Oppo Find X8 Pro review: Hubble telescope in your pocket

Oppo is finally returning to the premium segment with the launch of the Oppo Find X8 Pro in Europe. While the Find X5 was the King of the Night, this one earns the title Emperor of Zoom. Oppo created an extraordinary smartphone, but it still has some lessons to learn in terms of software.

The Oppo Find X8 Pro (€1,149 incl. VAT) is on European store shelves. It had been about three years since Oppo introduced another high-end smartphone to our market. The Oppo Find X5 Pro was one of the most interesting devices on the market in 2022, but a patent dispute with Nokia caused the supply of new devices to dry up. Meanwhile, the parties involved have settled their feud and Oppo is keeping promise: the Chinese manufacturer is back in business.

The Oppo Find X8 Pro is therefore an important device. After a three-year absence from the premium segment, the manufacturer needs to prove that it can still compete at the very highest level. Not only must the Find X8 be as good as the best smartphones of the moment, Oppo must also give prospective customers a reason to choose a Find, and not a Galaxy or a Pixel.

It succeeds, and with flying colors. The Oppo Find X8 Pro is a beautiful and sturdy smartphone, with an excellent battery and, above all, a breathtaking camera module. That combines quality sensors, optical lenses and AI into a whole that dazzles. Still, not everything is perfect: an neverbefore seen mountain of bloatware needlessly tarnishes the device. We’ll start with the exterior and performance, then look at the major drawbacks, and end with Oppo’s cameras because they make up for almost all of the drawbacks.

Exterior

The Oppo Find X8 Pro is a smartphone with a 6.78-inch screen diagonal and a nice oled display with 1,264 x 2,780 pixels. The maximum brightness we can measure is 1,165 nits, although the display should peak to 1,600 nits under bright sunlight. On the front, the smartphone looks like most devices, with thin screen bezels and a small hole at the top where the selfie camera sits.

On the side we find a slider that allows you to switch between sound, vibration and silence. Oppo acquired this functionality directly from subsidiary OnePlus. On the right, next to the power button and the volume button, we find a haptic button. You can use that to take pictures, or slide over it to zoom in and out. The button is nice but not necessary. We see added value in it; a (left-handed) colleague constantly pressed it by mistake.

Oppo puts four cameras in a giant camera island in the back. Such large camera islands have become the norm for some reason, and Oppo’s implementation is neat. The back of the device is further made of some kind of matte brushed glass, which looks nice and feels soft.

Both the screen and the rear glass are made of Gorilla Glass 7i and can take a beating. Oppo provides an IP68 certification for dust and water. We already had the device slide out of our pocket several times completely intentionally as part of our thorough testing process, and as of writhing, the phone does not have a scratch on it.

Unconventional processor

Oppo is building the internals around a MediaTek Dimensity 9400-SoC. For a device in this price range, choosing MediaTek over Qualcomm is not standard. MediaTek has however made big leaps in terms of the quality of its CPUs. The Dimensity-SoC gets a generous 16 GB of RAM and the internal memory has a capacity of 512 GB.

The Dimensity 9400 is a capable processor, but the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite is better. This is clear from the comparison with the OnePlus 13, where the Oppo subsidiary did choose Qualcomm.

The Tensor G4 in the Pixel Pro XL has a less powerful CPU, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 in the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra comes close. Xiaomi also opts for a Dimensity chip from MediaTek in the 14T Pro, but integrates a lower-end one with the Dimensity 9300+. which is obviously less fast.

The chip choice does not make the Oppo Find X8 Pro the fastest horse in the race, but the numbers show that the CPU is absolutely competitive. All the devices in this comparison feel lightning fast in everyday use.

Graphically, MediaTek has made big leaps. In the past, the built-in Mali GPU of MediaTek SOCs could not match Qualcomm’s Adreno GPUs. In the Dimensity 9400, however, there is an Immortalis-G925 and it finally plays in the same league as the Adreno 830 in the Snapdragon 8 Elite. The older Adreno in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 does not perform as well, and Google’s GPU cannot compete.

Tests show that Oppo has chosen a powerful beating heart for the Find X8 Pro, with both graphics and traditional capabilities. Tests of productivity on the phone comfirm that.

There is more at play here than the SoC alone, however. Samsung gets high scores because of the lightning-fast storage in the Galaxy S24 Ultra. The Oppo Find X8 Pro is consistently competitive.

The benchmarks show that choosing MediaTek over Qualcomm is by no means a disadvantage. In the artificial tests, Oppo will not be crowned the ultimate performance king, but the differences are measured in the margins. This smartphone is more than fast enough to handle whatever workloads you throw at it. Be it productivity, photo and video editing on the go, and even playing games: the Oppo Find X8 Pro wil handle it smoothly.

Endurance

The phone’s endurance is also quite good. Oppo puts a large 5,910 mAh battery under the hood, and the Dimensity 9400 in the Oppo Find X8 Pro uses the battery efficiently. Especially when running heavy workloads, like the Performance test of our benchmark suite, the phone lasts a long time.

Then again, the light video test exhausts the smartphone slightly faster than the competition, which is surprising. We find that the Oppo Find X8 Pro is economical in heavy workloads, but slightly less efficient in lighter workloads.

Looking at daily use, we find that the smartphone does work very efficiently on standby. With light use (a little surfing, WhatsApp, phone calls, and some photography), the device lasts two days without recharging. In other words, in our pocket, the Oppo Find X8 Pro consumes very little energy.

Charging: needlesly complex

As for recharging, the story is more nuanced. The graph below illustrates the results of the Oppo Find X8 Pro twice: once when recharging with a SuperVooc charger, and once with USB Power Delivery.

We get the top results when we top up the Oppo Find X8 Pro with an 80-watt SuperVooc charger. SuperVooc is a technology exclusive to Oppo and OnePlus, but no such charger is included in the box. You would have to buy on to achieve maximum charging speed. Only: the promise of 80 watts is currently unfulfilled. We measure around 60 watts. Oppo is aware of that problem, but did not yet give an explanation.

The Find X8 Pro is also compatible with USB Type-C Power Delivery, but not at 80 watts. In that case, the device charges at just under 60 watts. That’s a significant theoretical difference from SuperVooc, but since Oppo can’t deliver on the 80-watt promise there at the moment, the impact on charging time isn’t that big. To go from empty to half-full takes an extra three minutes. When you want to top up the entire device, the added value of an additional charger is a bit more noticable.

Oppo makes some mistakes in the battery and charging departement. The manufacturer is opting for a different battery technology for the first time, but still seems to struggle with it a bit at launch. For starters, it’s unfortunate that Oppo wants to offer 80 watts only with its own charger, which is not included in the box. Other brands like Motorola and Xiaomi do simply provide high charging speeds via the universal Power Delivery standard, so why can’t Oppo (and OnePlus)?

On top of that, the proprietary standard is currently not working properly. You invest in 80 watts, but that peak is not met at any point during the charging process. For a smartphone in this price range, that’s unfortunate. Just go for Power Delivery, Oppo.

That said: even with Oppo’s fiddling around the chargers, you can charge the immense 5,910 mAh battery pretty quickly. The phone also supports wireless charging, and at up to 50 watts. Don’t let the battery shenanigans be a dealbreaker, but don’t invest in an additional SuperVooc charger either at this time.

Aggressive control of background activity

On to the software then. Oppo installs ColorOS 15 (Android 15) on this device and promises five years of OS and six years of security updates. That’s pretty long, though Google and Samsung offer just a bit more for their high-end devices with seven years of support.

ColorOS is a fine Android shell that runs consistently smoothly. We don’t need to say much about this, except for one major frustration. Oppo tries to stretch your smartphone’s battery life even further by aggressively suppressing background app activity.

ColorOS is unfortunately too aggressive. When the operating system suppresses the background activity of an app, that app also loses connectivity. That connectivity does not always return when you call the app back to the foreground. For example, apps sometimes mistakenly think the phone is no longer connected to the Internet, or Spotify forgets it was connected to your earbuds. Restarting the app solves the problem immediately, but doesn’t prevent it from coming back.

Solvable problem

Apps that you expect to continue seemlessly where you left off when you open them, and rely on a connection to the Internet or an external device, most often experience problems. Think of transportation and ride sharing apps (like Donkey, Lime and BlueBike, which use the Internet and Bluetooth), or music apps (like Spotify, when used with wireless earbuds).

Fortunately, a permanent solution is also available. Go to App Info, select Battery usage and check the Allow background activity box. With that, the bug no longer occurs, but on the other hand, you sometimes get an iritating notification from ColorOS because an app supposedly consumes a lot of power in the background. This bug has been annoying us since the Find X5 Pro, and it’s disappointing to see that Oppo hasn’t fixed it.

New level of bloatware

Unfortunately, Oppo jampacked this premium phone with tons of bloatware. The pre-installed apps are downright terrible even by bloatware standards. For example, we find Temu on the device: an online store from China specializing in shipping planet-destroying junk at rock-bottom prices, and gathering customer data. Miravia appears to be a similar app but from Spain, so it’s unclear what it does on our device.

Things get even more vague when we click on Autodoc. That app looks like a tool to monitor the health of our device. At launch, we immediately have to give (or, ideally, refuse) a lot of far-reaching permissions. Only then do we see what Autodoc really is: a strange tool for ordering auto parts such as carburetors, with a layer of gamification over it. The list of unsolicited apps installed is too long to list them all, but an app whose sole function is to lock your screen still deserves mention.

This journalist has been reviewing smartphones on a consistent basis for more than a decade, and has been annoyed by bloatware for just as long. What Oppo does with the Find X8 Pro, however, defies all imagination and takes the problem to a new level. If you buy this device, start by uninstalling all the franky disgusting Chinese data-gathering junk apps from your device first. For €1,149, that shouldn’t be your priority. We inquired with Oppo about the motivation for integrating so much bloatware, and specifically asked for an explanation for the Autodoc app, but got no answer yet.

Cameras

After the justifiable scolding for bloatware, it’s time for some well deserved praises. The camera module on the Oppo Find X8 Pro is phenomenal. In fact, we are once again impressed with the capabilities of this device.

Oppo provides four lenses, each equipped with an equivalent 50 MP sensor. We get a wide-angle camera, a main camera, a periscope telephoto camera with three times optical zoom, and a similar periscope camera with six times optical zoom. All cameras except the wide-angle are equipped with optical image stabilization. Oppo partnered with Hasselblad for the camera, comparing each lens to a specific Hasselblad equivalent, but that is not important or relevant unless you are a passionate Hasselblad fan.

Camera selection brings a wide range of possibilities. For example, the different lenses have different focal lengths. The 3X lens captures the world as you see it, and guarantees professional-looking portrait photos. With the 6X lens, you can of course zoom in more, but you can also picture the same person with a different ratio of foreground to background. The possibilities are fantastic for portrait photography, or simply to capture the environment as you envision it.

Because Oppo puts a high end sensor behind each lens, we feel really free to choose which camera best suits our vision at any given time. All the cameras work excellently during the day and at night, and there’s not a stinker with an 8 MP sensor among them that you’ll ignore after bying the phone.

Photos are good and clear in all lighting conditions. If Oppo chooses to let its algorithms loose on night photos, it results in nice and realistically exposed shots. There is no question of excessive overexposure: a comon mistake made by phones. Be sure to click on the images above, and all the photos illustrating the zoom below, to see them in full quality.

Zoom

It’s time to zoom in on the zoom and boy, does this thing zoom. As mentioned, you can get up to 6X with the optical zoom. Between 1X, 3X and 6X, Oppo obviously works with a hybrid digital zoom but that doesn’t mather: it’s not like the quality visibly changes when you switch between optical and digital.

6X is not the limit though. You can zoom in up to factor 120. Up to about 20X, everything looks very normal, even at night. Toward 60X, the underlying AI algorithms start to play a bigger role. From 60X on, you are officially using AI-driven zoom.

The results are insane. The AI clears up blurred photos particularly well. When you zoome in very far, that’s certainly noticable. The photos lose some realism and sometimes begin to look like a painting or drawing. Details are inevitably lost when you try to zoom in 80 times with a smartphone in your hand, so textures become slightly unrealistical.

However, with the information the camera does manage to capture, the algorithms create sharp images. Don’t think the AI is making things up: what you see may have lost some detail, but is accurate. For example, we zoomed in on a church clock (which we couldn’t read with the naked eye), and up to the maximum zoom of 120X, we saw the hands were correct.

The tandem of Oppo-developed AI algorithms, optical zoom capabilities and the excellent 50 MP sensor open the door to new capabilities. Previously, you had to struggle to capture with your smartphone what your eye can see, today the Oppo Find X8 Pro captures what you cannot even perceive with the naked eye.

The Oppo Find X8 Pro is a telescope in the palm of your hand. Its capabilities are even a bit uncanny at times: you can zoom and look at things or people who wouldn’t expect it. 120X photos won’t immediately frame you, but how addictive it is to see what the device can still see with such a zoom factor.

This is the reason to buy the Oppo Find X8 Pro. Bloatware and charging woes are immediately forgiven. The four cameras allow for uninhibited mobile photography. The multiple lenses are an absolute bonus, even when zooming is not your priority, such as for portrait shots. Zooming obviously becomes a bit of a gimmick from a certain point, but up to factor 40 or so, the results are completely fine. As for video you can also zoom in quite a bit without losing quality.

Other AI tools

Oppo has provided some other AI capabilities for photo editing afterwards. You can find those through the Photos app. Through the AI editor, for example, you can remove people from photos. New to this phone is the ability to automatically remove reflections from windows. The results for all these features are variable. Sometimes it works very well, sometimes (for example with very large reflections) a little less.

Some operations require Oppo to upload your photo to the cloud. This is the case, for example, for the removal of reflection. The manufacturer is transparent about when this is required, so you can choose whether you want it.

Verdict

The Oppo Find X8 Pro shows not only that Oppo can compete in the top tier, but also that the manufacturer can make a unique value proposition. The Find X8 Pro is more than just a good phone. Its camera module and integration with AI enables things that were simply impossible until recently. This smartphone can do something that devices from Samsung, Google, Xiaomi and others currently cannot.

Cameras aside, the Oppo Find X8 Pro is a very good phone. The build quality is solid, the screen is nice and the performance is more than adequate. The Dimensity processor is certainly not a handicap and although the phone may not get the very highest scores in the benchmarks, you won’t notice it in daily use.

The same goes for the battery and charging. There are some legitimate comments to be made there, but the impact on the user experience is small. A solid downside is the bloatware: what a shame that Oppo prostitutes its own device as a billboard for unwanted junk like this. Fortunately, you can smoothly uninstall all unsolicited apps. Overall, we find ColorOS 15’s aggressive battery optimization to be the biggest problem.

The Oppo Find X8 Pro is not perfect, but just about all of its downsides can either be self-mitigated or ignored. If you are looking for a photography-centric device, then the Oppo Find X8 Pro is currently the most interesting choice on the market. The selection of cameras and lenses is simply unparalleled.

Oppo Find X8 Pro – 1,149 euros incl. VAT. 5 years Android updates, 6 years security updates.