Oppo Find X9 Pro review

The Find X9 Pro is a brute. It’s a substantial slab of glass and metal, weighing in at a hefty 224 grams. This is largely thanks to the whopping 7500mAh battery wedged inside, so this is not a phone for dainty pockets.

It feels premium, mind. Our 'Titanium Charcoal' unit has a lovely, subtle non-reflective texture. The camera bump is... prominent, but tidily arranged in the corner. You get a new, customisable 'Snap Key' on the left frame and a 'Quick Button' on the right for camera duties.

It’s also built like a tank. It’s not just the usual IP68; Oppo has added IP66 and IP69 ratings too. This means it’s protected from high-pressure, high-temperature water jets, just in case you decide to clean it at a car wash. The best bit? The bezels are vanishingly thin at just 1.15mm on all four sides, making the front almost all-screen.

This is pretty much an Ultra-sized phone or Max if you’re an Apple aficionado. Two hands isn’t the norm, it’s a necessity with this smartphone and it tends to get a bit too heavy for my liking. As much as I like the 7500mAh battery inside, it’s quite unwieldy to live with. I wish it was a bit lighter and a bit smaller for human hands. If you’re LeBron James, this is perfect for you.

That all-screen front is a 6.78-inch, 1-120Hz AMOLED with a pin-sharp 450PPI resolution. It gets blindingly bright, easily searing my retinas more effectively than the iPhone 17 Pro. But the colours are a bit much for my liking. Reds and blues feel slightly boosted, like they’ve had one too many sugary drinks. It’s still a commendable panel and movies and videos pop with a cinematic punch.

There’s all sorts of brightness and lowlight eye care stuff happening on this display but the bottomline is, the quality of it is top shelf. Brightness and contrast are vivid and punchy. Dolby Vision movies have good tone mapping, however the blacks are a bit crushed while watching the first episode of The Witcher S1. I really wish the display had an anti-reflective coating at this price point because under direct sunlight, the phone needs a bit more punch in the brightness for Netflix and other shows.

For those of us who get queasy in the back of an Uber, there’s a new 'Vehicle Motion Alerts' feature which displays visual cues to help reduce motion sickness. What isn't up for debate, however, is the 3D Ultrasonic Fingerprint scanner. It’s bonkers-fast, 35% faster than conventional scanners, and hasn't failed me once, even with wet fingers.

Under the hood, the Find X9 Pro is one of the first phones running the new MediaTek Dimensity 9500 chipset. Our unit is kitted out with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage, and it absolutely flies.

App performance is slick, and the fluid animations are buttery smooth. PUBG Mobile ran like a dream, but curiously, our usual test game, Grid Legends, wasn't supported. The older MediaTek 9400 supports it, so this one should too. However, it may be a developer issue or a problem with the MediaTek GPU optimization. Either way, the GPU performance has improved since last year on benchmarks.

What really impressed me was the Gallery app. The built-in video editor is surprisingly comprehensive, with tools for trimming, cropping, and adding filters. Processing crops or applying edits is instant here with no progress bars. The GPU renders new videos from apps like Edits and Premiere quickly and doesn’t stutter while editing high resolution videos.

Right, the main course. That camera module isn't just for show. Oppo has made some properly interesting and meaningful changes, starting with the 200MP Hasselblad telephoto sensor, which is used very tastefully.

In true Hasselblad fashion, it’s all about letting you crop into the high-res shot to reframe. But the real magic happens when you plonk the optional Hasselblad Teleconverter lens on top. The lens itself is a hefty, durable thing, clearly made in collaboration with Hasselblad. This gives you a 230mm focal length equivalent, which is, frankly, unreal. It delivers that delicious optical compression that squashes the background, creating dreamy portraits that software-based 'portrait modes' just can't replicate. The clarity, detail, and pure optical subject separation are top-dollar. It’s a genuinely fun bit of kit.

The photos you get from this teleconverter setup are only 9MP, not 200MP binned ones. I can't help but feel disappointed. I’d have loved all that extra resolution to play with, especially since the lens is sitting on that 200MP sensor. However, there’s a lot of nuance to using it and understanding how this works with the smartphone camera, so for that we have written a separate review outlining the entire experience of using the Teleconverter kit here.

The rest of the setup holds its own. The 50MP main sensor and 50MP ultrawide are flagship-grade. Macro shots, using the ultrawide, are particularly crisp. Night photography is good, though it can be a tad aggressive on crushing shadows, but it produces a good photo all round.

The 50MP front camera is seriously good, but it has that classic Oppo look. It zaps shadows and creates a very pleasing, bright skin tone, which is lovely, but not quite what I see in the mirror. Video is perhaps the most improved area. It captures crisp, detailed 4K footage that doesn't look over-processed. Apple still wears the crown for consistent white balance, but Samsung and Oppo are snapping at its heels. This is a proper, A-grade camera, and of course, you get the lovely Hasselblad extras, like the cinematic XPAN mode and some tasty film simulation filters.

Video has improved as well. Oppo is doing some magic when it comes to video processing and output at 4K and at 1080p. The footage is as good as iPhones but the lens itself gathers less light than Apple so highlights are usually kicked and you lose a lot of shadows. The end result is a more flatter picture quality devoid of any drama from the highlights and shadows. It’s the same story with the still images as well.

The phone runs ColorOS 16, which, let's be honest, is just OxygenOS 16 with a different hat on. If you've used a new OnePlus, you've used this. As much as Oppo tried to merge the OxygenOS and ColorOS into a single brand, it never sat well with fans and media, so they just created two separate names for the same thing and moved on in life. Now ColorOS 16 has all the features of the OnePlus’ OxygenOS. So it’s safe to say that you’re technically getting a superior smartphone experience here than the OnePlus 15 because this thing has better cameras in addition to having one of the best Android OS in the market.

The new 'Flux Home Screen' lets you create massive, resizable folders and app icons, and the new motion photo wallpapers are a nice touch. The real star, though, is the AI. I used the new AI Recorder for a meeting, and it was frighteningly accurate, providing real-time transcription and even understanding who was speaking and when.

I really wish Oppo put some more effort into their viewfinder when it’s working with the Teleconverter Kit. You can read that full review here for more details because besides the pros and cons of the teleconverter kit, this smartphone is a complete Android package.

The Oppo Find X9 Pro is a bit of a brute, isn’t it?. It’s a substantial slab of glass and metal that feels less like a phone and more like a piece of tactical field equipment. Weighing in at a wrist-straining 224g, this is not a device for dainty pockets or skinny jeans. The screen is a tale of two cities. It’s vanishingly thin-bezelled and pin-sharp, but the colour tuning feels like it’s had one too many sugary drinks. While it gets searingly bright, it has a habit of crushing blacks during moody Netflix binges.

Then there’s the camera. Oppo has kept the Hasselblad goodies for itself, leaving OnePlus crying in the corner. The 200MP telephoto sensor is a headline grabber, and when paired with the optional Teleconverter lens, the optical compression creates portrait shots that are genuinely dreamy. However, dropping from a 200MP sensor down to a 9MP image when using that fancy lens feels like buying a Ferrari and only driving it in a school zone.

Video performance is where it truly snaps at Apple’s heels, delivering crisp 4K footage that avoids the over-processed look. Throw in the snappy MediaTek Dimensity 9500 and the ‘OxygenOS in a trench coat’ software experience, and you have a phone that is technically superior to its OnePlus cousins, provided you have the biceps to wield it.