Oppo Find X7 Ultra review

Android and ColorOS in lockstep, at v14

The Oppo Find X7 Ultra was released with Android 14 on board, augmented by a layer of ColorOS, also at v14.

Oppo's update policy for the Find X7 Ultra means it will be getting 4 major OS updates and 5 years of security patches, which is the same policy as the one for Find X6 Pro.

It's not the first time we're seeing that 14 combo and we've already prepped a more detailed look at the software that Oppo, OnePlus, and Realme share almost unchanged (the names are different, yes).

The Find's case is a bit specific in that it's on the Chinese software branch and with that it gets a different set of apps preinstalled, plus some China-specific behavior in a few areas like permission handling or Google app support. For what it's worth, we were able to uninstall pretty much all the Chinese apps, as well as some of the global in-house apps, making for a seemingly international look.

That said, the granular way the Find X7 Ultra handles permissions, constantly asking you for this or that specific one, will remain - which can be a good or a bad thing depending on where you stand. Every now and then, a dialog window may pop up in Chinese too. The lack of Google Location history is not something you can bypass either.

A bunch of the AI services that Oppo advertises, like the Breeno smart assistant and its many incarnations, are also of limited use to western users - at least with our level of grasp of the Chinese language (which is somewhere around non-existent).

Perhaps specific to this reviewer were the repeated run-ins with the VIP mode, activated by bumping the alert slider to the topmost position. More than once that happened accidentally, leaving him GPS-less mid-hike - hardly a dealbreaker in itself, but an annoyance that can't be fixed in settings, as there's no setting menu for the slider's behavior.

Point being, you could learn to live with the Find X7 Ultra's software if you were to gray-import one, but it won't necessarily always be a smooth experience.

Benchmarks

The Find X7 Ultra is also powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset - just like the Galaxy S24 Ultra, Xiaomi 14 Ultra, Honor Magic6 Pro, and most flagships, be they of immense or lesser camera prowess. The vivo X100 Pro, on the other hand, relies on the Dimensity 9300, which adds a bit of silicon diversity to the top-tier cameraphone pool.

There are three memory versions that we know of - 12GB/256GB, 16GB/256GB, and 16GB/512GB. We reviewed the top-spec variant and its storage speed was consistent with the UFS 4.0 type, as specified.

As is common with ColorOS handsets, the Find X7 Pro Ultra has a high performance mode that unleashes its full potential - otherwise it runs at a lower pace. The difference is most drastic under single-core CPU load, where GeekBench records pretty low results - like we observed on the OnePlus12. The Find X7 Ultra's performance mode score GeekBench was as high as expected from the hardware, unlike the still rather low OP12 numbers.

Overall, the Find's numbers in benchmarks were just a smidge below the best in class - meaning it delivers top-tier performance, without being an overachiever.

We've discontinued GFXBench graphics benchmarking as the app is often banned/blacklisted on the phones we receive for review. The graphics performance ranking in 3D Mark is just as meaningful, so we suggest you refer to that one instead.

The high performance mode had somewhat of an effect on prolonged CPU load results, both in terms of maximum performance and what percentage of that can be sustained. In both cases, the phone's results settled at what appears to be an indefinitely sustainable level around the 15-minute mark and both graphs look nice, without erratic peak-dip behavior. Performance mode had no effect on long-term GPU load, and the Find's result in that metric is the usual 50-ish percent in the 20-minute 3DMark Wild Life Stress test.

3DMark Wild Life stress test • CPU Throttling test: Regular • High performance