The Oppo Find X9 Pro: A Camera That Doesn't Get In The Way
I've written before about getting itchy feet with technology. That pull toward trying something new, usually an Android phone, before inevitably running back to iPhone a week later because of iMessage or iCloud or whatever excuse I tell myself. My flip phone experiment was the culmination of years of talking about it before my wife basically told me to shut up and do it. I learned I can't escape the smartphone. If I'm stuck with one, it might as well be a good one.
The Oppo Find X9 Pro is a good one.
A Camera That Just Takes Photos
I wrote recently about how the iPhone camera has a habit of pulling you away from the moment. You're not taking photos. You're operating a computer that happens to produce images. The iPhone processes everything within an inch of its life until photos look perfect, sterile, entirely digital. When you lift it to shoot, you're thinking about the phone, not what you're shooting.
The Find X9 Pro doesn't do this. Oppo paired a 1-inch main sensor with a 200-megapixel periscope telephoto and tuned it with Hasselblad. The specs don't matter. What matters is the photos don't look like they were born in a processor. They have natural depth and colour that reminds me of shooting with my X100vi. Shadows are allowed to be dark. Highlights roll off like they should. It captures what a scene feels like, not just the data of what it looked like.
There's a Master Mode that gives you proper control over exposure and settings. Using it feels tactile and deliberate in a way phone cameras rarely do. It bridges the gap between a phone and a dedicated camera, and more than anything else, it makes me want to just go shoot. Not fiddle with settings or worry about processing. Just look at the world and take photos.
The 200-megapixel telephoto does something I haven't seen on a phone before. It focuses incredibly close, almost like a macro lens, but at 70mm equivalent. You can shoot portraits or small details from a distance that feels natural. The massive resolution means cropping to 6x or even further doesn't destroy the image. I took photos at full zoom that I'd actually use, which is more than I can say for most phone telephotos that turn to mush past 3x.
Battery Life That Actually Lasts
The Find X9 Pro has a 7,500mAh battery. I'm charging it every two days. Not every night like every other phone I've owned. Every two days. I wake up, track my run, listen to podcasts, check email, doomscroll more than I should, browse the web, and go to sleep with 60% battery left. It fundamentally changes how you use a device when you stop thinking about the battery icon. You just use the phone and forget about it.
When I do charge it, the 80W charging fills it up in about 30 minutes. Plug it in while I make coffee, and it's done before I've finished drinking it. Every flagship phone should have battery life like this. The fact that they don't feels deliberate at this point. The technology exists. Oppo proved it works.
Software That Doesn't Fight You
The biggest friction in moving to Android has always been the software. It usually feels (to me) janky, cluttered, or just off in ways that make you want to go back to iOS. ColorOS 16 is different. It's fast, fluid, and polished in a way that rivals iOS without trying to be a bad copy of it. The animations are thoughtful. The haptics are precise. It doesn't feel like a cheap Android skin anymore.
I will write more about the software side and why Android has won me over at last at a later point. However using Gemini as the default assistant is genuinely better than what Siri has been for the past decade. It actually answers questions. It interacts with apps in useful ways. It does what voice assistants have been promising to do since Siri launched and never delivered. I find myself using it more than I ever used Siri, which is saying something.
There's bloatware. About 59 pre-installed apps, including some third-party ones and redundant apps like an App Market when the Play Store exists. It's annoying but manageable. You can delete most of it. It's not the disaster some Android skins used to be where you couldn't remove anything, and thankfully you don’t get stuck between Samsung, Microsoft and Google services like most of my usual dalliances into Android hardware. Oppo are happy to let you be fully immersed in Google and that’s. Great thing.
The Ecosystem Surprise
The final thing that made me think I might actually stick with this phone is O+ Connect. I expected a buggy, half-working utility that would frustrate me every time I tried to use it. Instead, I found something that actually works. You install the app on your Mac, connect both devices to the same Wi-Fi, and you can drag and drop files between them instantly. Your clipboard syncs. Photos transfer in seconds. It just works.
In some ways, it works better than AirDrop. It doesn't try to be clever about figuring out what you want to do. It just creates a connection and gets out of the way. You can even view and edit files on your phone from your Mac without copying them over first. For someone who's been locked into the Apple ecosystem for years, finding out you don't actually need Apple hardware for a working ecosystem is a bit of a revelation.
What's Not Great
The design is fine but forgettable. It looks like an iPhone crossed with a Samsung. The colour options are boring, I got Titanium Charcoal and theres also a Silk White one. That's it. After years of phones looking identical, I'd take something with more personality.
The price is steep. At the equivalent of about £1,000, it's competing directly with the iPhone Pro and Samsung Ultra. That's a tough sell when most people are locked into their ecosystems. You're not just buying a phone. You're buying into a different way of doing things.
The Verdict
I bought the Find X9 Pro expecting a fun distraction. Something I'd play with for a week before going back to my iPhone like I always do. I was wrong. This isn't just a great Android phone. It's a great phone that happens to run Android. It has battery life that lasts days, not hours. A camera that feels like a camera, not a computer. Software that's polished enough to rival iOS. And an ecosystem solution that works without Apple's logo on it.
For the first time in years, I'm not looking back over the fence. There is no new iPhone anymore. Just incremental updates that feel like Apple going through the motions. The Find X9 Pro feels like what phones should be doing instead. Big battery. Great camera. Software that works. It's not complicated.
I might actually keep this one.