I have historically always been a long term iPhone user, switching all the way back from BlackBerry in 2011 I think it was. The iPhone 4, was my first one and I loved it from the moment I started using it. The iPhone 4 felt like a huge step forward to anything else on the market at the time, including my trusty old BlackBerry.

Fast forward to 2024 and the smartphone world is very different to back then. We now have multiple manufactures offering great phones at different price levels, all with similar features and build quality. After reviewing the new Google Pixel 9 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro, I wanted to branch out and look at more Android phones to see what is out there and what you can for your money.

Oppo are a Chinese brand, like Huawei who are trying to enter the European market and introduce their products to a wider audience. They did launch a couple of phones a few years ago in the UK, but then withdrew from the European market, due to an on-going patent dispute with Nokia. This has now been settled, so Oppo are back! Which is a good thing, as they make some great smartphones due to their partnership with Hasselblad (one of the best camera makers in the world). If you want to get into smartphone photography seriously, then some of the Chinese brands like Oppo and Xaomi offer excellent camera systems and are worth looking at. I think a lot of people assume because the iPhone is made by Apple, that it will always have the best cameras, which is the not the case. Yes, the iPhone does take great pictures and is probably the best phone still for video, but some of the other camera systems in phones like the Oppo are fantastic.

Design and Pricing:

Lovely pearl finish on the back with the huge camera system

The Oppo X8 Pro is a typical candy bar style smartphone and comes in two colours (Pearl White and Space Black). The phone is only available in the European market in one configuration, which is 16GB RAM and 512GB storage, which I think is a smart move by Oppo. The price is £1049, so whilst an expensive phone, it does offer better value than a Pixel or iPhone.

The screen is an OLED display, measuring 6.7” and is in my opinion the perfect size for a phone. I recently used the iPhone 16 Pro Max and found the 6.9” screen way to large for using the phone as a camera. Apple recently introduced the camera control system, but to me on the Max its just to large to make it useful. Oppo have included something similar and on the right hand side closer to the bottom of the phone, they have a haptic feed back button, which if you press it twice opens the camera. This works well for me and I haven’t had any issues in using it. At the top of the front screen there is also the usual front camera and this operates like a kind of dynamic island sometimes, but doesn’t work as well as Apple’s implementation.

The screen itself offers the usual 120hz refresh rate, just like the iPhone Pro and looks lovely to use. You can customise the phone far more than the Pixel or iPhone. For example if you go into the screen settings you can change the colour profile of the screen (I know you can do this on the Pixel but its more advanced on the Oppo). If you prefer more vibrant colours, then you can select the vibrancy mode or if you like muted style, then there is an option for this. It also has a pro mode for calibration on for photo and video work. One thing I am not keen on with the screen, is how it curves away at the edges. Oppo call this an “infinite display” and it does kind of look good, but in everyday use it makes it harder to press the corners of the screen. Motorola like to curve their screens and so do Honor, it really doesn’t work in everyday use and I wish they would just stop using the curved designs!

The phone feels really well made and has Gorilla glass on the front to protect it from scratches, which so far has worked well. It is also meant to be Oppo’s toughest phone yet, but I have seen people say their glass on the back has already broken from a small drop, so I would take this with a pinch of salt and still put the phone in a case. At the end of the day glass is glass and can be broken easily if you catch it at the right angle, so personally think a case is sensible.

On the back of the phone you get the huge circular camera system, which is branded with the Hasselblad logo in the middle and looks cool. I think the camera is the main selling point of the phone, so should be made to stand out which it does. The phone supports super-fast charging and wireless charging. Most of these new Android phones are coming with faster charging as standard and its nice to be able to top up the battery in say half an hour, rather than over an hour with the iPhone. Apple seem determined to keep the iPhone at 20w charging, whereas the Oppo offers 80w and it makes a real difference in real world use.

Powerful hardware:

After using the phone as my main device for two weeks now, I can safely say that this is one powerful phone. It uses MediaTek’s latest CPU, meaning apps open quickly and games run really well. The phone even barely gets warm, which was something that surprised me after coming from a Pixel 9. If you compare this to the Pixel 9 and the Tensor chips, it blows them out of the water in terms of performance. Whilst I loved the Pixel camera system, it used to really annoy me that the phone would slow down sometimes taking high resolution pictures, because the Tensor G4 couldn’t keep up. You can press the shutter button as many as times as you like on the high res mode and it just keeps on going, like the iPhone. The phone should last for years in terms of keeping up to date, but Oppo doesn’t commit to any terms of support like Pixel and Apple do.

The incredible battery life is something I noticed straight away in the first two days of use. The phone comes with a Silicone Carbon Battery, not lithium like most other smartphones. This enables the phone to have a smaller battery with more capacity and they don’t overheat as easily. I can get two days use out of the phone and that includes using the camera a lot as well. The phone is fully waterproof IP68 and IP69 so provides extra dust protection and shouldn’t have any problems getting wet.

Amazing Cameras:

The selling point of this phone is its camera system and they are amazing, easily beating the iPhone. Oppo call it the “HyperTone” Camera system, which gives you four 50 megapixel cameras on the back and one 32 megapixel camera on the front. You get a main wide camera, 3x Periscope Telephoto, 6x Periscope Telephoto and an ultra-wide. I really like having two telephoto optical zoom ranges, as it gives you more flexibility when shooting objects further away and you don’t sacrifice quality on the cameras. Three of the cameras have optical stabilisation on to, meaning you should get steady video even using the Telephoto for video.

Shot on the Oppo 6x Telephoto with no editing

How did I find this in everyday use? Well, I really enjoyed using the camera system and preferred it to my iPhone 16 Pro. The low light performance is particularly good, as usually when the ISO (sensor sensitivity) increases you get more noise on the images. I found I could use 2000 ISO indoors and still get good results. This might be, because the phone is using AI to remove the noise, but it works and you still get a natural image from the cameras. The Pixel used to over sharpen the image indoors, giving a false effect. I do think its low light performance is one of the main selling points of the phone, which I am guessing is mainly down to the larger camera sensors and lenses etc. The iPhone I thought did good low light images, but is hands down beaten by this phone.

There are plenty of AI features on the phone as usual these days, so you get AI Photo Remaster which can work well, it has something similar to Google’s best take and can change the photo iif you take several images all together. You also get a lot of Google Photo’s AI features, because it is running a modified Android 15. There is also the usual AI Studio, like Pixel studio where you can generate your own AI images, which to me is pretty useless. I did like the AI smart audio, where it can focus in on voices on the videos.

Should you buy the Oppo over the Pixel and iPhone?

I think Oppo have produced a phone that does offer a viable alternative to the mainstream brands and even beats them in some ways. People may be worried about going for a less well known brand like Oppo, but I wouldn’t be. The build quality is second to none and performance is great, the phone has performed flawlessly for me over the past two weeks.

The phone does run Android 15, but its in the form of Colour OS, which means Oppo have added some of their own features to the stock Android system. I didn’t find any of these to intrusive though and whilst it would be nice if manufacturers could just use the Google systems, I get why they do it to try and differentiate themselves from other Android manufacturers. I think we may start to see more phone companies use their own operating systems like Huawei soon, so they can make themselves look more unique and be less reliant on Google.

If you are in the market for a new smartphone, then please do consider the Oppo X8 Pro as it really is a great phone and it certainly can compete with the Pixel 9 Pro and even beat it for performance.

OPPO X8 PRO Initial In-depth Review: Can it beat the Pixel 9 Pro?

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