How the OPPO Find X9 Pro gets its inhuman durability and smoothness

In the realm of flagship Android phones, what would you consider “enough” for long-term use?

Some might argue that battery lifespan is the most important factor, or that a good phone doesn’t slow down after years of abuse and junk memory buildup. Others might say it has to do with surviving the daily rigours of use, far beyond lab-certified IP ratings, knocks, and bruises that your handset might sustain.

For OPPO, it decided: why choose?

The Chinese smartphone brand demonstrated what it considers “enough” in ensuring a durable and smoothly operating Android phone through its guided R&D lab tour at its new OPPO Binhai Bay Campus, located on the outskirts of Dongguan, China.

OPPO Apex Guard, a concept given physical form

OPPO’s work in ensuring long-lived flagship smartphones today and tomorrow can be summarised in a single phrase: to achieve greatness, one must not shy away from trivialities.

After all, promises made by Android brands are usually difficult to keep once the phone leaves the retail shelves and enters a consumer’s hands. To alleviate the gap in expectations, OPPO decided that it could perfect every detail about its devices before it even leaves the factory floor.

To meet the new, self-imposed standard, OPPO called its new approach to hardware testing by the name of Apex Guard.

Summarising the hours of presentations and demonstrations we’ve gone through, Apex Guard is a guiding principle upholding OPPO’s promises of phone durability. It goes beyond industry-standard testing, looks past an expected product’s lifespan, and is above what normal people consider as normal, everyday use.

Some were harder to demonstrate in person and would simply remain as claims OPPO made (for example, OPPO stated that it conducts temperature tests ranging from -40°C to +75°C). Other examples of its Apex Guard approach were more visceral, providing us with numerous opportunities to observe as we navigated its maze-like labs.

In one lab test, the metals used in OPPO’s Find N foldable’s hinges were subjected to two minutes of incrementally growing force, up to 20,000N (~2,000kg-force) by the end of the test. A separate lab checked whether the phone’s 0.3mm casing could withstand a puncture from a focused steel tip (it survived up to 4kg-force).

According to OPPO, the excessiveness of these tests is necessary. It said that its Apex Guard approach helps to prepare its phones for “once-in-a-lifetime moments”, which is a polite way to say it wants the phone to out-survive you.

In total, about 180 of its hardware, materials, and durability tests have already exceeded industry standards, and its approach also led it to discover suitable high-strength materials that cascade into greater user benefits — such as a difference of 10% in material strength can give its foldables 15% better durability.

Using ColorOS 16 to deliver on its smoothness promise

As you would have guessed, software is the other half of a long-lasting Android phone. Gao Yonghao, Director of Product R&D at ColorOS, explained that OPPO’s approach is to consistently address common pain points that hinder user experiences.

The company taps on two unique architectural optimisations afforded by ColorOS that are unlike typical Android devices. OPPO refers to them as the Luminous Rendering Engine and Trinity Engine.

The updated Luminous Rendering Engine treats animation rendering as independent, instead of the conventional per-module rendering framework approach used by default in Android. OPPO stated that this grants them up to a 40% increase in tapping responsiveness in commonly used apps and a 52% improvement in scrolling stability in third-party apps. This isn’t new, because the updated engine was already available as early as ColorOS 15.

The updated Trinity Engine makes the phone faster than its preceding OS. The addition of chip-level Dynamic Frame Sync gives the animations an exclusive pipeline to resolve themselves. On top of a 37% boost in stability, it also keeps the phone cooler than before (at a mere +4.1°C from two app-launching cycles) and 13% better power consumption.

However, all of this is very hard to translate into real-world benefits, since responsiveness is largely about the user experience. Unsurprisingly, OPPO’s Binhai Bay campus also features R&D labs to make this process empirical and scalable.

Part of its intelligent manufacturing process involves smartphone testing, which is similar to what we do for phone reviews, but at far greater volume and granularity. In the terminal testing lab pictured above, this room (which looks like racks of servers) is actually home to 10,000+ units of OPPO phones locked in an eternal benchmarking prison. Instead of simulating real-world use, the phones here are put through real-world use with automation to assist their endeavours. Our visit saw 2,000 phones actively running these tests.

According to OPPO, the core Android user experience is based on four common navigation gestures: app launching, global search (i.e., searching for an app on your phone), the app drawer, and the Home Screen. All these factors also play a part in app compatibility and agility, which is why the testing lab was also measuring whether the OPPO handsets could gain any advantage in responsiveness and speed beyond their own software.

Also shown to us was the power consumption intelligent lab. As the name implies, it’s not enough that app startup is smooth and fast, since the battery usage also affects the phone’s viability as your daily driver.

The power lab was showcasing how OPPO phones could record 4K60FPS video for prolonged times while consistently drawing low amounts (500-1,000mA) of power, with detailed explanations on how they use these measurements to further optimise software for maximum efficiency.

In a way, these software tests don’t actually measure how clean the code is, as quality shows up when these devices are put to real-world use. What’re measured would be the details that lends to the overall user expectations, like app agility, power efficiency, temperature management (which informs user comfort), or even avoiding dropped calls or messages where possible.

Does any of this actually help OPPO or its users?

That’s where we leave you to judge the outcomes. The OPPO Find X9 Pro is one such tested device that came to fruition with the use of its Binhai Bay R&D and labour, which sets a very nice stage for users to see if its inhuman attention to trivialities helped OPPO achieve the greatness it envisioned.

OPPO Find X9 Pro retails at S$1,599 (16GB RAM, 512GB storage) in Silk White, and Titanium Charcoal. Click here to see its full list of official retailers.