Oppo Find X9 Pro review: long battery life, even longer lens
Ultra by nature, not by name
My first review of this year is for one of the very best phones from last year.
As I noted in The Multicore Awards, Oppo had an amazing 2025, with every high-end phone it released turning out to be a banger. The Find X8 Ultra is arguably still the best camera phone on the market — albeit only on the Chinese market — and in my estimation the Find N5 remains the best folding phone available anywhere.
Then Oppo launched the Find X9 series late last year, with the Find X9 Pro currently at the top of the range. As with the previous generation, it seems likely that a Find X9 Ultra will follow in a few months, but for now the Pro is what we’ve got, and I’ve been using it for a couple of months.
One piece of inside baseball I can give you about the Find X9 Pro is that everyone who uses it seems to love it. It’s been a near-ubiquitous sight at recent tech events. I don’t always agree with all of my fellow reviewers — let’s just say I’ve often had to explain myself for carrying the iPhone Air — but it’s rare they’re so in lockstep, and this time I’m fully on board.
The Find X9 Pro is a phenomenal phone that makes some serious breakthroughs in areas that really matter for professional or heavy users. In a lot of ways, it’s actually an upgrade over the Find X8 Ultra.
And as with its predecessor, its biggest flaw is the sense that something even better is in the pipeline.
As the successor to the Find X8 Pro, the X9 Pro essentially has an all-new design. The X8 Pro was a gorgeous phone with a sleek, subtly curvy frame, whereas the regular X8 and X8 Ultra adopted a boxier approach with flat sides all around. The X9 Pro follows this direction while shifting the camera bump into a squircle in the top left corner; the lens array actually reminds me of the Find X5 Pro from four years ago.
The result is a serious-looking device that feels capable and industrial, especially when paired with the “titanium charcoal” finish that adorns my review unit. It’s not as boring as it sounds; when the metal catches the light it often has a slight hint of red or purple.
Oppo is not exactly discouraging iPhone comparisons with its “Snap Key” that works identically to Apple’s Action Button, nor the “Quick Button” that apes the Camera Control. I do still prefer Oppo’s take on the latter, though, which is now slightly recessed but still works through a responsive pressure sensor rather than a physical button.
I feel like I’m running out of ways to talk about flagship Android phone screens, but here’s another great one. It’s a 6.78” 120Hz flat OLED panel with a resolution of 2772 x 1272 and a peak brightness of 3,600 nits, though you’ll more commonly see 1,800 nits in the high brightness mode. Oppo has made a point of prioritising system-level HDR for years now and that’s still the case here, with excellent colour reproduction in the Photos app and support for both Dolby Vision and HDR10+.
Compared to the Find X8 Ultra, the panel here is very slightly smaller and lower-resolution, but it has slimmer bezels and an advantage in brightness. Ultimately it’s a wash; this is very much another example of a flagship screen that’s very difficult to fault.
The Find X9 Pro runs on MediaTek’s latest Dimensity 9500 chip, and the global model (which I’ve been testing) comes in a single configuration with 512GB of storage and 16GB of RAM. In benchmarks, it tends to edge out the Snapdragon 8 Elite in the Find X8 Ultra; high-end MediaTek chips have generally reached the point where they’re now playing cat-and-mouse with Qualcomm.
This chip also doesn’t appear to present any problems with battery life, though it clearly doesn’t hurt that Oppo has managed to cram a gigantic 7,500mAh cell into the phone. It’s by far the biggest battery I’ve ever seen on a mainstream flagship that’s shipping outside China — various regulations and multi-country logistics mean global models often carry lower capacities — and the results are frankly astonishing.
This phone just does not die. You’ve probably seen reviews before that say various phones “can easily get you through a day”, but that is almost never true for me. I push phones hard with tons of camera use and games and browsing, as do many other reviewers I know, and they agree — the Find X9 Pro is the real deal. It’s the best battery life I’ve ever experienced in a phone.
I found that the phone charges from 1% to 100% at up to 80W with proprietary Oppo SuperVOOC chargers in a little over an hour. That’s not particularly fast compared to other Chinese flagships, but it’s more than solid enough given the battery’s high capacity.
It’s also worth pointing out that the Find X9 Pro isn’t at all bulky. The design is blocky and functional but it’s only 8.3mm thick — that’s half a millimetre thinner than the Find X8 Ultra, which has a nearly 20% smaller 6,100mAh battery. Believe it or not, the X9 Pro is also two whole grams lighter.
There’s no Qi2 on this phone, unfortunately, but it does support wireless charging at up to 50W through a SuperVOOC charger, and Oppo also makes a MagSafe-compatible case that you may well want to use for reasons we’ll get into soon.
I don’t usually spend a lot of time on battery life in phone reviews, because unless it’s something weird like the iPhone Air, my real-world take on almost every phone is the same: it’ll get you to the evening with casual use, but I’ll always carry a battery pack when I leave the house for an extended period. I have never been able to trust myself not to kill a phone in a day.
The Find X9 Pro is different. You would need to be the world’s most hardcore Pokémon Go player to have a chance of running out of juice, and I’m not sure even that would do it.
The X9 Pro’s Hasselblad-branded camera system doesn’t quite match the X8 Ultra but represents a big upgrade on the X8 Pro. The 50-megapixel main camera has a 1/1.28“ sensor, falling inbetween the two predecessors’ in size and adding a faster f/1.5 lens, while there’s a near-identical 15mm-equivalent 1/2.76” ultrawide. The killer feature here is the same 70mm-equivalent f/2.1 3x telephoto camera as in the X8 Ultra, with a 200-megapixel 1/1.56” sensor.
This is an awesome telephoto that I had a ton of fun using last year. The X8 Ultra does also have a 50-megapixel 6x telephoto that can get you some extra detail and focal-length compression in good light, but honestly it’s often no better than cropping in from the 3x. The 3x lens also focuses really close, allowing for excellent macro shots.
As with Oppo’s last few high-end phones, the Find X9 Pro has best-in-class colour science and is capable of fantastic images almost anywhere you might find yourself, including difficult situations like concert photography. First introduced on the X8 Ultra, the X9 Pro also has a dedicated colour spectrum sensor that helps ensure accurate reproduction right across the frame.
The one thing I will continue to say is that you really need to be shooting in Oppo’s Master mode. This is ostensibly the enthusiast option that allows you to tweak various exposure parameters, but you don’t actually need to worry about any of that. Right off the bat, Master mode just makes your photos look much better.
Here’s a comparison, with Master mode on the left:
I know the image on the right is more vibrant and jumps out of the screen at you more immediately, but open them both up in full-screen and look at the details. The Master mode photo is softer and everything you see in it is for real, whereas the regular mode shot is over-sharpened and has a ton of noisy artifacts.
It’s not like Oppo’s processing is any worse than other phones in this regard — this is just what most phone photos look like. But the inclusion of Master mode gives you the ability to take pictures that look like they were captured with a regular, enthusiast-grade camera. You can always sharpen them and boost the saturation later if that’s what you really want.
Here are some more unedited shots in Master mode:
The Find X9 Pro offers a really capable setup out of the box. If you do find yourself wanting some extra optical reach, though, Oppo has you covered with the Hasselblad Teleconverter Kit. This is a seriously high-end accessory that attaches over the 3x lens and extends it by 3.28x, getting you to a 230mm-equivalent focal length — that’s 10x that of the main camera.
Other than its relatively diminutive size, the teleconverter kit really does feel like a quality lens for a camera system, with its all-metal build and hefty weight. At €499 in Europe, you’d hope so.
To give you an idea of the difference this accessory makes, here’s a direct comparison from the teleconverter at 10x versus the Find X9 Pro’s 3x telephoto zoomed into the same frame of view.
You can see that the lens delivers dramatically better detail and shallower depth of field. The bokeh is kind of funky due to the periscope lens design, but it’s still clearly an upgrade if you’re looking to blur your background. Due to the 200-megapixel sensor, you can get good results at 20x zoom as well, although anything beyond that and AI over-processing starts to kick in.
There can also be a difference in colour reproduction, which is illustrated in these shots. Outside of side-by-side comparisons, though, you’re unlikely to notice a colour shift.
Here are some more samples straight from the teleconverter, which all look pretty neutral:
These are incredible results for a phone, albeit one with an expensive accessory attached.
I do think Oppo could have refined the implementation a little further. To attach the teleconverter, you need to use a specific included case that’s made out of a synthetic aramid material. It’s very slimline and feels sturdy, but it attracts fingerprints like you wouldn’t believe. (It does at least give the X9 Pro MagSafe-compatible wireless charging support.)
Even with the case attached, you then need to slide a mounting plate over the camera bump. This provides the screw mount for the teleconverter, and everything attaches smoothly, but it means you’re also blocking the other two camera lenses.
Finally, once the hardware is in place, you have to use the dedicated Hasselblad Teleconverter mode in the camera app. All this really does is flip the image around, since it would otherwise inverted, and give you access to the zoom modes that are designed for the teleconverter.
This means there’s no way to use the teleconverter in Master mode or even portrait mode. If you want to use the regular cameras, you have to slide off the teleconverter and the mounting plate at the same time, which makes for an awkward object to stash into a pocket.
The Hasselblad Teleconverter Kit is a really impressive accessory that expands the shooting envelope of your phone, but it could have been more convenient to use, and it’s a lot of money to drop on something that’s unlikely to work with future devices.
The Find X9 Pro isn’t necessarily going to blow you away with its design or pyrotechnics on its spec sheet, but it’s a fantastic phone that ticks every important box almost as well as anything else. In many regards I would rank it over the X8 Ultra, a phone that’s still ostensibly in a tier above.
The existence of the X8 Ultra is really the only thing that makes me think twice about the X9 Pro’s value proposition. I will personally always find it hard to give up a 1” sensor, and having a built-in 6x telephoto can be useful in certain situations.
But otherwise, the X9 Pro is a sleeker, faster phone with much better battery life. It also has better zoom performance if you’re willing to use an unwieldy but awesome accessory. And it’s available globally, at least in Europe as well as Asia.
The caveat to this ebullient praise is that I do have to wonder about the inevitable X9 Ultra. I’m not sure I understand Oppo’s strategy of waiting several months to launch its highest-end models; it casts doubt on excellent Pro-level phones that really don’t deserve it.
Right now, I do highly recommend the Find X9 Pro. Just know that if you’re interested, there may well be something better on the horizon — whether it makes its way out of China or not.