OPPO Find X8 Review: A Power User's Dream

This year’s trend seems to be to build it like the iPhone. And honestly, I’m not complaining, of course I do use an iPhone so it feels right at home. But after having used both the OPPO Find X8 and Find X8 Pro, I kind of prefer the design of the Find X8 Pro. That’s not saying anything negative about the Find X8, as it does look stunning and feels incredible in the hand. But the quad-curved display on the Find X8 Pro looks even better.

So what’s the difference between the Find X8 and Find X8 Pro, and should you prefer one over the other? Well, there are a few distinctions between the two. Of course, it is a smaller display at 6.59 inches, it also lacks that second telephoto camera, and it has a smaller battery inside due to the smaller physical size. It also has flat sides compared to the curved sides of the Find X8 Pro. Despite the very small changes between the two, I think that they both hit different buyers. Let’s talk about the good, the bad and the ugly of the OPPO Find X8, and figure out if you should buy it or not.

OPPO Find X8 Review: Hardware and Design

OPPO, much like its other BBK siblings, has always produced top-notch hardware. And that’s no different here with the Find X8. This phone is extremely well-built and feels high-end in the hand. Of course, part of that is due to the metal frame and the glass back. Surprisingly, the OPPO Find X8 is somewhat thin, we’re looking at a thickness of 7.85mm and a weight of 193g. For a phone with a 6.59-inch display, that’s pretty respectable. The Galaxy S24 FE, which is a tiny bit larger at 6.7-inches, is also thicker at 8mm and heavier at 213g.

Another aspect to consider with the hardware here is the camera module. Yes it’s still massive, taking up nearly half of the back of the phone. But it is also about 40% thinner. Numbers don’t always translate to what it looks like in the real world. Because I’ll tell you, when OPPO said the camera system was 40% thinner, I didn’t really expect it to be this thin. But it is. It measures in at just over 3mm thick now. It’s actually pretty sureal to see in person and compare to other phones like the OnePlus Open, or the Xiaomi 14 Ultra, both of which have huge camera modules with the latter having a 1-inch type sensor inside.

On the right side, there is the volume rocker above the power button. Which is the correct way to position these, not with the power button above the volume rocker, Google. On the left side is the iconic alert slider, which I never really realized how much I use it until I used a phone without it. On the bottom of the phone, you’ll find the USB-C port, SIM card slot, and speaker. At the top are a few microphone holes and an IR Blaster. Yes, OPPO is also keeping the IR Blaster around. This is another underrated feature that a lot of Chinese phones have, and it’s really useful when you lose your TV remote.

On the other hand, despite the flat sides, the Find X8 feels very comfortable. And despite it looking very slippery, it’s anything but. Not once have I had the Find X8 slip out of my hands. It’s a stunning phone that is comfortable to hold and not terribly slick. That’s a win in my book.

OPPO Find X8 Review: Display

When reviewing the Find X8 and Find X8 Pro, I actually used the Pro first and then started using the regular Find X8 and forming this review, and seeing how thin the bezels were on the Find X8 was pretty impressive. Because they are thinner than the Find X8 Pro. And it’s really a totally different experience since the Find X8 Pro uses the quad-curved display, and the Find X8 is flat.

Having said that, this display is no slouch. It’s a 6.59-inch display with symmetrical 1.45mm bezels. It also gets insanely bright at up to 4,500 nits of peak brightness. It’s important to note that you’ll never really see that in real life unless you’re in some extreme circumstances. The typical brightness is 800 nits, and the high brightness mode gets up to 1,600 nits. That’s closer to what we found in our testing of this display; we were able to get it up to 1439 nits. That’s still plenty bright, and I’ll say, I’ve had no issues with brightness here, even outdoors in direct sunlight.

The colors on this display are also quite impressive. While the content melting off the side of the Find X8 Pro does look nicer, the flat display of the Find X8 also looks incredible. The colors are pretty accurate, and it also supports many different HDR specs. This includes Dolby Vision, HDR10, HDR10+ and HLG.

It’s a stunning display, which makes watching video on YouTube, Netflix and other video apps pretty amazing.

OPPO Find X8 Review: Performance

The MediaTek Dimensity 9400 powers the OPPO Find X8, which is the latest and greatest from MediaTek. The Find X8 and X8 Pro were my first experience with the new Dimensity 9400, and I have to say, I’ve been pleasantly impressed. The Dimensity 9400 is quite speedy, without getting very warm.

In day-to-day tasks like browsing X, Facebook, and Instagram, or spending loads of time on TikTok, the Find X8 does not get hot at all, and doesn’t throttle either. Even while gaming with Wild Rift or Genshin Impact, it stays pretty cool, which is rather impressive to be quite honest.

Of course, having 16GB of RAM on board does definitely help with that. We have run some benchmarks to see how it stacks up to the competition, too.

Benchmarks

For our benchmarking, we run Geekbench 6, and 3D Mark Wildlife Extreme Stress Test, as well as a video export test with Capcut. For this review, we’re going to compare the OPPO Find X8 to the realme GT 7 Pro which sports the Snapdragon 8 Elite and the Vivo X100 Pro from last year which sports the Dimensity 9300 – the predecessor to the Dimensity 9400.

In Geekbench 6, as you can see above, we’re looking at a pretty healthy increase over the Dimensity 9300, around 30% here. Though, the Dimensity 9400 does still run lower than the Snapdragon 8 Elite, which is expected given that Qualcomm has their processor clocked at 4.32GHz. Though surprisingly, the Find X8 has a better GPU score than the Realme GT 7 Pro with the Snapdragon 8 Elite.

Next up is the 3DMark Wildlife Extreme Stress Test. This test will push the phone as far as it can go, and also test its thermals and any throttling it might have. So its best loop was 6,138, which is the highest score I’ve seen in our testing. The lowest loop was 2,635, which means there is quite a bit of throttling here, especially with a stability of 42.9%. Generally, we consider anything over 70% stability as pretty good, in terms of throttling. This is part of our thermal tests, which we’ll talk about in a second.

Finally, we have a video export test. What we do here is, we import the same 1-minute video into Capcut and then export it. Timing how long it takes to export at 1080p60. Now we do 1080p30 because not all phones we test can export at 4K60, unfortunately. This is generally a pretty quick test, with most phones exporting the video in under 10 seconds. For the OPPO Find X8, it exported it in 7.03 seconds. Now compared to the realme GT 7 Pro which was 6.34 seconds, it’s a difference, but not a huge difference in day-to-day usage. But it is a rather massive improvement over the Vivo X100 Pro and its Dimensity 9300 chipset.

Thermals

Moving onto the thermals, we also have a few tests to check out the thermals on every device. There are three tests that we perform to check the thermals on each device. First up is 3D Mark Wildlife Extreme Stress Test. This is going to get the phone as hot as it will ever get, it’s not really indicative of daily usage, but it does show us how much the phone might throttle. The OPPO Find X8 hit a temperature of 110.3 degrees during this test. That’s right in the middle of the pack of the phones we’ve reviewed in the past year. Interestingly, it is a few degrees warmer than the Find X8 Pro.

The next test that we run is with Genshin Impact. Since this is an insanely popular game that is also pretty demanding, we feel like this is a good test for each phone. We play Genshin Impact for an hour (starting at room temperature) and put the phone at max brightness, with the maxxed-out graphics settings. The OPPO Find X8 hit a temperature of 95.3 degrees. That’s pretty impressive, but it also shows how optimized Genshin Impact truly is now.

The final test is a camera test. We record video at 4K60 for 10 minutes, taking temperature readings at 5 minutes and again at 10 minutes. Video recording does typically get the phone quite warm, and here, it actually got warmer than playing Genshin Impact. 5 minutes in, the Find X8 was recorded at 93.2 degrees Fahrenheit. And at 10 minutes, it went up to 100.2 degrees. That is higher than some other phones, but given the size, this is not bad at all. We’ve had larger phones get much warmer.

So does the Dimensity 9400 overheat or run hot? Not in our testing so far. Of course, we’ve only tested it one design, the Find X8 series.

OPPO Find X8 Review: Battery life and Charging

As I mentioned earlier, I used the Find X8 Pro first and put that review together before moving onto the Find X8, and I have to say, I expected the battery life to drop off on the Find X8. Even though it is still a pretty massive battery at 5,630mAh – that’s 12% larger than the Galaxy S24 Ultra in a much smaller body. And I’m happy to report that is not the case. It is still a legit two-day phone, if not three days, depending on your usage.

I was routinely getting 10 hours of screen time here over the course of almost two full days. That’s pretty impressive and not something I can say about a lot of other phones I’ve tested this year. I have no worries about battery life with the Find X8 nor the Find X8 Pro. Additionally, if you do need to top up, there’s 80W SUPERVOOC charging.

OPPO says that it takes just 48 minutes to charge the Find X8 to 100% battery with the included 80W SUPERVOOC charger, which I found to be pretty accurate. In my testing, it took

The only issue I have with these fast chargers is, USB-A. That’s right, they are using USB-A to do these fast charging speeds – and it’s not just OPPO. Which means that if I bring a USB-C charger with me, I won’t get anywhere near these charging speeds. Instead, it’ll be closer to 20W. So much for USB-C being so universal, right?

Benchmarks

We also run a few benchmarks for battery life and charging. For battery life, we charge the phone to 100% and then max out the brightness and play a YouTube Video, until the phone drops to about 1%. Typically, anything over 20 hours is good battery life, with very few phones that we’ve tested having passed the 24 hour mark.

The OPPO Find X8 lasted 23 hours and 21 minutes. That’s a solid two hours shorter than the OPPO Find X8 Pro, but still very respectable. Here’s how that compares to some of the competition.

After we finish the battery test, we then plug it in, using the charger that came with the phone – in the case of the Find X8, that’s the 80W SUPERVOOC charger. Otherwise, we use a USB-C charger that outputs the max speed that the phone supports. And we time how long it takes to do a full charge.

It took the OPPO Find X8 56 minutes and 3 seconds to go from 1% to 100%. Surprisingly, that’s about 30 seconds faster than the OPPO Find X8 Pro, which has a 4% larger battery. Here’s how that stacks up to some other recent, fast-charging smartphones.

OPPO Find X8 Review: Software

OPPO is shipping the Find X8 on ColorOS 15, which is based on Android 15. So it’s the latest and greatest version of Android, that’s really great to see, since Android 15 only got pushed to AOSP about 2 months ago. Much like the Find X8 Pro, the Find X8 did have a couple of small updates available out of the box, which I installed before starting to use the phone.

ColorOS 15 is actually a pretty major update for OPPO. They are touting that it has over 800 new animations, it also adds Circle to Search and Touch to Share. But perhaps even more important than all of that is, how smooth it is. OPPO has slimmed down the ROM, allowing you to have even more on-board space, while also making it snappier and smoother. Who can complain about the software being even smoother? Which we experienced during our time using ColorOS 15. It’s been pretty incredible just how smooth it is.

This update also brings in a visual overhaul, with new app icons and changes to the Quick Settings panel. Now you can choose to have it split with the notification shade, or have it a separate page. Think of it as the Control Center and Notifications on iOS, except you can swipe between them.

One of the more useful features in ColorOS 15 is Touch to Share. With this feature, you can share photos and videos with iPhone users, like you would with other Android users. This is a very useful feature, and it works as advertised. However, the iPhone user needs to install the O+ Connect app on their phone for this to work. It would be better if no app was needed, but this is better than nothing.

ColorOS 15 is still as smooth as ever, and it continues to add more useful features that we all grow to love.

OPPO Find X8 Review: Camera

OPPO is continuing its partnership with Hasselblad on the Find X8, which was a stroke of brilliance by OPPO. Because since they’ve been working with Hasselblad, their cameras have become pretty amazing. And that’s no difference on the Find X8. Unlike the Find X8 Pro, there’s only three rear cameras here. This includes a 50-megapixel primary sensor, a 50-megapixel ultrawide, and a 50-megapixel 3x telephoto lens, which can do a sensor crop for 6x. The main difference here is the lack of a dedicated 6x telephoto, which the Find X8 Pro does have.

The biggest feature for the camera that I really appreciate is the Zero Shutter Lag. Many phones do have a bit of shutter lag, though it’s not always noticeable. However, when you’re photographing action or kids and pets that don’t stop moving, you can really notice the shutter lag. That’s gone with the Find X8, which results in some pretty stunning action shots.

OPPO is also using AI for Zoom here. Which, yeah I know I know, we’re all tired of hearing about AI gimmicks. However, this is not a gimmick. I’ve taken shots that were at 30x on this 3x telephoto lens, and they’ve turned out pretty incredible. Typically, 30x digital zoom shots look like watercolor paintings, but that’s not the case with the Find X8. They, instead, look like it is optical zoom. AI is pulling overtime here with these Zoom capabilities, and I love it.

Below, you can see many samples I’ve taken with the Find X8 over the past few weeks. I’ve been very surprised at how good this camera is, and I don’t really miss the dedicated 6x telephoto lens from the Find X8 Pro, either.

Should you buy the OPPO Find X8?

The OPPO Find X8 is a pretty incredible phone. The only real reason I can find why you shouldn’t buy this (legitimately) is because it won’t be coming to the US. Though it works pretty well on T-Mobile’s network, I was getting 5G connectivity on it with Google Fi.

If you’re in the market for a new phone and are looking for one that has a great camera, incredible battery life, and the latest version of Android – none of Samsung’s phones have that – then the Find X8 is a great phone to pick up right now. This review was written before we knew the global price, so we aren’t able to put that into respect with this review.

You should buy the OPPO Find X8 if:

• You want incredible battery life.
• You want amazing cameras.
• You want a phone that looks like the iPhone but isn’t confined to iOS.
• You want a phone that can do everything and do it all well.

You should not buy the OPPO Find X8 if:

• You want a larger phone – go for the Find X8 Pro instead.
• You don’t want a phone that looks like the iPhone.