You wish your phone had the battery life of the Oppo X9 Pro

Whenever I review a phone, one of the first things I do after setting it up is fully charge it and then just… let it run, as long as I use it as my only phone, while I resist every urge to charge it.

The OPPO Find X9 Pro lasted for three days. 74 and a half hours, to be a bit more precise. I couldn’t quite believe it either, so I played it again. This time I turned on the power-hungry Always On Display, and the phone lasted 50-round hours before the battery hit the low single digits.

This is the best battery life of any phone I’ve tested in years, and by far the best performance 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 offering batteries larger than 7000mAh, which could soon change expectations about how long a smartphone lasts.

The impressive longevity is thanks to the Silicon Carbon battery, a more energy-dense type of cell that allowed Oppo to fit a 7,500mah battery into a phone that’s still 8.25mm thick—thinner than the iPhone 17 Pro, with nearly double the battery capacity, and with the same price tag 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 tests that involve spending all day in and out of the camera app, one of the biggest battery drains on a modern phone.

I am waiting for it. The biggest and best Android flagships from China, from the Xiaomi 15 Ultra to the Honor Magic 7 Pro, have been touting the all-day battery line for years, but this is the first time I’ve felt completely comfortable saying that a flagship phone will last two days, and take you from breakfast one day to bedtime the next. This is something that Apple, Samsung, and Google simply do not offer.

When the Find X9 Pro is out, it can charge up to 80W on Oppo’s proprietary Sprock Wired charging standard, or up to 55W on the universal USB-PD standard, so you’ll have to charge pretty quickly with a third-party plug. There’s also wireless charging, though we’re still waiting for the next Android OEM to join Google in offering magnetic Q2 support.

Once you factor in battery life, the cameras are the next good reason to consider the Find X9 Pro. The triple rear camera is really excellent here, with a 50-megapixel main and ultra-wide lens and a 200-megapixel 3x telephoto.

Unlike its subsidiary OnePlus, OPPO has maintained its partnership with Hasselblad, which has helped with color toning and provided branded filters, Pro modes, and the ultra-ultrawide Xpan shooting option. None of this is new on this year’s phones, and from the outside it’s impossible to tell how much of the camera performance is from Hasselblad, and how much is from Oppo – though at least all the Hasselblad orange-tone colors look good in the camera app.

Now that high-end Android manufacturers have mastered the main camera, telephoto has become the do-over of the battlefield, and Oppo’s latest is impressive. The high resolution is headline-grabbing, but it’s the large 1/1.56-inch sensor and fast f/2.1 aperture that really make the difference. The large sensor makes it easy to take shots with beautiful bokeh and depth. They look great at the default 3x zoom, with a slightly perceptible drop-off to 6x, which justifies Oppo’s decision to stick with one telephoto, rather than having them both on the Find X8 Pro.

The main camera still does better than the phone with dimly lit and fast-moving subjects like cats or kids, though the difference is smaller than you might think—especially when shooting under warm or colorful light, the main lens’ advantage comes mostly to color correction. Since I often prefer the framing that telephones provide, I haven’t shot with it very often, and especially miss the more powerful periscopes of phones like the Vivo X200 Ultra.

The X9 Pro’s look for this phone is helped by one thing: an optional add-on telephoto lens that gives you 10x zoom when you attach it to the phone with a dedicated case and mount. Yet it costs a whopping £499 – half the price of the phone again – and when I asked, Oppo wouldn’t confirm in which European markets it would actually go on sale. If you can find something, it’s a great way to zoom out more from a phone) (and it’s not like a toilet paper tube, which doesn’t allow mirrors and sports games to hide because of concerts and sports that won’t allow mirrors to hide and doesn’t allow mirrors to hide or A mirror would not allow a mirror to hide, and a mirror would not allow a mirror to hide, and a mirror would not allow a mirror to hide.

A design tweak moves away from a central, circular camera and to a much more attractive rounded circle in one corner. The second major year-over-year design change is the move to completely flat edges on the 6.78-inch OLED display, in another industry-wide trend. It’s a shame, though I’m glad to be rid of the extreme curves that dominated the flagship for a few years, but the X8 Pro’s subtle micro-curves make this phone more comfortable to hold, and I’ll miss them.

The Find X9 Pro includes a couple of extra buttons that will be familiar if you’ve used the action buttons or camera controls on some recent iPhones. At the top left of the frame is the Snap key, which can be set to a variety of options including toggling ring/vibration settings, recording audio, and saving screenshots or notes to Oppo’s AI-based Brainspace, which can then analyze them to create reminders or calendar events. On the opposite corner of the phone, a touch-sensitive control serves as a shortcut to open the camera, a shutter button, and a zoom dial—though like last year, and like most iPhones, it’s too far away from the phone’s body to be a truly comfortable camera shutter.

A Dimension 9500 runs the show under the hood – essentially the same as MediaTek’s flagship Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 – along with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage on the worldwide launch model. Surprisingly, this results in faster performance, though at this price it should be a given.

The phone launched running the latest version of Android 16-based Chloros, a similar update found in OnePlus’ new OxygenOS. The biggest change from the Gemini integration is Mind Space, which lets you ask Google’s AI questions based on the photos and voice memos you’ve stored there. OPPO also continues to improve its Connect Plus software, which lets you transfer files between the phone and a Mac or PC, or take control of a computer from the phone, with limited support for the Apple Watch. Finally, a more customizable lock screen still falls short of Apple’s iPhone offerings, but now allows you to use short videos or motion photos as wallpaper.

Oppo is one of the first Chinese players to release 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 X9 Pro in international markets before the year is out. I haven’t tried these competitors yet, but on paper I’d be surprised if I preferred one over the other. 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 sure its cameras will outlast the Honor Magic 8 Pro.

The Find X9 Pro is my kind of phone. It’s class-leading in the two areas I care most about—camera and battery life—and doesn’t compromise anywhere else to make it possible. Throw in a Q2, and it’ll be just perfect.

Photography by Dominic Preston/The Verge