I’ve been able to get my hands on every major flagship phone in 2024, testing the iPhone 16, Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, OnePlus 12, Google Pixel 9 Pro and many more besides. It takes a lot to stand out as one of the best phones in any given year these days, but like a phoenix from the ashes, and at the last possible moment, a new contender has snuck into the calendar year with a real chance at being crowned the very best.

Oppo has returned to the UK phone market with a bang. After a couple of years away thanks to a legal dispute with Nokia in Europe, the Android smartphone maker is back with the Oppo Find X8 Pro, a stunning smartphone with cameras that take the fight to the iPhone 16 Pro, S24 Ultra and Xiaomi 14 Ultra, three of the best camera phones you can buy on these shores.

I’ve been using the phone for a few weeks and have found it an easy device to love. It’s a big phone (not unusual in 2024) but if you don’t mind that then there is plenty to enjoy here, from the premium build with marbled white finish to the excellent quadruple 50MP cameras, with the camera bump amazingly thin and unobtrusive considering the tech packed in here. Particularly great are the main lens and 6x optical zoom, the latter of which has image stabilisation and is one of the best periscope zooms I’ve ever used.

That’s mostly down to the excellent hardware, but camera brand Hasselblad has also lent a hand (and its logo) on the visuals and colour tuning, making sure these shots are some of the best in the business. The Find X8 Pro is one of those rare phones that's hard to take a bad photo with, even though I gave it a very good go with my limited shutter skills.

The advantages of a larger main camera lens here is improved low light performance over older phones. I took the X8 Pro to Kew Gardens’s Christmas lights in London and got some shots I simply couldn’t have got on lesser phones. Bright lights were pin-sharp while not blowing out the darkness of the sky, while faces and colours were still snapped well.

Compared to the £1,249 Galaxy S24, the still-expensive-but-cheaper £1,049 Oppo manages to better capture moving subjects, both in light and dark. Samsung’s best camera phone really struggles with children, pets and objects, whereas Oppo has found a way to better capture sharp images of moving things.

Hot off the back of Apple’s Camera Control button on the iPhone 16, Oppo has included what it calls the Quick Button here, which serves as a way to open the camera app and snap photos as a shutter button. It doesn’t physically move, instead using the phone’s good haptics to mimic a button press. I prefer it to Apple’s moving button, and swiping over it zooms effectively, but these buttons feel like gimmicks. It’s easier to use the on screen controls.

Oppo is owned by the same company as OnePlus, a brand that’s been selling handsets to Brits for years. Both now share practically the same software under different names. Oppo calls theirs ColorOS, and here it runs over Android 15, the latest available version. When I’ve used Oppo phones in the past it has been a little rough around the edges but on the Find X8 Pro it feels mature, and despite looking a little like iOS - you might find this a good thing rather than negative - it’s simpler and cleaner than Samsung’s often-cluttered One UI. There’s a bit of bloatware when you set up the phone that you can mostly uninstall.

Everything does feel a little too large and cartoonish out of the box, but you can customise icon and text sizes as well as layouts and themes until the phone looks how you’d like.

You view it all through an excellent 6.78-inch AMOLED screen with HD resolution. It’s nearly but not quite flat, with the faintest curves at the edges, and is covered in hardy Gorilla Glass 7 that should keep bad scratches at bay, though this is still a fragile glass phone that will smash if you drop it. You may well do too, as this is a huge phone. The in-screen fingerprint sensor works very well and quickly with a bit of hand gymnastics, but there’s face unlock if you want it.

There’s a see-through case in the box, but it feels very cheap and is not very nice to use. Better is the inclusion of a wall charger, not included with any Apple or Samsung phone these days, which can charge the Find X8 superfast thanks to its 80W speeds. There’s also 50W wireless charging if you buy the right wireless charger, which is faster than the S24 Ultra can charge with a cable. With a 5,910mAh battery, I’ve had incredibly good battery life, easily lasting two days. It’s one of the best things about this phone. Many Android phones tick down quite a lot when unplugged overnight, but not this one.

It’s also worth mentioning that for the price, you’re getting 16GB RAM and a huge 512GB storage. That’s very generous - the £999 Pixel 9 Pro only has 128GB, which isn’t enough for most people over several years.

Not to be left out of the AI game, Oppo has included a raft of artificial intelligence features in the Find X8 Pro. I’ll level with you here: I don’t care for AI tools, but it’s good to report that Oppo doesn’t shove them down your throat. I happily used the phone without needing or using the AI, but if you want it, there are things such as Google’s Circle to Search, a handy way to quickly freeze what's on screen and then circle it with your digit to do a Google search.

AI will also sharpen images if you’ve zoomed in from very far away and lost some quality, which is useful. Less great is the AI Studio app where it gamifies gaining stars so you can cash them in and create AI generated portraits of yourself. Here’s me ‘Manhattan style’, unfortunately:

It feels like bloatware and AI for AI’s sake.

More useful could be AI Summary and AI Writer, which can summarise chunks of text for you from various apps, or help you check grammar or rewrite emails or messages in a different tone or length. As a journalist, the ability to transcribe audio recordings was the most useful tool of the lot.

I’ve enjoyed using the Find X8 Pro and find it a very complete all-round smartphone. The cameras have given better results than the pricier Galaxy S24 Ultra, though I still prefer the contrast and feel of photos from the Google Pixel 9 Pro. That phone is also smaller and more pocketable than the Oppo, which is quite a larger device.

Oppo has promised to update the Android software for five years and there’s six years of security updates that will keep you safe until the end of 2030. That’s not quite Samsung and Google’s seven years, but it’s not far off, and you’re unlikely to still be using this phone by then anyway. If you want a well-made premium Android phone with excellent battery life, fast charging, a great screen and some of the best cameras around, you’ll be pleased with the Find X8 Pro.