so I think they've got some work to do. Clearly, their competition isn't doing a perfect job either.
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So one of you, one of you step up.
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Because from a hardware standpoint, I'm happy with either of them.
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Honestly, I think OPPO's got it a little bit better, but the software is
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where the experience is still being let down. And OPPO has more work to do than Samsung.
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Actually, I should see if Samsung has magically fixed this.
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Nope, still no stories. Okay, fine.
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