Oppo's New Phone Has an iPhone 16-Like Camera Button

Oppo's new flagship phone has a shutter button similar to one Apple debuted with the iPhone 16 series. The new Find X8 Pro is part of a two-member flagship series, which Oppo unveiled Thursday in its native China ahead of an imminent international release. 

The entry-level Find X8 starts at 4,199 yuan, or roughly $590, while the Find X8 Pro starts for 5,299 yuan, which converts to approximately $745. (International prices are expected to vary depending on the country or region.)

The higher-end Find X8 Pro has the new shutter button as well as a range of 2024 flagship-level features. It has a 6.78-inch screen, runs on Mediatek's latest Dimensity 9400 chip, packs a huge 5,910-mAh battery that supports 80-watt wired charging and 50-watt wireless charging.  

One of the Find X series' key selling points is its cameras, and the Find X8 phones seem to build on that reputation, at least on paper. The Find X8 Pro has a Hasselblad-branded camera module, which houses four 50-megapixel cameras, two of which have telephoto lenses of 6x and 3x optical zoom.

Oppo's Find X8 Pro is armed with a Hasselblad camera module.

Oppo/Screenshot by Sareena Dayaram/CNET

Although Oppo may not be a global household name like Apple or Samsung, the Chinese company is one of the world's largest smartphone manufacturers. According to research firm, the International Data Corporation, Oppo commanded nearly 9% of the global smartphone market share in 2023, with shipments estimated at more than 103 million units for that year.

At its launch event, Oppo demonstrated the camera's ability to take pictures of objects in motion. A presenter used one of Oppo's new phones to take a photo of a dog jumping on stage, and then compared the shot to one taken by the iPhone 16 Pro.

Oppo compared an iPhone shot of a jumping dog with a photo shot on one of its new Find X8 phones.

Oppo/Screenshot by Sareena Dayaram/CNET

The Find X8 Pro also gets a new hardware button, similar to iPhone 16's Camera Control button. It's pressure-sensitive and allows you to take photos and zoom in and out of shots. The X8 Pro also has an alert slider, which is a hardware switch popularized by OnePlus (a subsidiary of Oppo) on its phones that makes it easy to toggle between ring, silent and vibrate modes

As expected, Oppo also highlighted the AI features of the devices. Apart from AI tools that remove glare from images, Oppo showed off a feature similar to Google Lens or iPhone's Visual Lookup feature, wherein you can snap a photo of your surroundings, say a landmark, and then with a prompt the Find X8 Pro's AI will spit out a description or some contextual information about the image.

"In any interface, you can easily call up AI by simply pressing the power button," a Google translation of Oppo's Chinese-language website said. "You can ask whatever is on the screen. Identify scenic spots, recognize animals, search for questions, navigate, summarize."

Oppo has not released a Find X phone series internationally since the Find X5 series. The timeline for the Find X8 series' international launch isn't yet confirmed, but it's rumored to happen this year.