Oppo Find X9s Review: A Refined and Compact Smartphone With a Steep Price Tag

A camera focused sub-flagship from Oppo? Say hello to the Oppo Find X9s. Thanks to soaring memory prices, smartphone line-ups have begun to overlap, and not in a good way.

The Find X9s, unlike the Vivo X300 FE, has nothing new in terms of features, doesn’t differentiate on design, and has a price point that we could argue for days about.

Yet, after having used the smartphone for a couple of weeks now, I feel the Find X9s can do a good job of replacing the Find X9, not co-existing with it.

Design and Display: Almost Identical

Yes, it is hard to tell the Find X9s from the Find X9 when looking at them side-by-side. Oppo had a couple of months between the launches and could have refined the design, brought in some new colours, or altered it enough to stand out on its own.

It’s got the same flat edges, with curved corners, and a comfortable in-hand feel. It comes in at just 7.99mm thick, and is quite lightweight. There’s that same square camera model in the top-left corner of the rear panel and a matte finish to do away with the fingerprints. It’s got IP66, IP68 and IP69 ratings for dust and water resistance.

The 6.59-inch LTPS AMOLED display (1.5K resolution, 120Hz refresh rate and 3,6000 nits of peak brightness) is a delight. While I don’t think a 6.59-inch smartphone is good for one-handed usage, it does provide a happy medium and that perfect balance

Thanks to the display being Dolby Vision HDR capable, it’s great to binge-watch content on. From Netflix shows, to booting up JioHotstar for the latest IPL match, the Find X9s can handle all your content needs with a plomb. The content is vivid and the text is sharp. Oppo has added Corning Gorilla Glass 7i for protecting the display. The brightness is good enough for outdoor legibility, though at the harshest of times, you may struggle a little. The only downside is that it is a LTPS panel, and hence has a fixed refresh rate.

Performance: Slight Downgrade

For the Find X9s, Oppo shifted to the MediaTek Dimensity 9500s (versus the Find X9’s Dimensity 9500 chip) chipset. Yes, this chipset isn’t exactly a “pro grade” or “flagship grade” one, but for daily tasks it is quite capable. Consumers won’t notice any lags or slowdowns and the phone flies through all your multitasking needs.

ColorOS 16, while not the best software out there, has improved by leaps and bounds over recent editions. Furthermore, it is well optimised to run on different kinds of chipsets.

Gaming is fine, and I had no problem playing all the casual games I spend quite some time on. The phone doesn’t heat up during prolonged gaming sessions, which is a good thing.

The Find X9s hardly gave me a reason to complain with respect to its performance, except when playing high-end games. Oppo isn’t prioritising gaming, and so it is somewhat understandable that gaming is lagging behind other aspects of the smartphone.

Are the Cameras Worth the Hasselblad Hype?

The short answer is yes. The long answer is slightly complicated. When the Find X9 Pro released, I was super excited to test it out. After a few weeks, I called it the best camera on a smartphone, barring any of the ‘Ultra’ smartphones out there. While the regular Find X9 disappointed me a little, and now even has a Rs 10,000 price hike, I am more enthused after having used the Find X9s for a few weeks.

There’s a triple rear-camera setup - 50MP Sony LYT-700 primary sensor (with OIS), 50MP ultra-wide camera, and a 50MP Sony LYT-600 periscope telephoto lens (3x optical zoom) - and a 32MP camera for all your selfies.

The primary camera is a delight. In daytime conditions, the photos are razor sharp with great amount of details, true-to-life colours, and no over processing/over saturation. Oppo really has improved upon the skin tones.

Portraits, which are my favourite to shoot, also came out quite well. There was good background separation, though in low-light it does suffer a bit.

Speaking of low-light photography, this is where the Find X9s truly surprises. A good amount of detail is retained, noise is reduced, and text is legible.

Last, but not least, the telephoto is good, but only up til the 3x optical zoom. Beyond that, digital zoom is acceptable up to 10x and then beyond that the image quality really suffers.

As I say in most of my reviews, the less said about the ultra-wide camera, the better. The photos from the ultra-wide just about suffice for social media, but that’s about it.

Battery Life

With a huge 7,025mAh battery (with 80W wired charging support), the Find X9s comfortably sails through the day with plenty of charge left in the tank when you hit the sack.

With a light-to-moderate usage pattern, the Find X9s lasts until lunch on day 2, and sometimes even until tea time. I got around seven and a half hours of screen-on-time (SoT), sometimes even eight.

With the bundled charger, the Find X9s takes just under 90 minutes to fully charge.

Verdict: Best Sub-flagship Out There?

I have really come to like the Find X9s and what Oppo has done with it. I’m just truly disappointed that Oppo didn’t even bother to tinker with the design. By now, we are all used to it, but most of us are not happy with it.

The Find X9s, for its credit, gets a lot right. The AMOLED display is sharp and vibrant, the cameras are very reliable (minus the ultra-wide), and the battery life is excellent. For the most part, the smartphone provides a smooth experience, with very few bugs popping up.

The other thing that Oppo needs to be cognizant about, is the fact that the Find X9s is priced a tad bit too high. WIth the standard Find X9, the Find X9s is harder to justify.

The Find X9s is one of the best compact (though not intended for one-hand usage) smartphones on the market. If you aren’t a gamer, you can definitely consider this smartphone as your next daily driver.

The thing is, Oppo needs to decide upon streamlining its portfolio. Either discontinue the standard model, or reduce the price of one of them. The Find X9s starts at ₹79,999, while the Find X9 can be had for as low as ₹74,999 (as per a quick Google search). With hardly anything to differentiate the two smartphones, it’s getting increasingly harder for consumers to choose one over the other.