Oppo Find X8 Ultra review

Android 15 with Color OS 15

The Find X8 Ultra is running Color OS 15 on top of an Android 15 core. Oppo hasn't announced its software update plans for this model, but we guess it should equal what the X8 Pro got - 5 OS releases and 6 years of security updates.

Oppo says that ColorOS has received a visual overhaul with this release, but what we're seeing is more of a gentle facelift. Most notable in day-to-day operation is the restyling of the quick settings, now treated to a 'Now playing' widget and a reshuffling of the big bubbles.

Also somewhat readily visible is a refresh in the iconography. But the settings menu, for example, is largely unchanged in its presentation, though the About screen does look nicer now.

Color OS on the Oppo Find X8 Ultra

Oppo is keen on making iPhone users switch to Find X8, so it has made the ColorOS as iOS-lookalike as possible, down to the Action and Camera key functionality, Dynamic Island animations, and even similar system apps behavior.

The same goes for the camera button and its functions.

iPhone-like UI

Even better, you can now AirDrop files between the Find X8 Ultra and any iPhone which has the O+ Connect app installed.

Of course, there's plenty of bits sprinkled around Color OS with an AI label on them. Google's Circle to search is replaced by similar functionality courtesy of another app.

The Chinese version of ColorOS relies on Breeno AI instead of Gemini. You can install and enable Gemini, too, but you will have a hard time replacing Breeno's Circle to Search functionality, if that's even possible.

Some AI options

Other AI options such as AI Writer, AI Search and AI VoiceScribe all go through Breeno. They basically do the same thing as Google's AI options. There is even AI Eraser, which tweaks your images using AndesGPT.

The Smart Sidebar is here to stay if it contains various useful features such as a file dock, floating window shortcuts, screen recording, and Breeno Touch shortcut for various AI tricks, including screen recognition.

Smart Sidebar

Then there's a handful of AI-based photo editing tools in the gallery - some of those were already here on previous Color OS versions. AI Recompose, AI Eraser, Enhance Clarity, Unblur, Remove Reflections - these are more or less self-explanatory. The AI Editor can also be set to automatically suggest one of its tools when it sees fit.

AI Editor

Finally, one thing worth mentioning is the much-improved vibration motor, which offers incredibly natural tactile feedback throughout the UI and superb experience in games.

Performance and benchmarks

The Oppo Find X8 Ultra runs on the Snapdragon 8 Elite (3nm) chipset, the most powerful SoC a phone can get these days. Oppo has used a lot of heat dissipation elements - a vapor chamber system, graphite and copper layers, even the screen is fully backed by copper. The phone supports up to 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM and up to 512GB of UFS 4.1 storage.

Naturally, the Find X8 Ultra scores around the top, or takes the top spot on our benchmark tests, which is great.

Quite expectedly, the Find X8 Ultra offers high-end smartphone performance thanks to its top-of-the-shelf chipset.

Sustained performance, on the other hand, is not great. The CPU speed drops to 80% for the first 40mins of our stress test, and then it gets worse with drops down to 58%.

The GPU speed is worse - the phone can keep only 64% of its GPU raw power once it heats up after a couple of minutes.

CPU test • GPU test

None of these can be felt in real life unless you are playing a super modern 3D action game, and even then - those have been optimized not to use the maximum of your hardware.

But the Find X8 Ultra gets really hot around the frame when running benchmark tests and more demanding games, so you have been warned.