Jalen Sigh Tech

Verdict

The Oppo Find X8 is a fantastic smartphone with a great display, capable cameras and rapid charging, which makes it all the more disappointing that it won’t be coming to the UK or Europe.

Introduction

Oppo’s latest flagship range has finally landed, and with the Find X8 and X8 Pro, the company has gone all in on MediaTek, stuffing some impressive performance and features into a device that’s sleek and perhaps a little inspired by some other phone makers.  

Sadly, this particular phone isn’t coming to the UK or Europe yet, so does that make this one of the best phones you’ll never buy? Let’s dive in and find out. 

Editor’s note: As there’s no UK/EU pricing available, we can’t rate its value and therefore deliver an accurate rating. If the Find X8 does launch anywhere in the UK or EU, we’ll be sure to give it a final star rating.

Design

• Rather safe iPhone-like design
• IP68/69 water resistance
• Alert Slider is a welcome addition

There’s an incredibly good chance that if you glanced at the Oppo Find X8 lying face up, you’d mistake it for a Samsung, Pixel or even an iPhone. Oppo has – like most manufacturers – joined the flat-sided phone revolution. Which, I think we can all agree, has made the smartphone market a little less interesting. 

It’s worth stating here that I actually prefer the flatter glass on the front compared to the glass with curved edges you’d find on previous OnePlus and Oppo phones. It’s more practical. It’s easier to type on and doesn’t distort or affect visuals negatively at the sides. 

With that said, there are ways to differentiate your phone aesthetically from other manufacturers. We’ve seen it from Samsung with the Galaxy S24 Ultra. A subtle difference in the corner and edge shape, mixing up flat edges with rounded sides and right-angled corners, immediately makes a phone stand out. 

But with the Find X8, Oppo has fully leaned into the iPhone aesthetic. The brushed metal edges are nigh-on identical to the iPhone 15 Pro and 16 Pro. 

You get the same subtle softening at the top and bottom to stop it from being completely sharp and right-angled. Even the corner radius is similar, although technically it’s not quite as round, and sits somewhere between the iPhone and the Galaxy S24 Plus.

Now it’s safe to say this is just a product of the times, and isn’t a uniquely Oppo thing. But with Oppo – in the past – you’d rely on the Find X series being at least a little unique. The design on the X3 and the X5 with their seamlessly curved glass on the back was absolutely sublime. 

The first Find X had an entire portion of the top that popped up and down to hide the front and rear cameras when not in use. It stood out. This – does not.  

Before I start sounding too much like an old man complaining about the good old days, there are some positives. 

Turn it around and you’ll see something pretty unique: Symmetry. And that’s something I find impossible not to like. Rather than stuff all of its cameras in the top left corner, Oppo has a large, round camera island placed centrally in the top third of the phone’s rear. 

As large as it is, it’s still somehow subtle, and doesn’t protrude all that much from the back. And like Pixel’s flat, horizontal camera bar, its position also means that if you place it to rest on its back, it won’t wobble. 

Aesthetics aside, it feels really sturdy and durable too. There’s barely any flex at all in the metal frame, and with an IP68 and IP69 rating it can survive being rained on, dropped in the sink, or even sprayed forcefully with hot water. It’s built to last. 

It has to be said, it’s also really slim, and it’s lightweight too. Oppo gets kudos there. It’s under the magic 200-gram number, and is less than 8mm thick. Considering the battery capacity, the camera system and the power on offer here – all of which I’ll go into shortly – that’s pretty incredible given where we were just a couple of years ago with 5G phones. 

To put into context how impressive that is, it’s thinner and lighter than an iPhone 16 Pro. And while it’s the tiniest bit thicker than a Galaxy S24 Plus, it’s shorter, narrower, and has about 700mAh more battery capacity than Samsung’s similarly-sized phone. 

It’s also got an alert slider switch – borrowing from its sub-brand OnePlus – and it’s genuinely useful. You can move notifications between silent, vibrate and ring just by sliding the switch up and down between the three positions. 

Generally speaking then, the design, the aesthetics and build are all great – even if they are a little unoriginal. But let’s move on. 

Screen

• 6.6-inch OLED screen
• Slim bezels
• No LTPO-enabled refresh rate

Like so many areas of smartphone features and performance, we’ve reached a point with displays where it’s hard to imagine how they can improve further. 

Over the past few years, we’ve seen incremental jumps in brightness, dynamic range and refresh rates. So it’s no surprise to see a big 6.6-inch display with 120Hz refresh rates and peaks of 4500 nits. 

As always – it’s worth remembering – peak brightness typically refers to small bright spots in HDR movie scenes. It’s rare – in fact hasn’t been seen yet to my knowledge – to find a display that can reach anything near as high as that across the entire panel. 

With that said – this so-called ProXDR OLED-based panel on the Oppo is very, very good. Stick on a modern HDR movie on Netflix, and it renders even dark scenes with good levels of detail, wonderful dynamic range and contrast, with vibrant colours. 

The only way it could be any better is if it had a surface that was better at cutting out reflections and glare. Still, it’s bright enough that for the most part, it can cut through reflections pretty well. 

With over 460 pixels per inch, it’s also really sharp. And since it can reach up to 120Hz, animations are smooth and crisp too. All-round, it’s really hard to fault it. It’s been a great panel for watching movies, TV shows and gaming. Add those super skinny 1.45mm thick bezels and you have a great experience all round. 

It’s not perfect though. Despite its fast refresh abilities, Oppo opted not to stick a properly good LTPO panel on it, so it can move up and down quickly between refresh rates in small increments. It can jump between 60, 90 and 120 frames per second, but that’s it. 

There’s no dropping as low as 1hz or 10Hz to save battery on static pages like the top-tier phones do, and that means the battery life isn’t as impressive as the capacity might lead you to think it should be. More on that later though. 

Software & AI

• ColorOS 15 based on Android 15
• Packed with bloatware
• Range of AI features

There has been something of an issue with testing this particular phone though, and that comes in the form of software. Where Oppo’s previous versions of ColorOS were generally bloat-free, this one wasn’t. 

When first set up, it had those annoying ‘Hot Apps’ and ‘Hot Games’ folders on the Home Screen, which are essentially just ads for games that aren’t actually installed, but can be. Tapping them takes you to the Oppo App Store, not the Play Store. And while you can remove these fake folders from the Home Screen, they do live permanently in the app drawer. 

I also had a handful of random third-party apps from other regions install themselves on the phone immediately after setup. Some looked Russian or Eastern European, others were Asian. None of them for services in the UK, the market I selected upon setting it up. 

Still, Oppo gives you lots of choice for customisation, even letting you fine-tune the shape and size of your app icons to really granular levels. 

Like so many phones these days, there are lots of big impressive claims about AI. And it’s much the same stuff we’ve seen from the likes of Google’s Pixel phones and the Samsung Galaxy AI suite. 

You get the standard text-based solutions, like translation, summarising and spell-checking. AI Studio is quite a lot of fun, and lets you generate images. The best part is the AI Reimage feature that takes your photo and generates an alternative texture and style, so if you want to turn yourself into a felt doll, you can. 

There are so many style options here though, including clay, American comic, sketches, line art, clay, metal mosaic, and – if you want – you can turn yourself into latte art. Admittedly, like a lot of the more visually impressive gen AI tools, it gets boring pretty quickly. 

And the best AI features, as usual, are kept for photo editing and image processing in the camera. Those elements that do things like, improve your zoom image quality, remove unwanted items from photos, or make the camera faster to snap and shoot in low light are far more useful. 

Cameras

• Triple 50MP rear camera system
• Impressive image processing, especially on zoom shots
• HDR can sometimes look a bit off

And since we’re there already, let’s discuss those cameras. 

Now, what’s interesting here is that Oppo has kitted out the Find X8 with three big sensors. Whether it’s the main, the ultrawide or the 3x optical zoom camera, it’s got a 50-megapixel sensor. And while pixel count isn’t everything, the fact the zoom camera sensor is larger than what Samsung has in the S24 Ultra signals very capable hardware. 

And while great sensors and lenses are one thing, with hardware this tiny – compared to real cameras – the real magic is in the processing. Because of the new processing, it takes images really quickly.

Its secret weapon, I think, is the new zoom camera. It’s got a 3x periscope-style optical zoom which doesn’t take up a lot of space inside the phone. More importantly though, is that it can zoom quite a lot further than 3x without losing too much in the way of image quality. 

Thanks to the combination of a large pixel-dense sensor and some AI jiggery-pokery, you can take photos at 10x and 20x that aren’t atrocious. 

Details remain crisp for the most part, and while there’s definitely some artificial softening going on that removes some of the texture, it’s much better at pushing past its optical limit than something like the Galaxy S24 Plus, which also has a 3x zoom camera, but struggles to get anything beyond that looking close to half-decent. 

The 3x zoom camera is capable of capturing great images of animals or people close by, using it for portrait shots, and things like that. The results are clean, sharp and don’t have much in the way of grain or noise. 

As with any phone camera system, it’s not perfect. I found there’s a slight inconsistency in colours and exposure when moving between the lenses. There are times when they don’t quite match up, where – for instance – the blue skies in the background don’t appear to be the same shade of blue. 

Also, I found that the HDR feature could be a bit aggressive and confused in some instances. 

In some shots where there was bright light shining directly on one side of a building, for instance, it would do well at keeping the contrasty-looking shadow and brightness on one side. But then another side of the building that was all shadow would be lifted and brightened to the point where it just looks weird. 

The whole image almost looks as though each surface of the building or each of the objects in the frame was masked off in an edit suite, then had their exposure, brightness and contrast adjusted separately from each other and then brought back together. 

As always with Oppo – there are a ton of features in the camera app. Too many to go into. There are preset photo settings you can use to shoot things like fireworks, stage performances or dark silhouettes against a bright backlight. Hasselblad Portraits lets you use virtual versions of lens focal lengths to create more effective portrait mode shots, and there’s Master mode for adjusting all your settings manually.

As with most modern smartphones, it also has a night mode ability where it automatically detects its nighttime, increases the exposure time, and uses AI to keep it sharp and bright. Compared to most I’ve tested, it’s pretty quick; usually capturing the photo in under two seconds and delivering a bright, sharp result (for the most part). 

I did find in most night mode photos that the ultrawide and zoom cameras struggled to focus in particularly dark scenes, and so they were more likely to produce slightly soft shots with a little motion blur. They weren’t as crisp and in focus as the main camera.  

As for video – it’s a very capable phone and can easily cope with shooting 4K video at 60 frames per second. It can even shoot in Dolby Vision HDR at that resolution and frame rate, across all three lenses. 

Shooting in standard 4K/60, the videos come out looking warm, appealing and smooth, ready to post straight to your social media. 

Performance 

• MediaTek Dimensity 9400
• Fast, powerful everyday performance
• Hit-and-miss network performance

Since we’re there let’s talk performance. And there is an interesting development here, if only because previous generations of flagship Oppo phones have used whatever the latest Snapdragon chipset is from Qualcomm. The Find X8 doesn’t, and neither does the Find X8 Pro. 

Maybe in an effort to differentiate it from the OnePlus 13 that’s not out quite yet, the phones are powered by the MediaTek Dimensity 9400+, and it is a proper powerhouse. 

Benchmark it using any popular service or graphics test, and it’ll perform really well. It’s fast, speedy and can handle pretty much anything you could throw at it. 

My only performance issues really came with network performance. Using Wi-Fi, it didn’t seem quite as fast to load web pages and videos as other phones that I’ve used this year. Sometimes taking a couple of minutes to stream YouTube videos at full- or quad-HD resolution. And this was on a 900Meg network more than capable of coping with instant 4K resolution streams. 

And despite Oppo boasting about its dual Wi-Fi and AI network boosting abilities, it wasn’t until I turned off the dual Wi-Fi feature that it started performing more reliably.  

Battery Life 

• 5630mAh silicon carbon battery
• 80W SuperVOOC charging
• 50W wireless charging

It feels like we’re moving away from the traditional lithium-ion batteries with smartphones, at least as far as Chinese manufacturers go. This phone has a 5630mAh silicon carbon battery, a battery of that capacity in lithium-ion just simply wouldn’t fit in a phone this slim and nimble. 

As great as it looks on a spec sheet though, I can’t say I experienced a jump in battery performance I’d expect to see from such a large battery capacity. It didn’t feel remarkably better than any other phone. In fact, it drained more when I had the display set to its highest refresh. Again, because it doesn’t have the incremental variable refresh that the more expensive Pro model has. 

Switch to ‘auto-select’ and it performs about the same as any other Android flagship. 

I can through a full day quite easily with my usual, fairly light 3 hours of screen time in a day I’d finish the day with around 40 percent of the battery left over. That was mixed usage, split between scrolling on Bluesky, watching Netflix, testing the camera and playing Mario Karts. 

Battery anxiety isn’t really a problem then, even less so because when it is empty it can be charged up again quickly. Its 80W SuperVOOC charging can – it’s claimed – do a full refill in under 50 minutes. 

In our testing, it was actually a little over 50 minutes, but it could comfortably do a 50% charge in under 20 minutes, which is really handy when you’re in a rush to go out for the evening and just need a quick top-up. 

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