Oppo Find X8 Pro review

Design, build quality, handling

The Find X8 Pro continues in the footsteps of previous Oppo Finds and one of its main styling elements is its large camera island on the back. The marketing materials point out numbers and ways in which it's evolved and gotten smaller, but it's anything but small. So it may as well be the centerpiece.

Still, there's some extra engineering that went behind it, so it is worth making a point out of it. The short telephoto got a dual prism lens which helped bring the camera bump thickness down by some 40%. It's now 3.58mm thick, they say - we'll take their word for it. Indeed, while certainly prominent, it's somehow not quite as dominating as on last year's Ultra.

FInd X8 Pro (left) next to Find X7 Ultra

The front and back panels of the Find X8 Pro are made of glass, Gorilla Glass 7i specifically. The display curves very gently in all four directions and so too does the back panel. The frame, meanwhile, is aluminum.

Oppo has come up with a name for the concept behind the Find X8 Pro's build and that's Armor Shield. Combining the above materials and adding shock absorption zones, they're confident they've engineered a tough handset.

Part of that is the Find X8 Pro's IP69 certification alongside the usual IP68. So not only is the phone rated to survive a dunk in water down to 1.5m deep for as long as 30 minutes, but you can also have at it with a pressure washer as long as your water isn't hotter than 80 degrees Celsius.

We're not entirely sure what's happening this year with the IP69 rating that's being thrown around left and right - did makers come up with a new adhesive to bond elements together, or did they just realize that the existing solutions are good enough for an extra set of test conditions? Either way, perhaps don't actually have at it with a pressure washer?

Dual nano SIM tray (eSIM also supported) with a gasket - is it a new type of gasket?

What is certainly new this time around is the Find X8 Pro's extra control 'button'. Located on the right side (or the top when the phone is held in landscape) it's a capacitive and pressure sensitive strip that can be used to launch the camera and do stepless zoom inside it, as well as trigger the shutter release.

It's not a real button, strictly speaking - it doesn't 'give' when you press it, but the phone's vibration motor does a fine job of creating the illusion of a click. It's essentially what many people watching the iPhone 16 keynote were led to believe Apple was doing, only to find out that the iPhone implementation was an actual button.

The previous generation of Finds introduced an alert slider, a staple of the OnePlus phones. The Find X8 and X8 Pro feature it too, letting you quickly switch between ring, vibrate, and fully silent modes. If you're one to just set your phone to vibrate as soon as you get it out of the box, the slider will be wasted on you, but it could function as a fidget clicker of sorts. It is a really nice clicker.

The Find X8 Pro uses an under-display fingerprint reader, an optical one, and it's positioned somewhat low. We had no real issues with its operation - it was fast and reliable in use - but it could have been placed higher, and it could have been ultrasonic too.