You wish your phone had the battery life of the oppo Find X9 Pro

When I’m reviewing a phone, the first thing I do after setting it up is charge it fully and then… leave it on, use 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 three full days. 74 and a half hours, to be precise. I couldn’t believe it either, so I turned it on again. This time I turned on the power-hungry always-on display, and the phone ran for 50 hours before the battery reached low single digits.

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

Credit for his impressive longevity goes to A Silicon-carbon batterya more power-dense type of cell that allowed Oppo to fit a 7,500 mAh battery into a phone that is still only 8.25 mm thick – thinner than any other phone. iPhone 17 Prowith almost twice the battery capacity, and roughly the same price at £1,099/€1,299. It’s not alone in its large size, as it recently matched the 7,500mAh capacity Xiaomi 17 Pro Maxand exceeds 7300 mAh OnePlus 15 And 7200 mAh Honor Magic 8 Pro.

Thanks to this battery, the Find

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

When the Find There’s also wireless charging, though we’re still waiting for the next Android OEM to join Google in offering Qi2 magnetic support.

Once the battery life runs out, the cameras are the next good reason to consider the Find X9 Pro. The triple rear camera here is truly excellent, with 50MP main and ultra-wide lenses and a 200MP 3x telephoto lens.

Unlike its OnePlus subsidiary, Oppo maintained its partnership with Hasselblad, which helped with color tuning and provided branded filters, pro modes, and an ultra-wide XPan photography option. However, none of this is new for this year’s phone, and from the outside it remains almost impossible to tell how much of the camera performance is down to Hasselblad, and how much is down to Oppo – although all the orange Hasselblad colors in the camera app at least look nice.

Now that high-end Android manufacturers have perfected the main camera, close-ups are the battleground of the day, and Oppo’s latest is impressive. The high resolution is what grabs the headlines, but it’s the large 1/1.56-inch sensor and fast f/2.1 aperture that really makes the difference. The large sensor makes it easy to capture images with beautiful bokeh and depth. It looks great at the default 3x zoom, with a noticeable drop down to 6x, which justifies Oppo’s decision to stick with one zoom, rather than the two in the camera. Look for X8 Pro.

The main camera still performs better than the telephoto lens with low light and fast-moving subjects like cats or children, although the difference is smaller than you might think – the main lens advantage is mostly down to better color correction when shooting under particularly warm or colored light. Since I often prefer the framing provided by a telephoto camera, I started shooting with it more often, and didn’t particularly miss the more powerful perspectives of phones like Vivo X200 Ultra.

This is helped by one thing the Find However, it costs €499 – almost half the price of the phone again – and when I asked, Oppo had not confirmed which European markets it would actually go on sale in. If you can find one, it’s a great way to get a little more 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 that won’t allow mirrorless or DSLR cameras), although once the novelty wears off, it’s not something I’d find myself finding. Reach everyone often. What a novelty, though!

The design revamp moves away from the central circular camera and toward a more attractive rounded circle in one of the corners. The other big year-over-year design change is the move to completely flat bezels on the 6.78-inch OLED display, in another industry-wide trend. That’s a shame, as while I’m happy to get rid of the extreme curves that have dominated flagship phones for a few years, the Find

The Find X9 Pro features a couple of additional buttons that will look familiar if you’ve used the action button or camera control on some recent iPhones. The top left of the bezel houses the Snap Key, which can be set to a range of options including toggling ring/vibration 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. In the corner opposite the phone, a touch-sensitive control acts as a shortcut to the camera opener, shutter button, and zoom dial – although as with last year, and as with most iPhones, it’s positioned too far away from the phone’s body for a truly convenient camera shutter.

The Dimensity 9500 runs the show under the hood – essentially the equivalent of MediaTek’s flagship Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite 5th generation – In addition to 16 GB of RAM and 512 GB of storage space in the model that will be launched worldwide. Unsurprisingly, this results in fast performance all the time, although that should be taken for granted at this price.

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

Oppo is the first of the major Chinese companies to launch this generation of flagship phones 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 these competitors yet, but on paper I’d be surprised if I preferred any of them over this one. It doesn’t have anything as distracting as a second screen like the Xiaomi 17 Pro, and its battery is larger Vivo X300 ProI am confident that its cameras will outperform those of the Honor Magic 8 Pro.

Find X9 Pro is my type of phone. It’s a leader in the two areas I care about most — camera and battery life — and doesn’t compromise much elsewhere to make that possible. Throw in Qi2 and it would be damn near perfect.

Photography by Dominic Preston/The Verge