OPPO Find X9 Pro review: True all-day battery with excellent cameras

The Find X9 Pro’s pre-loaded apps are mostly familiar, such as Amazon, Facebook, iQiyi, Shopee, Trip.com, and more. There are also other semi-useful OPPO-made apps, such as Phone Manager and Game Assistant, as well as at least two folders full of app recommendations (not pre-installed).

When it comes to bloatware, we would have preferred having the phone ask if we wanted those apps during setup. It would have saved us time spent on deleting placeholder icons. That said, the current bloatware on the Find X9 Pro feels manageable and easy to remove.

AI Mind Space, Gemini, and trying out its AI stuff

AI Mind Space is a new feature introduced by OPPO, debuting on the OPPO Find X9 series, including the phone we reviewed. A three-finger swipe going from bottom to top, or a click of the Snap Key captures whatever’s on your screen. 

The result is saved in the Mind Space app. This is not the same as a screenshot, where it goes into your Gallery app instead.

Stuff you saved in AI Mind Space comes with descriptive OPPO AI snippets summarising what you’ve gathered. It also relies on OPPO AI to automatically organise information. This is really handy for people who heavily rely on screenshots to remember things, whether at work or for personal use.

OPPO went a step further for AI Mind Space by making it compatible with the phone’s built-in Google Gemini AI. This is on top of Gemini Live’s default screen-sharing assistance you could do on other Gemini-compatible Android phones.

In our trials, we found AI Mind Space helpful given its smart sorting with descriptions, but nothing of value could be gleaned when we started giving OPPO AI harder questions. For example, snapping up all the online shopping deals during official work hours proved really helpful, and it even sets reminders for any promotional periods you see in your snaps. However, you’re better off asking Gemini to suggest ideas, because the OPPO AI replies feel primitive and superficial.

The rest of OPPO Find X9 Pro’s AI features should be familiar to you if you’ve touched a relatively modern AI-powered phone in the last three years. Find X9 Pro still has AI Summary, AI Writer, AI Recorder, and even AI-powered photo editing.

What we liked best, however, is how OPPO presents AI smarts in a non-intrusive manner. The Find X9 Pro doesn’t make AI its entire personality like a certain Galaxy AI does. They only appear when you look for them or use them, so there’s no distraction, nor would you forget or wonder if the phone has “this” or “that” AI feature available. 

OPPO AI’s training and contextual understanding still have a long way to go, as it lacks agentic understanding. It can handle straightforward tasks like summarisation, but it couldn’t help us delete unwanted apps “because it’s an AI” (they ownself say one). The suggestions can be harmful to the less tech-inclined, as it told us to delete essential apps (which showed that it had merely read our screen capture).

Fortunately, Gemini and Gemini Live fill that gap if you need AI that feels more dialled in.

Snap Key and Quick Button

On the left side of the Find X9 Pro is a physical Snap Key, which serves as a customisable shortcut to common utility features. By default, it starts up ColorOS 16’s AI Mind Space. 

Snap Key is functionally identical to the Action Button that debuted on iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max. You can bind it to the phone’s Ring/Vibrate/Silent Mode, Do Not Disturb function, the Camera app, torchlight, audio recording, translation, or screenshotting. 

Like the iPhone, you can only bind one action to Snap Key — so you can’t have a single click be the Find X9 Pro’s phone mute, while separately binding a long press as a screenshot.

On the opposite rim below the power button is the Find X9 Pro’s touch-sensitive Quick Button. This tactile slate is solely for starting up and controlling the Camera app. It also responds to pressure.

By “double-clicking” the Quick Button, you can start your Camera, while sliding the slate adjusts your zoom range. Squeezing down gently snaps a photo. All these functions still work even with winter gloves worn (we’ve tried), and the pressure can be adjusted to your liking via the Settings app.

The functionality is almost identical to the iPhone 16’s Camera Control button. We say ‘almost,’ because holding the Quick Button doesn’t take a screenshot that an AI can analyse, as with iPhones. Instead, the OPPO Find X9 Pro already has a Circle To Search with Google, allowing you to ask Gemini what’s being shown to you (triggered by holding down the Home button).

Imaging Performance

The OPPO Find X9 Pro features a Hasselblad-backed triple rear camera system that works in tandem with an additional True Colour Camera sensor. They are: 

• 50MP main, Sony LYT-828 1/1.28-inch sensor, f/1.5 aperture, OIS, 23mm default
• 50MP ultrawide, Samsung ISOCELL J5 1/.275-inch sensor, f/2.0 aperture, AutoFocus, 15mm default
• 200MP periscope camera, Samsung ISOCELL HP5 1/1.56-inch sensor, f/2.1 aperture, OIS, 70mm default

The True Colour Camera is actually an 8-channel, 2-million-pixels spectral sensor that reads colour temperature variations in your photo to figure out a uniform (and accurate) reproduction for the other cameras.

Additional computational photography is handled by Lumo Imaging Engine, which uses AI to denoise, demosaic, and render fast-moving objects cleanly.

With its AI-powered computation and claims of clarity, the OPPO Find X9 Pro bucks Android phone trends by offering default 50MP via the Hasselblad Hi-Res shooting mode. Instead of pixel-binning their snaps to 12MP in favour of better lighting (like its main shooting mode), you can get 50MP or 200MP that is supposedly even better at catching details, but at the cost of bigger file sizes.

Note: You can disable the 50MP default shooting mode if you prefer to save storage space. Go to the Camera app, find its Settings in the top-right corner, and locate the Format sub-category. Select “Standard” instead of “High Resolution”.

It’s worth noting that the Hasselblad optimisation here refers to the phone’s default colour science, the ultrawide XPAN shooting mode, and the subject separation in Hasselblad Portrait mode. 

However, OPPO has the added advantage of Master Mode, which lets you control the colour tuning of your shots without downloading a third-party camera app (unlike Xiaomi’s compulsory Leica colour profiles).

If it wasn’t already obvious, the OPPO Find X9 Pro excels in colourisation, detailing, and noise control. You could probably nitpick about the contrast handling, given how the overcast sky still blows out the brighter highlights of the image. The outstanding bit is the phone’s excellent telephoto, where it can even make out faraway faces with uncanny detail.

Benchmark Performance

The electronic brain powering OPPO Find X9 Pro is a MediaTek Dimensity 9500. The technical details and comparisons to its predecessor can be found in our coverage here. 

This MediaTek chipset is the successor to the one found in the previous Find X8 Pro, and it’s designed to go up against its perennial rival (Qualcomm)’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 as a fellow premium flagship mobile processing package and platform.

Naturally, we’d pit the Find X9 Pro against others of its price class, or at least against previous year’s flagship phones. The details on how we benchmark phones can be found here.

While OPPO Find X9 Pro isn’t exactly trouncing others at synthetic numbers, the performance is at least on par with leading premium flagship processors made in recent times. In real world use, it’s capable of handling high framerate gaming, smooth video playback, smoother home screen browsing, while keeping to a comfortable temperature in hand.

Battery Life

Our battery benchmark uses PCMark for Android’s Work 3.0 Battery Life, with results shown in minutes. This controlled benchmark simulates real-world usage, such as web and social media browsing, video and photo editing, parsing data with various file formats, writing, and more. The test starts at 100% and ends with 20% left on the device.

The OPPO Find X9 Pro has a massive 7,500mAh battery, despite weighing less than other large-format Android phones. The increased capacity is a whopping 26.9% more than its predecessor, despite both using silicon-carbon batteries.

The battery life was astounding, to say the least. In our experience, early formulations of smartphone silicon-carbon batteries merely looked good on paper, but the higher mAh numbers they boasted didn’t translate into vastly higher uptimes when stacked against older lithium-type batteries with smaller capacities.

For the Find X9 Pro, we had to conduct the battery life test multiple times because we didn’t believe the results at first. On average, it took us 23 hours 59 minutes to complete one (and it ends off with 20% left in tank each time). 

Outside of benchmarks, the phone can go a really long time without needing a charge – our record was using it for two full days (doing content creation, no less) before we even felt it needed a top-off. We can confidently say that the Find X9 Pro is a rare flagship Android with true all-day battery life, and it’s great that the phone comes in a normal size. 

OPPO also stated that the Find X9 Pro battery can retain up to 80% of its original capacity after five years of use, partly addressing concerns about the lifespans of newer silicon-carbon batteries when compared to traditional lithium-based batteries. If what OPPO says is true, then its battery technology could well be the new gold standard for Android smartphones.

Conclusion

The OPPO Find X9 Pro’s improvements to its software and hardware experience have brought it even closer to being an easy pick, especially for users who want to try something different from the usual Android and iOS suspects without compromising on features, speed, and ease of use.

The design, durability, display, and UI all come together nicely, and this is further bolstered by OPPO’s long-standing imaging discipline in its Find X cameras. Together, they complete the flagship phone, leaving only minor complaints in the box.

While OPPO made sure to give the Find X9 Pro new toys like AI Mind Snap, a better telephoto camera, and stronger assurances across multiple IP ratings, we think the device stands out for its true all-day battery life and a design that’s no longer obtuse.

The cherry on top? most of its AI features are actually helpful and not too intrusive, especially as AI fatigue has already begun to set in and users are becoming more conscious about how AI actually helps them use their phones better.

Our minor complaint is the bloatware which we had to remove. It’s a really nitpicky thing, but having these “advertised” apps not in your phone upon boot up would really seal the premium deal.

Against other flagship phones, one would usually pick the OPPO Find X9 Pro for its attention to photography perks. We understand better-looking photos isn’t really for everyone, but OPPO has also covered that by having a massive uptime to satisfy users that simply want a phone that lasts the better part of the day.

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.