Oppo Find X8 Pro review: not quite Ultra
A beautifully designed phone that cuts a couple of corners
The Oppo Find X8 Pro is a little tricky to put into context. It’s Oppo’s newest, sleekest flagship phone to date, but it doesn’t necessarily sit at the top of the lineup.
Oppo’s flagship from earlier in the year was the excellent Find X7 Ultra, representing a shift away from the “Find X Pro” branding that had previously marked the best the company had to offer. But then there was no X7 Pro, so the Ultra branding felt like little more than a name change in practice.
And now we have the X8 Pro, which marks a step forward from the X7 Ultra in some ways and a step back in others. Oppo may well have left room in its lineup for an X8 Ultra at some point. That phone does not yet actually exist, however, and I can only review what’s in front of me.
That’s not to say the X8 Pro isn’t an interesting device, not least because — unlike the X6 Pro and X7 Ultra — it’s actually making its way outside China. This is a pretty compelling phone in its own right, one that simply has different priorities to the X7 Ultra.
Phone design has been trending towards flatter sides and more angular edges for the past few years, ever since Apple introduced the iPhone 12 range. Oppo was perhaps the biggest holdout, with its Find X7 Ultra luxuriating in the curvature of its display and vegan leather back panel.
The Find X8 Pro does mark a shift towards a harder-edged design, but the side panels remain slightly pillowy and the screen glass is subtly rounded on all four edges. The vegan leather is out, replaced by a pearlescent matte finish on the glass back panel. Combined with the fact that this phone is more than a full millimetre thinner than the X7 Ultra, as well as having shrunk the camera bump by around 40%, the X8 Pro feels like a significant refinement.
Purely as an object to hold, I think the Oppo Find X8 Pro is my favourite phone of the year. Its design comes with some tradeoffs, as we’ll get into, but this is still very much a flagship-class phone.
That extends to the display, where Oppo has retained a degree of curvature right at the edges without bending the panel itself. This makes for slightly thicker bezels on the sides, but it has the benefit of eliminating distortions on the curved edges and allows Oppo to achieve virtually identical bezel thickness all around, while still offering a comfortable feel when you swipe in from the edges.
The screen itself is great, as you’d expect: it’s a 6.78” 120Hz LPTO OLED panel with a resolution of 2780 x 1264, a 1,600-nit high brightness mode, and a peak brightness of 4500 nits. The standard X8 has similar specs but is slightly smaller and boxier at 6.59” and 2760 x 1256; it also ditches the curved glass altogether. I like the Pro’s approach better, but that’s really just down to personal preference.
Both phones also have very similar internals, using a MediaTek Dimensity 9400 processor with up to 512GB of storage and 16GB of RAM. The 9400 is MediaTek’s current highest-end smartphone chip, beating out the X7 Ultra’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 on most performance and efficiency metrics. Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 8 Elite just launched, of course, though I don’t yet have a device in hand with that chip for direct comparisons.
The X8 Pro has an unusually large battery, with its 5,910mAh capacity sailing through the conventional 5,000mAh barrier that it feels like Android phones have been stuck on for several years. Oppo is using silicon carbon technology for the first time in a flagship phone, allowing for higher density in a smaller package.
The X8 Pro charges at up to 80W with a cable and 50W wirelessly, but the larger capacities mean it’ll take a little longer to fill up from zero compared to previous Oppo devices. After spending a lot of time with the phone, I think it’s a solid tradeoff — battery life has been consistently excellent, and you still get a full charge in well under an hour with the bundled wired charger.
I mentioned earlier that Oppo had also managed to downsize the X8 Pro’s camera bump from the X7 Ultra’s by around 40%. Did this slimming down come without compromise?
Well, no. But before we get into that, let’s address another aspect of the X8 Pro hardware: the Quick Button. Yes, this is pretty much the same thing as the iPhone 16’s Camera Control, and it may well have been included on this phone based on advanced intel on Apple’s plans. That doesn’t really matter, because Oppo’s implementation is a lot better.
The Quick Button is purely capacitive and sits flush along the phone’s edge. It’s much easier to press than the iPhone’s Camera Control, and while it does let you zoom in and out by swiping, that’s about the extent of the interface. It’s just a simple button in a useful location, which I think the iPhone 16 proved is really all it needs to be.
I don’t really use the Camera Control on my iPhone any more, but I do use the Quick Button more often than not on the Find X8 Pro, at least while taking photos in landscape orientation. That more or less sums up the difference; Oppo’s take on the feature feels better to use and never gets in the way.
As for the actual cameras, the story here is a bit of a mixed bag. Oppo’s colours and processing are as good as ever, and you still get the excellent Master mode that lets you dial in more natural shots without excessive smartphone-style HDR and sharpening. But while the slimmer camera bump is appreciated, the hardware has had to be squeezed to fit.


Regular Multicore readers will know how much I’m a fan of the 1” image sensors used on several recent Chinese flagship phones, including Oppo’s own Find X6 Pro and X7 Ultra. It’s the same size sensor used in high-end compact cameras, most notably Sony’s RX100 range. Paired with a fast lens, you get a ton of depth and detail to your images — they just don’t look like they came out of a phone.
The X8 Pro’s main camera is a step back in this regard. It uses a 1.43” LYT808 sensor, the same chip found in Oppo’s folding Find N3. While this is a decent component, the pictures just don’t look the same as what you get out of a 1” sensor. Everything is noticeably more in focus, which is sometimes what you want, but generally you’re not going to hit the same highs.






The telephoto system is very competitive, featuring two periscope cameras. The 6x camera is the same as on the X7 Ultra, with a 1/2.51” IMX858 sensor and an f/4.3 lens. There’s also a 3x f/2.6 camera with a 1/1.95” LYT600 sensor; this is somewhat of a downgrade on the X7 Ultra’s 2.6x 1/1.56” setup, but it’s still a bigger sensor than the equivalent camera on any non-Oppo phone.
Results are good, particularly considering the phone’s slimline design. I’ve taken the Find X8 Pro to some big concerts and sports events (well, pro wrestling) over the past couple of months and I think Oppo still has the overall lead for this kind of challenging situation.
The 3x lens works best in low light, while the 6x telephoto is better suited for getting extra detail in daylight. At higher levels of digital zoom, Oppo begins to apply AI-powered upscaling to images, which is quite effective at around 10x but quickly falls apart if you push it much further.



The ultrawide camera on the Find X8 Pro has suffered the most on a hardware level, presumably as a casualty of the drive to slim down the camera bump. It has a 1/2.75” sensor, which is a huge step down from the X6 Pro’s 1/1.56" sensor and smaller even than the iPhone 16 Pro’s, though it does have a relatively fast f/2 lens.
All of this matters less on an ultrawide than on other cameras, because you’re not getting shallow depth of field in most shots. It does make a difference for macro photos in low light, however; I didn’t fall in love with many close-up food photos from this phone.
Still, results from typical snaps are fine. I did notice that the colour temperature tends to run a little cooler than the main camera, and there’s an expected loss in fine detail, but Oppo has managed to get solid results out of the hardware here.


Overall, the Find X8 Pro’s camera system doesn’t quite match up to the X7 Ultra’s, and honestly I’d also take the X6 Pro over it for anything other than long zoom shots in daylight.
But that’s stiff competition by any standard, and the X8 Pro is still very capable and versatile, with arguably best-in-class image processing. It’s a much more impressive system than Samsung’s just-announced Galaxy S25 and S25+, for example, while the S25 Ultra has better wide-angle hardware but loses out on the zoom.
So yeah, this is a bit of a strange release for Oppo. The Find X8 Pro is a great phone that might have my favourite hardware design of any device out there right now, but ultimately I can’t recommend it over its direct predecessor if the camera system is a priority. I can, however, recommend it strongly if you live outside China, as it’ll be a compelling new competitor in its price range in several markets around the world.
I can’t imagine a Find X8 Ultra is too far off, as Oppo appears to have taken a deliberate step back with the X8 Pro. But for now this is what we have to work with: a beautifully designed phone that has had to cut some corners.