You wish your phone had the Oppo Find X9 Pro’s battery life

Whenever I review a phone, one of the first things I do after setting it up is charge it to full and then just… let it run, using it as my only phone for as long as I can, resisting every urge to charge it along the way.

The Oppo Find X9 Pro lasted for three full days. 74 and a half hours, to be a little more exact. I couldn’t quite believe it either, so I ran it again. This time I turned on the power-hungry always-on display, and the phone ran for 50-odd hours before the battery hit low single digits.

This is the best battery life of any phone I’ve tested in years, and by far the best of any flagship. The only real problem for Oppo is that I suspect it’s not unique — it’s part of a new wave of Android flagships delivering batteries larger than 7,000mAh, which could soon shift expectations on how long a smartphone should last.

The impressive longevity is thanks to a silicon-carbon battery, a more energy-dense type of cell that’s allowed Oppo to fit a 7,500mAh battery into a phone that’s still only 8.25mm thick — thinner than an iPhone 17 Pro, with almost double the battery capacity, and about the same price at £1,099 / €1,299. It’s not alone in sheer size, though: It matches the 7,500mAh capacity of the recent Xiaomi 17 Pro Max, and beats the 7,300mAh OnePlus 15 and 7,200mAh Honor Magic 8 Pro.

Thanks to that battery, the Find X9 Pro reliably delivers at least two days of power, even through demanding review testing that involves spending all day in and out of the camera app, one of a modern phone’s biggest battery drains.

I’ve been waiting for this. The biggest and best Android flagships out of China, from the Xiaomi 15 Ultra to Honor’s Magic 7 Pro, have been cruising past the all-day battery line for years now, but this is the first time I’ve felt totally comfortable saying a flagship phone will last for two days, taking you from breakfast one day to bedtime the next. That’s something that Apple, Samsung, and Google simply don’t offer.

When the Find X9 Pro does run out, it can charge at up to 80W over Oppo’s proprietary SuperVooc wired charging standard, or 55W on the universal USB-PD standard, so you’ll still get fairly fast charging with a third-party plug. There’s wireless charging too, though we’re still waiting for the next Android OEM to join Google in offering magnetic Qi2 support.

Once you get over the battery life, the cameras are the next good reason to consider the Find X9 Pro. The triple rear camera here is truly excellent, with 50-megapixel main and ultrawide lenses and a 200-megapixel 3x telephoto.

Unlike its subsidiary OnePlus, Oppo has maintained its partnership with Hasselblad, which has helped with the color-tuning and provided branded filters, pro modes, and an ultra-ultrawide XPan shooting option. None of that is new to this year’s phone, though, and from the outside it remains just about impossible to tell how much of the camera performance is down to Hasselblad, and how much to Oppo — though at least all the Hasselblad orange accent colors in the camera app look nice.

Now that high-end Android manufacturers have mastered the main camera, telephotos have become the battleground du jour, and Oppo’s latest is impressive. The high resolution is the headline grabber, but it’s the large 1/1.56-inch sensor and fast f/2.1 aperture that really make the difference. The big sensor makes it easy to take shots with beautiful bokeh and depth. They look great at the default 3x zoom, with little perceptible drop-off up to 6x, which justifies Oppo’s decision to stick to one telephoto, rather than the two found on the Find X8 Pro.

The main camera still does better than the telephoto with dim light and fast-moving subjects like cats or kids, though the difference is smaller than you might think — the main lens’s advantage mostly comes down to better color correction when shooting under especially warm or colorful light. Since I often prefer the framing the telephoto provides, I’ve taken to shooting with it more often than not, and haven’t particularly missed the more powerful periscopes of phones like the Vivo X200 Ultra.

That’s helped by one thing the Find X9 Pro has in common with that phone: an optional add-on telephoto lens that gives you 10x zoom once you attach it onto the phone with the dedicated case and mount. It costs a massive €499 though — almost half the phone’s price again — and when I asked, Oppo wouldn’t confirm which European markets it’ll actually go on sale in. If you can find one, it’s a great way to get even further zoom out of a phone (and at about the same size as a toilet paper tube, it’s compact enough to sneak into concerts and sports games that wouldn’t allow a mirrorless or DSLR), though once the novelty subsides it’s not something I find myself reaching for all too often. What a novelty, though!

A design revamp moves away from a central, circular camera and toward a substantially more attractive rounded circle in one corner. The other big design change year-on-year is the move to entirely flat edges on the 6.78-inch OLED display, in another industry-wide trend. This one’s a shame, though — while I’m happy to be rid of the extreme curves that dominated flagships for a few years, the subtle micro-curves of the Find X8 Pro made that phone more comfortable to hold, and I’ll miss them.

The Find X9 Pro features a couple of extra buttons that will sound familiar if you’ve used the Action button or Camera Control on some recent iPhones. The top left of the frame holds the Snap Key, which can be set to a range of options including toggling ring / vibrate settings, recording audio, and saving screenshots or notes to Oppo’s AI-based Mind Space, which can then analyze them to create reminders or calendar events. On the phone’s opposite corner, a touch-sensitive control serves as a shortcut to open the camera, a shutter button, and a zoom dial — though just like last year, and as on most iPhones, it’s positioned too far up the phone’s body to be a truly comfortable camera shutter.

A Dimensity 9500 runs the show under the hood — essentially MediaTek’s flagship equivalent to the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 — together with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage on the model launching worldwide. Unsurprisingly that results in snappy performance throughout, though that should be a given at this price.

The phone launches running the latest version of ColorOS based on Android 16, with the same updates found in OnePlus’ new OxygenOS. Gemini integration to Mind Space is the biggest change, allowing you to ask Google’s AI questions based on images and voice memos you’ve saved there. Oppo has also continued to improve its Connect Plus software, which allows you to transfer files between the phone and a Mac or PC, or even take control of the computer from the phone, along with limited support for the Apple Watch. Finally, a more customizable lockscreen still falls short of Apple’s iPhone offering, but does now allow you to use short videos or motion photos as wallpapers.

Oppo is the first of the major Chinese players to get this generation of flagship phones out in Europe, but it won’t be alone for long — recent Chinese releases from Xiaomi, Vivo, and Honor could follow the Find X9 Pro into international markets before the year is out. I haven’t tried those rivals yet, but on paper I’d be surprised if I prefer any to this. It doesn’t have the distraction of a second screen like the Xiaomi 17 Pro, its battery is bigger than Vivo’s X300 Pro, and I’m confident its cameras will outclass the Honor Magic 8 Pro’s.

The Find X9 Pro is my kind of phone. It’s class-leading in the two areas I care about the most — camera and battery life — and doesn’t compromise much anywhere else to make that possible. Throw in Qi2, and it’d be just about perfect.

Photography by Dominic Preston / noti.group