The Oppo Find X9 isn’t Oppo’s true flagship phone for 2025, but given the huge price difference between it and the Oppo Find X9 Pro, it’s not hard to see it as something of a bargain.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Superb battery life | Plain design and slightly boring colour choices |
| Good performance for a premium phone | Lots of preinstalled apps |
| Good cameras | Not quite Oppo’s best cameras – by design |
Score: 4/5
 |
Buy The Oppo Find X9! | Buy On Amazon |
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In this review
Oppo Find X9 Specifications
Oppo Find X9 Design
Oppo Find X9 Camera
Oppo Find X9 Performance
Oppo Find X9 Battery
Oppo Find X9 Verdict
Ethical disclaimer:
The Oppo Find X9 used in this review was loaned to me for a two week period by Oppo Australia, and it’s going back to them. I mention this upfront in this review, because far, far too many sites and reviewers either bury disclosure or omit it entirely. That doesn’t build trust, and I prefer being transparent and clear with my audience; others rather clearly do not.
For more on ART’s Ethics position, see here.
Design
The Oppo Find X9 is the slightly cheaper sibling to Oppo’s current “true” flagship phone, the Oppo Find X9 Pro. It’s a very common play for premium phone makers to deliver variations on a premium theme at different price points, and it’s one that often leaves the less expensive (but not, to be clear, “cheap”) model looking a little less compelling simply because there is a better option for those who want to spend a little more.
At the time of writing this review, I’ve not had the chance to test out the Oppo Find X9 Pro, just its smaller sibling, which sells at a fairly significant discount to the $2,299 asking price at “just” $1,799. That’s still serious money by any reasonable measure, so what do you get for your cash?
At the front, the Oppo Find X9 is built around a 6.59 inch 120Hz capable AMOLED display with a resolution of 2760×1256. There’s no fancy LTPO action here as you might find on some flagships (though there is on the Pro) with refresh rates at 60Hz, 120Hz or an auto-select mode that switches between the two.
Fully dynamic refresh rates are a nicer way to deal with a phone, but it’s one of those features you really only miss if you’ve become accustomed to it, and I’ve broadly had few issues with the Find X9 in this respect.
One area I do have an issue with the Find X9, though Oppo is hardly the only culprit in this case is in regards to the colour choices. Here in Australia it sells in Space Black or Titanium Grey finishes, both of which do somewhat fit that “Pro” styling that brands seem to love… but honestly, they’re a bit dull to me. The model loaned to me by Oppo was the Titanium Grey, and it’s… fine, I suppose… but while I’ve made this observation before, it bears repeating, I feel.
Dear Phone Brands (all of you, not just Oppo)
If I’m paying premium money for a phone, why not give me a range of fun colours, not just what you think are elegant-looking “professional” ones? Not everyone wants a phone that looks like the lobby of a 4-star hotel.
Regards,
Alex.
A little searching around suggests that in some markets Oppo does sell the Oppo Find X9 in “Velvet Red” or (sigh) “White” finishes. That’s a little more choice, not that we see it, but still, I do feel just a little let down when so many premium phones all ape the same broadly metallic styles. It can’t just be me… can it?
In terms of controls, you get a combination power/assistant button and volume controls on the right hand side of the Oppo Find X9 and on the left hand side, a customisable action button that Oppo calls the “Snap Key”. Configurable action keys are a fine idea, though I was struck by two realisations in regards to the Snap Key.
Firstly, it’s located quite high up the left hand side of the phone body, which for some hand sizes isn’t going to be that easy to press. Maybe the Snap in “Snap Key” relates to what you’d have to do with your fingers to get it to work?
Secondly, I’ve been covering Oppo phones long enough that I can well remember when the brand’s SOP was in providing Android phones with a UI that looked a lot like Apple’s iOS. That was a very common play for a lot of Chinese phone makers for a while now, though Oppo’s own ColorOS has changed a lot over the years into its own distinct style.
I’ve seen this before somewhere… but where?
So I genuinely laughed out loud the first time I pressed the Snap Key, because Oppo’s animation for how you set that up is directly cloned from the way that Apple handles the Action Button in iOS.
Imitation might be the sincerest form of flattery, but it’s also not subtle at all, and it does represent something of a visual step back for Oppo. Does it change how you use the Snap Key? Not at all, but still, it was a surprise to see it presented in such an obvious mimicking way.
The Oppo Find X9 has a very prominent camera bump at the rear, and while many prior Oppo phones used to include a simple protective case that might have mitigated that just a little bit, for the review model (and, as per Oppo’s web site local Australian models) no protective case is included. A pity, especially as the cardboard insert in the packaging does strongly suggest it might be an inclusion in some markets.
I’m a big fan of putting cases on all phones, but especially premium ones, because if you’re going to spend serious money on a phone it makes sense to protect that investment. Without it, you’re just going to have to rely on the Oppo Find X9’s Corning Gorilla Glass 7i and IP69 rated water resistance to get by.
Did the Oppo Find X9 explode into a shower of sparks or pick up numerous scratches and dents when I ran it over my chainsaw during my review period?
*THUMP*
That sound you hear is likely an Oppo Australia product manager having a heart attack at the prospect of what I might have done to the Oppo Find X9 they loaned me, I suspect.
The reality here is that I’m not into destruction porn for its own sake disguised as “phone testing”, so I didn’t in fact bring the Oppo Find X9 near a chainsaw at any time.
It’s been fine during my review period, but I’m careful with review devices, and if it were my daily driver, I’d be investing in an Oppo Find X9 compatible phone case. (disclaimer: affiliate link).
Camera
The big story for the Oppo Find X9 (and even moreso for the Find X9 Pro) is the inclusion of Hassleblad tuned camera lenses. The Find X9 Pro gets the better deal here, including a fancy (and slightly pricey) extension zoom lens if you’re into your really serious photography, but the fact of the Pro’s existence does mean that Oppo’s stuck with offering a slightly lesser experience – at least on paper – for the Oppo Find X9. As a reminder, I’m writing this up prior to testing the Oppo Find X9 Pro.
The Oppo Find X9 is built around a primary 50MP Wide, 50MP Ultra-Wide 120°, 50MP Telephoto 3x and 2MP Monochrome sensors at the rear, plus a front-facing 32MP sensor. Before you start wondering what the 2MP sensor is doing there, Oppo doesn’t expect you to create grainy looking black and whites with it; like so many other monochrome sensors on phones, it’s there for detail capture with the other lenses instead.
Yes, it can take pictures of cats. Of course, I’m obliged to test phones by taking cat photos. Obliged, I tell you.
Also flowers — which the Oppo Find X9 is quite adept at capturing well.
While the pricier Find X9 Pro will no doubt get the camera professionals significantly more excited – and I’m keen to have a crack at it myself – the Find X9 presents itself well enough in most shooting environments.
It is considerably cheaper to take photos of property in Sydney than to buy them, and not by a small margin.
As is typical of a lot of phones there’s a slight tendency towards oversaturating colours in final shots, but it’s nothing that you can’t work around with a little post processing.
Sometimes additional colour can help, as with these bananas
Sometimes, as with these clouds, it can come off as a little over-processed, however.
The telephoto lens on the Find X9 has a native 3x zoom, and Oppo pushes that a lot, up to a maximum of 120x. Oppo does provide a level of AI smoothing, but the reality at 120x is that it mostly delivers results that can’t help but look inauthentic.
Here’s a valley scene shot at 6x telephoto, longer than the native zoom but not by much. It’s fine, as are most distances up to around 20x.
Let’s get in really close to the other side of the valley, though, to see what the Oppo Find X9 can do with its maximum supported 120x zoom.
We seem to have landed on an alien planet, based on the vegetation around us.
Much of the rest of the Oppo Find X9’s camera performance is quite good; it generally shoots well and quite quickly with few issues with focus or exposure in standard circumstances.
The Oppo Find X9 can’t make me pretty, but then, nothing can do that.
I do feel like the camera-centric crowd will gravitate towards the Find X9 Pro’s fancier feature set, but if you had the Find X9 in your pocket, as long as you kept your zoom requirements within sensible levels, it’ll treat you quite well.
Can’t I just eat the Kit Kats instead of having to treat them like LEGO blocks?
Performance
It used to be the story of premium flagship phones that they all tended to gravitate towards that year’s fastest Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, with internal configuration and RAM allotments often being the differentiator in performance between them.
Recent years have seen some brands opt instead for MediaTek solutions, and the Oppo Find X9 is one of those.
Not the MediaTek of old, which infested budget phones with treacle-slow processors, but instead the company’s more impressive Dimensity line. The Oppo Find X9 runs on a Dimensity 9500 with (for the Australian models) 12GB of RAM and 512GB of storage; there’s no capacity for storage expansion via microSD card, with a dual nano SIM card tray that doesn’t incorporate a slot for that size of card. The Oppo Find X9 does also support eSIM, though doing so will disable the secondary SIM card slot.
Can the MediaTek 9500 stand up against the current best of breed Snapdragon 8 processors, not to mention the best of breed premium phones at the time of writing this review?
To put that to the comparative test, I ran Geekbench 6’s CPU benchmark against it. Here’s how it compares:
While it can’t quite best the Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy beneath the hood of the Galaxy S25 Ultra, the gap there isn’t immense, and it does slightly outpace the Apple iPhone 17 too.
It wasn’t that long ago that the Android pack was trailling well behind Apple Silicon; now it’s leading the race. It’s also pleasing to see a nice jump up in performance from last year’s Oppo Find X8 Pro, not that I’d advise updating year-on-year anyway.
It’s a similar story when we look at GPU performance by way of 3DMark Wild Life Extreme:
The practical reality – and this has been true for a long, long time now – is that premium phones truly are the supercars of the smartphone family; more power than most people will feasibly need during the lifespan of their phones, and that’s absolutely true of the Oppo Find X9, whether I was testing it with high-end Android games or apps.
On the software side, the Oppo Find X9 Pro is an Android 16 phone, not that you might know it to look at it, because it’s running Oppo’s very bright ColorOS launcher. ColorOS isn’t my personal favourite style of launcher, but tastes can vary, and it’s certainly a functional enough user interface that has its fans. A lot of this kind of observation truly does veer into the subjective, honestly.
Oppo does go slightly overboard when it comes to the preinstalled apps on the Oppo Find X9, though not in the typical “lots of crap Android adware games” route. Of course Booking.com is preinstalled, as is TikTok, LinkedIn, Temu, AliExpress, Amazon Shopping, Capcut, Instagram and Facebook.
Are there some apps in there that you might likely want? Sure, but did you want all of them? That’s much less likely. As is common for most Chinese OEMs, you do also get a choice of app store, with Google Play sitting alongside Oppo’s App Market.
I cannot claim to have done a comprehensive security audit on every app in App Market, but a lot of what it offers… does not inspire confidence with a lot of dodgy looking apps and adware infested games being promoted prominently.
Do you crave a truly awful, boring, adware-infested GTA knockoff? I know where to find one (sadly)
Is Oppo responsible for every crappy app on its App Market? No, not at all, but it is responsible for making the App Market available in the first place. While some of the same dreadful apps are in Google Play, they’re not as often promoted in the same prominent way as the App Market is, so I’d suggest sticking to Google’s App Store for now.
Premium phones typically also get a better shot at longevity with the promise of longer upgrade cycles. For the Oppo Find X9 that’s five year of OS upgrades and six years of security updates, a little behind the pace compared to the likes of Samsung and Google, both of whom offer seven years of both on their flagship phones.
It is fair to argue that a number of premium phone buyers may be looking to upgrade after five years anyway, but not keeping up with the competition does mean that the Find X9 compares poorly in this respect.
Battery
The Oppo Find X9 does play second fiddle to the Oppo Find X9 Pro in the battery life stakes, but then that’s a phone with a chunky 7,500mAh battery, and having a 7,050mAh power pack, as the X9 does isn’t exactly nothing.
Indeed, that’s a lot, at least numerically when you consider that so very many Android phones make do with 5,000mAh batteries or smaller.
Having a big number in front of your battery capacity is nice, but as always I want to see how well a phone can actually stand up to real world usage.
To test this, I put the Oppo Find X9 through my standard YouTube battery test (you can read all about that test here) to see how well it compares
Is it just me, or does it feel like the Oppo Find X9 is showing off here?
In one sense the Oppo Find X9 isn’t as battery efficient as some of its competitors here, of course.
If you take just that first hour of YouTube playback, the Find X9 dropped to 97%, which means it’s used 3% of its battery, or somewhere in the region of 211mAh. Yes, that’s a rough calculation with some assumptions baked in, but in the same timeframe the Galaxy S25 Ultra’s 5000mAh battery used up 4%, or around 200mAh for the same usage.
I am being slightly pedantic here, of course, because what actually matters at the end of the day is if the Oppo Find X9 has gone flat by the end of the day. The odds are extremely high that it will not unless you utterly hammer it relentlessly, and for more moderate users, battery life into the second day is highly feasible.
In charging terms, the Oppo Find X9 supports Oppo’s own SuperVOOC charging standard at up to 80W, UFCS charging at up to 44W or 11.7W over PD charging, as well as wireless charging at up to 50W via Oppo’s own AIRVOOC charging standard.
One interesting inclusion here, given that so very many premium phones now don’t include them is a charger. The review supplied to me (and as far as I can tell, this should be true for Australian models generally) ships with an 80W SuperVOOC charger that can rip through recharging the Oppo Find X9 in a very satisfying way.
Oppo Find X9: Alex’s Verdict
The Oppo Find X9 isn’t quite the flagship of the line, and there’s little doubt in my head, even before testing it that the camera fanatic smartphone users would likely be better served with the Oppo Find X9 Pro instead.
However, given the $500 saving on the Oppo Find X9 relative to the Pro model, what you’re getting is still quite a compelling package. The battery life and charging speeds are superb, general app performance is good and while I could wish for some more exciting style and colour options, it’s certainly not an ugly phone to look at, even given my own totally subjective criticisms there.
You do have a lot of choice in the premium space, and this is one area where flagship prices can drop quickly, but the Oppo Find X9 is certainly worth your consideration if you’re shopping for a new flagship at slightly-less-than-flagship prices.
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Oppo Find X9: Pricing and availability
The Oppo Find X9 retails in Australia for $1799.
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