When looking for a new phone, most customers don’t look across the whole market to make their choice. Instead, they head to their local Samsung or Apple store — or their carrier’s — and choose the Galaxy or iPhone that fits their budget. They know they mightn’t be buying the best phone for the money on paper, but they’re familiar with that brand, so they stick with it.

Getting customers to change brands takes a lot of effort. Google has spent billions over the past decade making their Pixel smartphone line competitive, finally paying off with the Pixel 9 — one of the best phones on the market — which peaked at 13% of new US phone sales when it launched in October 2024. That’s still a small figure though, and it took Google’s functionally limitless resources to get there. So what can smaller manufacturers do?

In most cases, the answer is to make better phones, and for years, the best on the market came in the premium Find X line from Chinese brand Oppo. Whereas other brands would try to undercut their big competitors on price, Oppo’s Find line was above the $1000 mark; but they gave their customers a lot more for the money. I bought a Find X3 Pro in 2021 for precisely this reason; and so, I was excited to check out their latest Find X8 Pro.

If you just consider the hardware, this phone lives up to the promises. The screen is a 120hz AMOLED display, 6.78 inches across, with minuscule bezels courtesy of slightly curved edges, and it gets brighter than any other phone I’ve tried, with a peak of 4500 nits. It’s powered by the flagship MediaTek Dimensity 9400 chipset, with 16GB RAM and 512GB storage.

The only disappointment on the hardware side is the design. The original Find X had a wild pop-up camera, the X3 Pro had a stunning liquid-metal-inspired flowing reflective back, and the last generation Find X7 Ultra had this stylish half-faux leather back. The Finx X8 Pro is just another slab phone with a big circular camera display, and I hope they bring character back to the Find X line.

Saying that, in hand, it feels unmistakably premium, with a matt metal back, flat rails, a satisfying alert slider, and an additional haptic shutter button on the right-hand side. It also has four 50-megapixel cameras on the back, with a primary camera, ultra-wide camera, 3x zoom telephoto camera, and a 6x periscope zoom camera, which can digitally crop into a 120x zoom.

The most impressive part is the battery life. For comparison, the iPhone 16 Pro Max has a 4685 mAh battery, charging at up to 30 watts with a wire or 25W wirelessly with a MagSafe charger. It can get to 50% from dead in half an hour, and it takes just over 2 hours to charge fully.

On the other hand, the Oppo Find X8 Pro has an enormous 5910 mAh silicon-carbite battery, which will never run out through a day of use and can wirelessly charge at 50 watts or up to 80 watts with a cable. It’s 80% charged from dead in half an hour or to full in 50 minutes.

On the surface, it’s the best phone on the market for daily life. But it’s on the software that Oppo trips. Oppo uses its own Android skin, ColorOS, and though it’s customizable and comes with some nice added features, it is laggy and has visual elements directly taken from Apple’s iOS. The slow animations make this powerhouse of a phone feel lethargic; and though these can be fixed by going into Developer Mode and cutting down animation speeds to 0.5x, this shouldn’t be necessary. The visual elements “influenced” by Apple aren’t as frustrating, but they make the phone feel cheap. Oppo might defend copying Apple’s media output selection and earbud icons by saying this makes it easier for iOS users to jump ship, but it’s still a bad choice. And the inclusion of a “Dynamic Island” media widget, on a phone without a notch, feels stupid.

Then there are the cameras. These are large sensor cameras, which should produce great photos, but the software tuning often lets them down. Even with all visual controls turned off, the selfie camera overly beautifies — meaning your face looks better in pictures than in reality — and photos with the rear camera are usually too saturated, and the software inconsistently sharpens.

If you take a photo of a still landscape, the initial photo looks quite good, only for the processing to over-brighten and over-sharpen the picture, making it look artificial. But take a picture of a child or a pet, where complete stillness is impossible, and it’s hard to get an unblurred shot, and the processing counters for this by somewhat blurring details. These are still good photos, but, in a side-by-side comparison, I preferred the Pixel 9 Pro’s more boring but realistic and detailed photos every time.

Also, the gimmicky features of the Oppo’s camera can be dismissed. Ultra long-distance zoom shots are pixelated blurs, and then the AI-assisted processing imagines faces and turns the pixelation into a soft, blurry mess. The Hasselblad-tuned filters feel like early 2000s Instagram filters rather than changing film or processing the image differently, as they’re supposed to.

It’s a still a great phone. It’s powerful, premium, lasts forever, charges in minutes, and has an incredible screen — but the software is a real letdown. As I noted, I bought Oppo Find X phones before as, at that point, they were better than their mainstream competitors in every single way. But the competition has gotten steeper, and Oppo’s software has fallen behind, so that’s no longer true. I would stick with a Pixel 9 Pro.

And I say all this as someone living in the UK, where these phones are readily available. To buy a Find X8 Pro in the US, you have to buy an imported version through a site like Gizstop. And if it were my $800, I wouldn’t do so.