Unboxing the Oppo Find X2 Pro Lamborghini: a love letter in phone form
17.7.2020
The Special Edition Oppo Find X2 Pro turns the flagship into an eye-catcher. But the phone itself isn't even the most beautiful thing about it. The box, inside and out, contains a love for detail that is second to none. Some pitfalls included.
Unboxings are boring. Phone. Cable. Plug. Cheap headphones. Who wants to see that? And in my case, even worse, who wants to make it?
Unless, of course, I receive a black box that comes with golden Ys and the Lamborghini logo. This is just what happened with the Special Edition Oppo Find X2 Pro. The Chinese smartphone manufacturer has joined forces with the Italian hypercar brand and brought out a phone that costs 2000 francs.
But you don't just get a phone, cables and plugs: included in the price are a set of Oppo Enco Free in a Lamborghini design and a 12-volt adapter for your car, better known as a cigarette lighter adapter.
Smartphone plus car: a pattern emerges
Oppo isn't the first smartphone manufacturer to join forces with a car designer. Somehow, the Hypercar/Flagship combo seems to have established itself as a style. There seems to be a connection between smartphones and sports cars. While Oppo is partnered with Lamborghini, Huawei is working with Porsche and OnePlus with McLaren.
The exciting thing about Car Special Editions is that the three manufacturers take completely different approaches.
- Huawei/Porsche will focus on Porsche Design. Porsche Design is more dictated than directly inspired by the car.
- OnePlus/McLaren was inspired by the marble steering wheel and uses the same material for the phone's backplate.
- Oppo/Lamborghini adopts the design language of cars wherever possible and aesthetically justifiable.
But who is Ferrari working with? It used to be Vertu, but they don't exist anymore. There was a rumour that Lenovo and Ferrari were teaming up, but that was ages ago.
Adaptive design
So where exactly is the design? In the end, the phone looks just like a phone. It's a rectangle. With rounded corners. A camera bump. The Oppo Find X2 Pro Automobili Lamborghini Edition, as it's called by its full name, is a flagship smartphone at the end of the day. But the design doesn't begin and end with the smartphone. It starts with an idea.
Oppo/Lamborghini have thought about the elements that make up an iconic Italian car, more specifically the Lamborghini Aventador S Roadster. Essentially, four things that correspond to the design language that Lamborghini adopted in 2006 and 2007 have remained.
- The bull logo.
- The roof shape.
- The Y.
- The hexagon.
If you look closely at the car, you'll see hexagons. The spokes on the rims, the seams on the seats, the shape of the headlights... all hexagons. Lamborghini first debuted this shape in 1967, one year after its first sports car. But only on a concept car called Lamborghini Marzal.
The Marzal was never planned as a production vehicle, but some of them are still on the roads today.
The Y was first fitted as standard in the rear lights of the Murcielago 640 Roadster in 2006. In addition, the Murcielago had hexagons at the rear. Speaking of which, the word Murcielago translates into «Bat ». Bruce Wayne, a.k.a. Batman, drove one in «The Dark Knight».
Then there's the roof of the Aventador Roadster, seen here at a shooting at Lamborghini St. Gallen. It looks like a flat, inverted W.
Double box doors
The design starts with the box in which the Find X2 Pro is delivered. Where other smartphone boxes always work in the same way – a lid that's pulled off the box underneath – Oppo/Lamborghini has installed a kind of gullwing door.
To make it quite clear where the idea came from, here are the gullwing doors of a Lamborghini.
Apart from the Y-shapes and hexagons on the packaging, you still need some mental gymnastics to recognize the parallels between car and crate. But with the gullwing doors on the box, the design team has moved the furthest away from the car. The rest is simply scaled.
The camera bump is a hexagon.
The backplate of the phone is made of carbon, the same material as the cockpit, and follows the shape of the car roof. This isn't an optical illusion, by the way, but actually a physical profile.
The 12-volt adapter is where you'll really recognise the Y. There's a wreath around the USB connector that reminds me of the Lamborghini's taillights. When you connect your phone to a car – not only possible with Italian luxury cars – and the phone charges, the Ys light up.
The cable is far less conspicuous. It comes with a protective Lamborghini yellow sheath and is essentially a conventional USB cable. It won't connect your phone to the power plug or PC any faster, but it's yellow.
Finally, there's a pair of Oppo Enco Free. The Bluetooth headphones also come in a redesign. The charging cover is no longer matt black, but high-gloss. Then there's the Lamborghini logo. The earphones themselves are also matt black and have a hexagon on the sides. Not in yellow, but in a reddish brown with a copper tinge.
And that's basically it when it comes to the physical contents of the package. And the beautiful things in the box. Oppo/Lamborghini has succeeded in hardware design. The phone feels nice, the backplate is such a good idea that I hope other manufacturers will follow suit and the Enco Free are good headphones. Cable and box? Look good to me. The 12-volt adapter is a really nice gadget and should actually be sold separately.
A disappointing theme
For a completely inexplicable reason, the Oppo and Lamborghini designers wanted to improve Oppo's software – an Android distro called Color OS. There's nothing wrong with Color OS. On the contrary. The Distro does a lot of things right. You can adjust the animation speed. The icon shapes on the home screen. That's the way it should be.
Then Lamborghini comes along and thinks that the following shape is the solution.
Somebody's gotta get fired for this. Here you have a phone that's more elegant than anything else currently on the market. An adaptation of a vehicle that works really well. Plus nice accessories, which are also really thought out. And then this idiocy. The fix is fortunately simple:
- Settings.
- Home screen & Wallpaper.
- Set Theme.
- Default Theme.
- Done.
No. Really? Oppo, Lamborghini, che cazzo avete fatto?!
A treat for lovers, fans and enthusiasts
For someone who just wants a good smartphone, the Lamborghini Phone is a hard pass. Of course, the Oppo Find X2 Pro, with its Snapdragon 865, 12 GB ROM and 120 Hz display, is a flagship that is right at the top. But you don't necessarily have to pay 2000 francs for it. When you choose a Special Edition, you're not only choosing a smartphone and its performance, but also the brand that lent the phone its design. A Lamborghini phone isn't just an article of daily use, but a conscious decision, a statement and also a tiny declaration of love.
Because apart from the design, the Lamborghini Oppo is identical to the normal Find X2 Pro. You don't have to pay 2000 francs for a smartphone. A thousand will do. That's why, according to Oppo, there are exactly 80 models in Switzerland.
In the package, you won't just find a smartphone and a charger, but also a set of headphones. The Enco Free look exactly like Apple's AirPods in terms of shape, but can be fitted to your ears with attachments. Then there's a 12-volt adapter and a cable. At some point, the 2000 bucks stop sounding like that much. But still, we're talking about 2000 francs.
Attention: the charger listed above doesn't support the latest version of Oppo's fast loading standard Vooc. It's just here for illustration. All prices, added together at the editorial deadline, result in the following bill:
1249.00 + 134.00 + 28.90 + 27.10 + 44.00 = 1483.00
The Lamborghini package costs 1999.00 CHF. From this, we can conclude that the Lamborghini design and the carbon backplate cost 516 francs. By the way, the phone costs exactly 0.43 percent of a brand new Lamborghini Aventador Roadster.
100 / 460000 * 1999 = 0.4345652173913043
The design costs 0.11 percent of an Aventador.
100 / 460000 * 516 = 0.1121739130434783
So if you decide on the 516 franc design, you'll get a device in which the designers have put a lot of love and above all creativity. Because the adaptation of a car is a success.
The only question left is whether the phone itself does justice to the Aventador Roadster's V12 or whether it's just a Multipla Fiat in nice clothes. I'll get to work.
That’s it. Digitec doesn't have the Lamborghini phone exclusively, by the way, as Migros doesn't allow the word «exclusive» for understandable reasons. But in Switzerland, there's exactly one place where you can buy the phone. It just so happens you're on that website right now.
Journalist. Author. Hacker. A storyteller searching for boundaries, secrets and taboos – putting the world to paper. Not because I can but because I can’t not.
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