Late contender for phone of the year features awesome cameras and biggest battery in a mainstream phone
06:43, 17 Dec 2025Updated 06:45, 17 Dec 2025
The clarity and reach of Oppo Find X9 Pro’s 200MP zoom means it’s a great camera for concerts(Image: Oppo)
The year may be almost over but Oppo has made a late claim to the 2025 best smartphone accolades with its Find X9 Pro handset.
The Chinese firm has raised the bar with high-end hardware in an almost bezel-free design that screams ultra-premium.
It matches and surpasses the most flagship handsets from the likes Apple, Samsung and Google. In fact the only thing it does not do is fold.
READ MORE: Antigravity A1 drone review: unique flying camera is fun to use and packed with clever features
READ MORE: Scapade AirPack review: the clever backpack with rechargeable Apple Find My tracking built-in
Here’s my detailed appraisal of how this powerhouse in photography performs as an everyday smartphone…
Oppo Find X9 Pro in everyday use
The Find X9 Pro is a robustly made 8mm slim waterproof phone that weighs 224g and is protected by Gorilla Glass Victus 2 on the front, meaning it can resist scratches and drops. There is a screen protector pre-installed too. The phone comes in two colour options – silk white and titanium charcoal. I reviewed the former and it looks and feels great in the hand. I’ve been using it without a protective case and there are no micro-scratches or scuffs in evidence after several weeks.
On the rear is a redesigned and unique-looking square camera module, now protruding from the top left corner. The base of the module makes for a natural finger rest and is helpful for gripping the device.
The redesigned camera module on the rear of Find X9 Pro(Image: Oppo)
Along the 8.25mm thick matte aluminium side frame, Find X9 Pro features a customisable snap button that works as a useful shortcut to certain apps and is set by default to save screenshots to the firm’s Mind Space app. There is also a dedicated camera button along with the usual power button and volume rocker. I prefer to use the volume down key as a quick camera key to the actual dedicated camera button. The base frame of the phone houses a USB-C port, speaker and dual-SIM tray.
On the front is a stunning pin sharp 6.78in AMOLED display with peak brightness of 1,800 nits, a superfast 120Hz refresh rate, 450 pixels per inch pixel density, built-in eye protection from flickering and excellent viewing angles even when outdoors. Colours look beautifully natural. Animations are silky smooth. The brightness can also drop all the way down to just 1 nit for those occasions like a movie theatre or late at night in bed. There are symmetrical bezels around the device that are so slim this unit has an outstanding 95.5 percent screen-to-body ratio.
The brains of the device is a tremendous MediaTek 9500 chip that is up there with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 and A19 Pro as the fastest on the block. My review unit also had 16GB of RAM to help it along. It came with 512GB of storage and runs the firm’s slick ColorOS 16 operating system on top of Android 16.
Side views of the Oppo Find X9 Pro smartphone(Image: Oppo)
There are plenty of AI tools built into the software as is the case with all 2025 smartphones. These include AI Writer, AI Recorder, AI Translate and AI Albums – the latter is a useful photo search engine. One of the brand-specific AI features here is Mind Space which captures, analyses and organises your screenshots and voice notes into easily searchable folders. You can quickly capture the screenshots and recordings using the snap button on the device. It is similar to the implementation of the Essential Key and Essential Space on Nothing’s recent smartphones.
The device features the largest capacity silicon-carbon battery (7,500 mAh) in any phone I’ve ever tested, capable of delivering at least a full two days of stamina for most users. Even in the days of heavy testing for this review, I never ran out of battery on day one. It is one of the most significant developments in smartphones in 2025, enabling large capacity batteries in handsets without increasing the bulk. For context, the battery has 50 percent more capacity than iPhone 17 Pro Max or Galaxy S25 Ultra. The phone supports 80W wired and 50W Airvooc wireless charging, which means you can fully recharge in 45 and 75 minutes respectively.
Oppo Find X9 Pro cameras
The Find X9 Pro camera system is another strong point, crafted in partnership with Hasselblad and offering a versatile and consistently pleasing package that delivers crisp and bright still images and smooth video footage from all four lenses (including the 200MP telephoto with 3x optical zoom).
The default focal length for the telephoto camera is the 70mm equivalent of 3x, which is ideal for portraits, food shots and capturing close-up details. In decent lighting, the camera is incredibly sharp at this length, with great dynamic range. Its 200MP resolution allows you to achieve up to an incredible lossless zoom up to 6x zoom which in decent lighting would pass for a dedicated 6x lens. After 13.2x the AI noticeably kicks in to smooth out and sharpen up images, but you can zoom all the way up to 120x. I found images up to 30x were still usable.
The main wide angle camera uses Oppo’s Ultra XDR tech that maximises dynamic range and can shoot at up to 2x lossless(Image: Oppo)
The zoom lens has a large 1/1.56in sensor with an f/2.1 aperture, while the main camera sports an even larger 50MP 1/1.28in sensor with a wider f/1.5 aperture. This makes the main camera even better for zooming in during lowlight conditions as the larger the sensor is, the more light you will capture.
The telephoto lens can also be used for macro photography. It boasts a minimum focus distance of just 9cm, which means you can get in quite close to subjects. The level of detail captured is super impressive.
It’s not just all about the zoom though. The main wide angle camera generally captures 50MP resolution images by default, depending on lighting, and is one of the best point and shoot cameras on a phone. It uses Oppo’s Ultra XDR tech that maximises dynamic range and can shoot at up to 2x lossless. Images are consistently pleasing.
Both the main camera and the zoom have autofocus (AF) and optical image stabilisation (OIS) while the 50MP ultrawide has AF but lacks OIS. It has a smaller 1/2.76in sensor, f/2.0 aperture and a 120-degree field-of-view. Images are not quite as breath-taking as on the other lenses, but sharpness, colour accuracy and dynamic range were on the whole still decent and it’s one of the most impressive ultrawide options on a smartphone.
Find X9 Pro contains a large capacity 7,300 mAh power pack with extraordinary battery life(Image: Oppo)
There is also a 2MP Monochrome lens on the rear that works away in the background by reading your scene and applying optimal colour balance across portions of the frame. Overall, the colour consistency between the rear camera lenses is impressive. Night mode photography and portrait shots are both excellent.
Around the front is a 50MP camera with an f/2.0 aperture, autofocus and a 90-degree field-of-view. It delivers beautifully rich and detailed selfies.
The camera app is an enjoyable user experience and includes options for Hasselblad Master mode with its beautiful colour accuracy and the option to experiment with a full suite of manual controls if you wish. You can also utilise the full 200MP resolution of the zoom lens by using Hasselblad Hi-Res mode but the resulting file sizes are huge so I would use it sparingly. This mode also enables pleasing 4K motion capture.
Video capture includes decent levels of control and support for Pro-level Dolby Vision HDR and LOG recording options, but most of us will just shoot using the automatic settings which will deliver reliably smooth and sharp footage. The highest resolution is 4K which you can capture at up to 120 frames per second if you need top quality slo-mo footage.
Oppo Find X9 Pro other features
Oppo promises five years of Android/Color OS updates and six years of Android security patches.
Find X9 Pro has the latest WiFi 7, Bluetooth 6 and NFC connectivity along with USB-C 3.2 Gen 1 for zippy data transfer speeds. There is support for higher quality audio codecs such as LDAC, aptX HD and LHDC 5.0
The only caveat is that during benchmark testing the phone did throttle performance significantly. However, most people will not experience any impact on performance in everyday use even while gaming.
Oppo Find X9 Pro verdict
I didn’t get to test the optional Hasselblad camera kit accessory that transforms the main camera into a telephoto with 10x optical zoom and costs an extra €549.
Even without it, Find X9 Pro is one of the consistently incredible smartphones you can buy for photography and many other things besides including the best battery stamina of 2025.
Performance is blazing fast and the firm’s software is fast, fluid and well executed. Pardon the pun, but it will be difficult to Find a more capable and well-rounded flagship smartphone.
The main snag for Irish consumers is the handset is not widely available through many of the usual channels. Only Currys currently has the item in stock.
Oppo Find X9 Pro pricing and availability
Oppo Find X9 Pro costs €1,199 (reduced from €1,319) from Currys.
Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest news from the Irish Mirror direct to your inbox: Sign up here.