Disclaimer: No AI was used in the making of this post, plus English is my 3rd language, so kindly ignore any formatting or grammatical issues.
Coming from a Samsung S23 Ultra, the Oppo Find X9s seemed to be a suitable choice, as I had a lovely exchange offer (offline stores in India FTW) and the Find X9 was unavailable, and the other variants were too big/expensive.
So now let's get into the nitty-gritty of things:
The Display:
The display is a silky smooth, 120 hz, 2760x1256 resolution, 6.59 inch AMOLED. It has good viewing angles, good color profiles and feels silky smooth and responsive to the touch. The bezels are microscopic as well. There are legitimately no issues here.
The Build:
Build quality is also relatively solid. I despise flat edged phones, and this phone is one, but despite that, the in hand feel and the thickness of the phone (8mm) is plenty good. It feels hefty in the hand, and the orange color legitimately is wonderful looking. YMMV tho.
The Speakers:
Speakers are unfortunately a slight miss on this phone. Partly due to the size of the phone, and partly due to the software tuning. It sounds slightly muffled on the lower end, so I do recommend using the system equalizer to fix that. But in any case, these are issues that might only affect audiophiles, so for the average person this is quite good.
The Cameras:
The cameras are legitimately wonderful. The ultrawide, telephoto and main cameras are solid, with good color accuracy, especially for Indian skin tones. Low light performance is also lovely, thought higher end flagships, and even the Oppo Find X9 would fare better in this regard. Selfies are also amazing. Videos are solid as well. I'm not much of a camera guy, but shots from this phone sometimes baffle iPhone Pro Max users, so take it as you will.
The Cellular Stuff:
Data reception on both sims is wonderful. Compared to my S23 ultra, the signal ranges are better and they're more battery efficient. Same goes for the WiFi as well. Microphone quality is similar to any other flagship, i.e quite solid but not iPhone level, so calling features work fine.
Performance:
Performance was genuinely a surprise on this one. I didn't expect a Dimensity 9500s to pull of the feats it did, especially with a low battery usage, but it did pull off. Wuthering Waves at Ultra graphics settings (with ini tweaks to make it look as good as possible on a smartphone) ran at a solid 30 FPS, with mild heating issues and no throttling. Same goes for games like NTE and COD Mobile. Apps that rely on emulation (Eg GameHub) might suffer slightly, as due to Mediatek policies, these PC emulation apps cant utilize the full power of the processor due to them not open-sourcing the drivers, but they're good enough. Other emulation apps (For Gamecube, Wii, PSP, DS, 3DS and even the Switch) work amazingly well though. In everyday life, especially in the sweltering Indian heat, the phone is warm to the touch though, but to no issues.
Battery:
This phone packs in a 7025 mAH battery, and trust me when I say this, this is easily a full-day phone at high usage. I constantly use mobile hotspot, game, scroll on social media, YouTube and have put the phone through the wringer; but 100% to 25% takes almost an entire 12 hours of continuous usage. For medium and light users I feel this could easily be a 2day or even 3day phone.
Software:
ColorOS is genuinely one of the best Android UI's out there. It is smooth, feature packed and reliable. My only main issue is the blatant fruit-based OS copying. It's everywhere, from the Quick Settings to the default apps. But ehh, over a period of time you do get used to it. This is also one of the rare phones where AI actually seems to have a good purpose, in Mind Space. Mind Space has basically become my hub for Voice Memos (for calendar reminders), Expense tracking (through SMS or through the mind key) as well as in general keeping bookmarks of stuff. Other AI features, such as the photo editing suite are something that have been vastly improved with ColorOS 17. They also have offline AI models that you can download for certain purposes, and a privacy report thingy for it, so its a good step in the right direction in terms of data privacy.
ColorOS is also feature packed, in terms of lockscreen customization (Flux Themes FTW) and homescreen customization. You can even have custom app icons, and modify app icons and names on a per-app basis (though for icons you dont get a searchbar, so you do have to scroll through the entire list, which for 9000+ icons is tedious). Features such as App Hiding, App Lock, App Cloning, Work Profile, Second Space etc are also present. I do wish app-hiding could have an option of merely hiding the icon of the app, as the way it currently works is almost completely isolating it, making widgets from that app not work anymore. Custom launchers also have an issue, where swiping back to homescreen creates a delay before icons appear (even moreso than default Android) so I wish that could also be fixed.
I do prefer open source apps though, so ColorOS is also great at being debloated (through Shizuku) though certain apps are locked and cannot be uninstalled entirely, they can only be disabled. Its also easy to disable the telemetry gathering, and its easy to uninstall the AI suite if you do wish to. Right now, as it stands, its also impossible to unlock the bootloader of this phone, due to Mediatek and Oppo policies, so if you're someone looking for that, look elsewhere,
So, to conclude; if you have the budget for it, are looking for a relatively compact flagship (and you cannot find the Find X9); go for this phone. I hope you liked the review, its my 2nd time doing a phone review so please leave your feedbacks, suggestions and criticisms below. Have a great day!
