Oppo Find X8 Pro review: Great but late

Don’t call it a comeback. The Oppo Find X8 Pro marks a return to the UK market for the Find X flagship line, after skipping our shores entirely for the past two generations. This latest Oppo smartphone is the first we’ve reviewed that runs on MediaTek’s new top-of-the-line processor, bringing the fight to the legion of Snapdragon-powered Android flagships that dominate the market.

Beyond that, it comes with an impressive camera lineup, engineered in collaboration with the photography legends at Hasselblad, a massive battery and a bright, crisp display; and all this for a couple of hundred pounds less than the priciest flagships around. With so much stiff competition, however, is this enough for Oppo to step back into the UK flagship market like it had never gone away?

Oppo Find X8 Pro review: What you need to know

The Find X8 Pro’s MediaTek Dimensity 9400 chipset is joined here by 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage space and that high-capacity battery mentioned above is a 5,910mAh silicon-carbon cell that supports 100W wired charging and 50W wireless.

Sitting on the front of the phone is a 2.5D 6.78in AMOLED display that subtly curves away on all four edges. The resolution is a suitably crisp 2,780 x 1,264 and LTPO technology allows for a dynamic refresh rate between 1Hz and 120Hz.

Nestled in the display is a 32-megapixel selfie camera while on the rear is a massive circular camera module that houses a further four lenses. The primary camera is a 50-megapixel f/1.6 affair, and backing it up is a 50-megapixel f/2 ultrawide lens and a pair of 50-megapixel telephoto cameras offering 3x and 6x optical zoom, respectively.

Oppo Find X8 Pro review: Price and competition

At £1,049, the Oppo Find X8 Pro slightly undercuts the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra and iPhone 16 Pro Max, instead sitting alongside Apple and Samsung’s second-best devices. Currently, the 512GB Galaxy S25 Plus is £1,000 and the 512GB iPhone 16 Plus is a little more, at £1,149. Google’s compact Pixel 9 Pro is also in this price range, with the 512GB model currently priced at £1,085.

Also around this price is the new Honor Magic 7 Pro, which uses the brand-new Snapdragon 8 Elite processor and currently costs £1,085. The biggest threat, however, comes from Oppo’s subsidiary company, OnePlus. The OnePlus 13 also runs on the Snapdragon 8 Elite but gains an edge by massively undercutting the rest of the competition on price, currently going for just £899.

Oppo Find X8 Pro review: Design and key features

Given that it’s been a couple of generations since we last saw a Find X Pro device on these shores, it tracks that the design has changed quite a bit. Gone is the glossy unibody rear, replaced here with a soft-touch back panel and a massive, circular camera module. The build is a little wider than the Oppo Find X5 Pro, measuring 162 x 77mm, but it’s also a little thinner at 8.2mm. At 215g, it’s on the lighter side of modern flagships, too.

There are only two colours available. The black model has a fairly standard frosted rear but the white version I received for review has a subtle pearl-esque swirling effect that adds a touch of character.

Oppo’s three-position alert slider is once again situated high up on the left edge, allowing you to quickly switch between silent, vibrate and loud alert modes without turning on the phone. On the right edge, below the power and volume controls, sits the new “Quick Button”, which is essentially Oppo’s answer to Apple’s Capture Button – it’s even located in the exact same spot.

This new feature allows you to open the camera app quickly with a double-tap – it doesn’t depress like the rest of the buttons but you get haptic feedback. You can capture single photos with a single press, burst shots by holding down and it’s also possible to adjust the zoom distance by sliding your finger along it while holding the phone horizontally. You don’t get the two-stage button action the iPhone 16 has but, for its intended purpose, it’s a decent addition.

On the software front the phone comes with the ColorOS 15 launcher, based on Android 15. Alas, it’s jam-packed with bloatware, with junk like booking.com and the Temu app clogging up the homescreen. And while the five years of OS updates and six years of security patches promised by Oppo are decent, they’re still a little behind the competition. Both Google and Samsung offer seven years apiece.

Much the same as Google and Samsung, however, Oppo has augmented its software offering with a smattering of AI features, including the usual suspects such as translation tools, note assistance and photo editing. There’s nothing particularly groundbreaking here, but then Oppo isn’t relying on AI to create the illusion of an upgrade – like the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra – so I’m hesitant to complain too much.

Oppo Find X8 Pro review: Display

The Oppo Find X8’s 6.78in AMOLED display ticks all the flagship boxes, with a sharp 2,780 x 1,264 resolution, a dynamic refresh rate between 1 and 120Hz and support for Dolby Vision HDR. Brightness is decent, too, hitting an impressive peak of 754cd/m² on manual mode and pushing to an even better 1,090cd/m² with auto-brightness selected and a torch shining on the light sensor. With HDR video playback, it peaked at 766cd/m².

There are three colour profiles to choose from; both the Vivid profile and the Pro settings target the DCI-P3 colour gamut, with the latter using the D65 colour temperature, and the results are punchy and vibrant, perfect for streaming and mobile gaming. The Natural profile targets the sRGB colour space, reproducing 100.8% of the colour gamut. The average Delta E colour variance score of 1.66 isn’t as close to ideal as its rivals are capable of, but it isn’t bad enough for any colours to look out of place to the naked eye.

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Oppo Find X8 Pro review: Performance and battery life

If it had been released a few months earlier, I’d likely be looking at the MediaTek Dimenity 9400’s benchmark results and calling them some of the best around. This 3.63GHz chip scored nearly identically to the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra in the benchmarks and nips at the heels of the iPhone 16 Plus.

The problem for the Oppo Find X8 Pro is that it’s launching now, and that means I have to  compare its results with those produced by phones based on the Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset. And you only need to look at the scores of the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, Honor Magic 7 Pro and OnePlus 13 to see how far ahead this new platform is.

While I wasn’t blown away by the CPU benchmark results, the results of the GPU-based GFXBench tests were a little more interesting. Ignoring the onscreen results (the phone capped playback to 60fps, so it doesn’t represent the actual framerate limit), we can see in the offscreen portion that the Find X8 Pro is much closer to the competition, landing less than 10fps behind the S25 Ultra and Magic 7 Pro.

Indeed, playing Genshin: Impact on the highest graphical settings was fluid and responsive. Oppo’s latest flagship is clearly a powerful competitor for mobile gaming.

Another first for the Oppo Find X8 Pro is its switch to a silicon-carbon battery, which essentially allows for a larger capacity without requiring much more space. The cell in this case is a relatively hefty 5,910mAh and, true to the marketing, it delivers some of the best battery life around, while keeping the phone relatively light.

Lasting for 29 hours on the dot, the Oppo Find X8 Pro isn’t the longest-lasting flagship (that honour still belongs to the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra at time of writing) but it’s still up there with the best, and will see you through a couple days of moderate use.

As with most of the flagships coming out of China, the Find X8 Pro also supports speedy fast charging – 80W wired and 50W wireless, in this case. There’s no mains adapter provided in the box but using my 100W charger, I was able to get the battery up to 50% in just 22 minutes and to 100% in around 45.

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Oppo Find X8 Pro review: Cameras

The four 50-megapixel rear cameras are co-engineered with the photography legends at Hasselblad and, unsurprisingly, they’re one of the best features of the Oppo Find X8 Pro. The main camera has an f/1.6 aperture and includes optical image stabilisation (OIS), capturing plenty of light and producing images that are rich with detail and fantastic dynamic range.

Hasselblad’s colour science is nice and natural in good lighting and, while it dials up the vibrancy slightly for night photos, the results still don’t look overprocessed. Detail levels remain great in the dark, too, and for the most part big blocks of darkness remain free from unsightly noise.

Where the Oppo Find X8 Pro has an advantage over its fellow entry-level flagships from OnePlus and Honor is the dual telephoto camera setup. Both the 50-megapixel (f/2.6) 3x lens and the 50-megapixel (f/4.3) 6x lens support OIS and deliver detailed, well-exposed shots, with slightly stronger contrast than the main lens keeping definition sharp.

The camera suite also offers a decent 10x hybrid zoom that retains plenty of detail and keeps the colouring looking fairly natural. The magnification can go all the way up to 120x but, beyond 30x, an artificial sheen betrays just how overly processed these images are, with highlights in particular looking very unnatural.

The ultrawide shooter is decent – the colour temperature is well-maintained compared with the main lens and detail capture is solid – but some blurring in the corners means that it isn’t quite up to the mark of its fellow cameras.

Video is generally solid, capturing detailed 4K footage up to 60fps, but the stabilisation is only electronic, so it’s not as steady as the likes of the OIS-backed Honor Magic 7 Pro. The Find X8 Pro also doesn’t support 8K recording, where both the Google Pixel 9 Pro and the OnePlus 13 do.

Oppo Find X8 Pro review: Verdict

Wind time back just a few months and I have no doubt that the Oppo Find X8 Pro would have been right up there with the very best flagship phones of 2024. The build is sleek, durable and stylish, performance and battery are both excellent for the price, the display is excellent and the cameras are mostly very impressive.

Its release date, however, puts the Find X8 Pro in a sticky in-between situation, where most of its competition from last year are now getting regular, substantial discounts and the incoming 2025 handsets have raised the stakes with newer, superior hardware.

Timing is everything and, with rivals like the Honor Magic 7 Pro and OnePlus 13 offering similar photography capabilities and stamina, alongside the faster performance of the Snapdragon 8 Elite, there’s very little space for the Oppo Find X8 Pro to squeeze into contention.