Oppo
Find X

Oppo described the Find X as “the world's first smartphone with a stealth 3D camera”. Essentially, this mean the camera was hidden behind a sliding mechanism but the complexity of the design mean that the company regarded it as a milestone product “with the most cutting-edge technologies at that time”. The story of the phone started in October 2017 when the initial product design had already passed internal evaluation and was ready for the next phase. However, Oppo industry designer, Xiaoyu Fan, approached the Oppo CEO Tony Chen with a brand-new design that meant the phone would have no visible cameras on both front and back. The CEO gave the R&D team permission to evaluate the new plan immediately. After a detailed evaluation they concluded that there was only a 50% chance that the design would effectively work. This left the company in a quandary – should they use an existing low risk relatively mediocre design that had been proven or start over and choose a new solution that was exciting, but risky. They decided to take the risk and the product development of the Find X started with less than seven months to go before the official launch on June 19th in 2018. Within two weeks, a camera module with a sliding structure was built, completing the first crucial step. However, everyone realized that building the camera module was only the beginning. People were already nervous about the design and when ordering the camera motor from factories, suppliers were skeptical of the forecasts for Find X's shipments and hesitant to commit to production, as the motor required special customization. It took a long time to convince suppliers to procure  it. The three months before the mass production were the toughest as Oppo tried to comly with its product quality standards. During drop tests, the Find X camera module broke almost every time. With product launch preparations already underway pressure was mounting. The solution to the camera issue came when Billy Zhang (who was the project lead for Find X) was chatting with the R&D engineers and suddenly came up with an idea. Could the camera damage be reduced if Oppo could find a way to retract the camera module on the Find X as it was being dropped. The engineering team realized the gravity sensor inside the phone, if combined with the right software, could detect when the phone was being dropped and automatically retract the sliding mechanism and protect the camera. The plan worked and the damage rate significantly decreased from 100% to 50%. It was further reduced to 20% after tweaks to the motor speed and software optimizations. However, despite this dramatic improvement, the Find X still couldn’t adhere to Oppo’s quality standards.  The 20% damage rate was almost entirely due to the device’s inability to retract quickly enough, when dropped from a low height. In the end, the Find X engineers, inspired by how cars reduce vibration, added two silicon sheets to the module which reduced the impact force when dropped at a low height and this provided enough protect to high the quality benchmark. The OPPO Find X was also notable for several other elements, the unified body with no holes, the industry's first dual-track periscope system, the first SUPERVOOC flash charging and its 3D curved screen.