Oppo Find X9 Review: Who needs the Pro anyway?

Introduction

I’ve been using the regular Oppo Find X9 for the past couple of weeks, and it’s left me with a certain feeling. Why would I buy the Pro instead of this?

It’s got the same processor, a massive battery, a brilliant display and great cameras – so why spend £200 more? 

Design 

• Premium design
• Action Button-like Snap Key
• IP68, 69 and 69K protection

There was once a time when the Find X series stood for something. And that something was doing things differently from the norm and thinking outside the box.

Whether it was using a pop-up mechanism to hide all the cameras in the earliest generation, or featuring a gorgeously designed camera hump that curved out of a single piece of glass on the back, it was special. 

Those days, sadly, are long gone. But in the Find X9, there’s still very clearly an emphasis on good design. It may have the same flat edges and overall shape as most other phones, but there’s still a precision and attention to detail that’s hard not to admire. 

The cameras and LED flash are positioned and shaped for aesthetic appeal, and even the raised square island they sit in has its own purposefully shaped metal edge around it to match the edge of the phone. It’s elegant, clean and precise. 

In fact, I think it looks better than the bigger Oppo Find X9 Pro because its LED flash has been arranged in a small ring within the same island as the cameras, rather than pushed out into the body of the phone. It looks really good in the soft, matte sand-coloured unit I’ve been testing too. It’s also a little smaller and lighter than the Pro model, which helps.

Otherwise, there’s not much to say about its looks and shaping. It’s got the flat aluminium edges and rounded corners you’d expect from a phone in 2025.

It also has some impossibly slim bezels around the display. In fact, they’re among the thinnest you’ll find on the market, ensuring that the front of the phone is almost entirely taken up by screen, making as much use of that space as is technically possible. 

There’s a dedicated button on the left side called the Snap Key, which bears a striking resemblance to Apple’s Action Button, and can be reprogrammed to launch a number of different shortcuts. By default, it snaps a screenshot and analyses the information – then saves it to Mind Space. This is Oppo’s AI-powered pinboard of sorts for storing things you want to remember and come back to later. 

You can change what it does – thankfully – but there aren’t enough options here. You can have it do simple system functions like enabling Do Not Disturb mode, enabling the torch, launching the translation feature or cycling through ring modes. But, there’s no option to pick a specific app, or do something like tag music with Shazam – which is what I use my iPhone’s Action Button for. It seems a bit of a missed opportunity from Oppo. 

Still, the phone has some serious water and dust resistant credentials, offering IP66, IP68 and IP69 ratings, protecting it against submersion and being sprayed by jets of water. It won’t be troubled by the odd time you’re caught in a rainstorm or drop it in a sink full of water.

Still, it does seem a little overkill getting it triple certified when the two highest ratings in the trilogy also imply it’s more than covered for the worst scenarios. 

Screen

• Gorgeous 6.59-inch AMOLED screen
• 120Hz non-LTPO refresh rate
• Super-thin bezels

As displays go, the AMOLED 6.59-inch panel on the Find X9 is one of the most accomplished on the market, which is typical of Oppo’s flagship smartphone offerings. It’s not quite Quad HD resolution, but somewhere in between 1080p and 1440p, with the lower FHD+ resolution enabled by default. 

The interesting thing about that resolution is that while you can enable the highest available resolution manually – if you do – it’s hard to see much of a difference, and so you might just decide to keep it in FHD+ mode and save battery in the process. 

It’s a pretty flawless display too. It’s bright, with deep contrast and vibrant colours.

Thankfully, we’ve reached a point now with displays where it doesn’t seem like the aim is to boast the highest possible peak brightness for small, bright spots in HDR video. But rather, having a display that can reach high brightness levels across the whole panel, and can also drop to very low levels for the times when it needs to conserve battery, or in low light environments. 

We’ve also seen companies work on adjusting the dimming and flickering of displays when auto brightness is adjusting, and making them more reliable in conditions where they usually aren’t – like when they’re wet. And in those ways, Oppo’s display excels. 

It can drop as low as 1nit brightness when needed, and it has a new ultrasonic fingerprint scanner underneath that works even when the display or your finger is wet. Plus, the registration of a new fingerprint only requires you to hold your finger down and roll or swipe it around in one single motion, rather than repeatedly lifting and placing it down again. It’s super convenient. 

The only weakness of this over the Pro model is that it isn’t an LTPO panel, and so it can’t drop and adjust its frame rates at small increments, or drop down to 1Hz for extreme battery conservation when you’re reading a static page.

But that’s not something I could tell with my naked eye. Swiping through menus, watching videos, playing games – it all felt smooth and sharp pretty much all the time. 

I only ever saw a very slight stutter when going from a static screen to a moving one quickly, and it was so brief, I’m not sure it matters at all. 

Cameras

• Triple 50MP rear camera system
• Fantastic camera tuning yields great results
• Zoom lens can sometimes struggle to focus

In previous years, I don’t think Oppo has quite nailed the camera experience. But this year, I think it might actually be my favourite for how it captures detail, colour and light, and then processes the image. There’s just something about it that hits that sweet spot that many miss. 

What I mean by that is the colours are vibrant and rich, but without over-exposing the scene, overblowing the highlights or smoothing out the detail. There’s a touch of sharpening going on, but it doesn’t push overly far, and so pictures keep a sense of natural texture and fine details that a lot of other phones seem to smooth over, or over-sharpen. 

I didn’t see any aggressive overblowing of highlights either – even when using the zoom lens, they were well-contained. Bright, but not blown out to the point of losing detail or haloing. It’s just a very capable all-rounder. And perhaps what impressed most is that colours and overall picture texture and feel were balanced across all three lenses. 

There was never a sense that photos from the three lenses were taken from different cameras, and no wildly different white balancing or temperature difference like you get on a few phones. It’s consistently reliable, and consistently strong.

And even though the ultrawide is the weakest of the three, it’s not so weak that it’s unusable, at least, in the daytime. I didn’t see any aggressive distortion or too much of that darkened, crushed look that some ultrawide cameras give you. 

As for zoom, you have to zoom in quite far before the detail starts to fall away and look like an oil painting. Between 6x and 10x zoom, the pictures become a bit grainy and exhibit a slightly over-sharpened look, but they’re still very passable shots.

Over 10x zoom, it gets more of that painting-like smoothing from the processing. But – again – I’ve seen much worse, from phone cameras that cost more. 

I did have an issue with focusing at certain zoom lengths though – at times – where it took me three or four attempts to get the zoom to focus on something in the distance, leaving me with a blurry, out-of-focus shot. 

It was at night that the primary camera showed its strengths compared to the other two, and that’s pretty typical of any phone. It’s almost always the larger sensor that’s more capable of drawing in light, and so it finds those lower light scenes a lot easier than either the ultrawide or the zoom lens. 

It was always generally the cleanest, sharpest of the three using the night mode in the camera. The ultrawide struggled to draw in as much light, and the detail is a little rough-looking compared to the main camera, as was the detail from the zoom, which has a lot of over-smoothing and aggressive contrast in an effort to make the picture look clean. But in fact, just gives it that painting look instead. 

I also found that at nighttime, particularly with streetlights or bright lights above the camera lenses, it would struggle quite a bit with lens flare. And that was on the primary lens, so even the main camera isn’t completely perfect at night. 

Video-wise, I’ve been really happy with the output from the Oppo. Like its daytime photos, it gets the balance of colour and texture right, so that it looks natural and authentic. It doesn’t aggressively boost the colours or contrast to make it ‘pop’. 

The stabilisation could be a little better when filming on the move, and the zoom camera – again – wasn’t the best at quickly focusing on objects in the distance.                                     

Performance

• MediaTek Dimensity 9500
• Not a Snapdragon, but you couldn’t tell
• 512GB of storage

What’s very interesting about the Oppo Find X9 series is that instead of going with Qualcomm’s top-tier Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 processor, it’s gone with MediaTek’s Dimensity 9500. From my experience, that’s no compromise in the slightest. 

For daily use, it’s got more than enough power to cope with any task, regardless of how power-intensive. Running through some of the stress-testing benchmarks we perform on all phones, it scored about as high as we’ve seen in a few of the benchmarks, particularly those where rendering smooth, complex graphics was required. 

Take that into the real world, and it means that even if you want to put time into demanding titles like Call of Duty or Genshin Impact – it can cope well with those – it doesn’t throttle performance early.

It’s an efficient, powerful smartphone. In real everyday use, I never once felt it overheat or get warm. In fact, the only time it did was when subjected to an extreme stress test in a graphics benchmarking app, which is precisely the point of those tests. 

Software

• ColorOS 16 based on Android 16
• AI-powered Mind Space can be handy
• Lots to love about ColorOS

Like virtually every other Android phone maker in 2025, there’s AI infused into the software in a few different ways.

One of those is Mind Space, which is similar to the Essential Space on Nothing phones. It’s essentially a place to store and analyse screenshots and voice notes, and things you want to remember. I didn’t use it a huge amount, but it can be handy in those moments where you want to quickly make a note of something to remember later. 

There are, of course, the usual AI suite of abilities like translation, automatically transcribing voice recordings and Circle to Search, among others. 

Otherwise, there’s a lot to love about Oppo’s ColorOS system. The settings menu is easy and intuitive without lots of clutter, so it’s easy to find what you want, and the customisation choices are pretty endless. And – as with so many modern Android phones – you can create enlarged folders for easy app launching and better Home Screen customisation. 

Flux Themes let you tie your Home Screen, Lock Screen and always-on display together in a cohesive look, and you can customise and change your app icons without having to download a third-party launcher.

And, there’s no unnecessary bloat here. At least, not to the extremes you get from a lot of other manufacturers. That’s not to say there are no duplicates, but they’re not excessive. 

Battery life

• Massive 7025mAh battery
• Multi-day battery life
• Fast 80W charging

In the context of 2025’s trends, Oppo has gone against the grain somewhat. Where Apple and Samsung have released super-thin phones with compromised battery life, Oppo went the opposite direction. Its phone isn’t particularly thin or light, but it does have a really big battery. 

Using the denser Silicon Carbon technology, Oppo managed to fit just over 7,000mAh in a phone that’s about the same thickness as any other phone. That’s about 1800mAh more than Google’s beefiest Pixel 10 Pro XL, or Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Plus. 

You’d think, then, that the battery life is mind-blowingly good. And – compared to pretty much every other phone on the market – it is.

Even with the full resolution enabled, combined with my own relatively light usage, I could easily get to the end of a second day. In fact, three days isn’t completely out of the question. On those lighter days when I don’t use more than 2-3 hours of screen time in a day, I could comfortably make it past two days away from a charger. 

Even heavier users who demand more from their phones, are constantly on the go, and use 4-5 hours of screen time in a day – I suspect two days is possible, especially if you leave the display in its default FHD+ setting. 

And when you want to refill it again, a compatible 80W fast-charger can refill it to 100% in around 70-80 minutes based on our testing. And it can do half a battery in about half an hour, which isn’t bad at all for a battery this size. 

Should you buy it?

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