Design

• Hasselblad-inspired design
• Relatively thin camera bump
• Durable, but thick and weighty

While 2025’s Oppo Find X8 Ultra looked like a regular phone with a massive camera bump, the X9 Ultra is unapologetically camera-inspired – and it looks all the better for it. 

The overarching design is based on that of the Hasselblad X2D camera, one of the best-looking cameras around in my personal opinion. That means the X9 Ultra features a similar two-tone metal-and-vegan-leather finish on the rear, with a dark brown aluminium frame and black leather cutouts. 

These not only help match the X2D aesthetic, but also improve the grip without any annoying smudges or fingerprints. It’s a very different feel from the glass-backed flagships most of us are used to, but in the best way. It’s reassuringly solid, and as a bonus, you won’t need to worry about it shattering when you drop it – something I’ve already done a couple of times over the past few weeks. 

However, if you can’t bear to be without the traditional glass-and-metal smartphone feel, it’s also available in a Canyon Orange finish. It’s not quite as vibrant as Apple’s iPhone 17 Pro hue, with a slightly more pastel look, with rippled canyon-like effects on the glass rear panel. It looks nice, and it’s notably thinner than the Tundra Umber finish, but the leather-clad finish is still my favourite. 

The camera bump has also been redesigned, sporting a hexagonal shape inside the centrally-placed circular module that Oppo says is inspired by the aperture of professional lenses. 

I’m not sure about the logic, but it certainly looks premium, and the housing is much slimmer than you might expect with the camera tech on offer. It’s a lot slimmer than Vivo’s X300 Ultra’s camera bump, and beats the Xiaomi 17 Ultra too – though not by as much. But more on the fantastic camera tech a little later. 

Alongside the regular power and volume rockers on the right side of the phone, you’ll find Oppo’s camera-focused Quick Button – though the placement has been shifted so it’s actually comfortable to use, unlike options from Apple and Honor. It works in much the same way too, with touch sensitivity that lets you swipe to zoom, as well as a two-stop button to lock AE and AF before taking your snap. 

The left side houses the returning Snap Key, primarily used for Oppo’s Mind Space tech, but it can be reprogrammed with a few taps – something I expect most people will do within the first few weeks. 

As ever with Oppo’s flagships, the X9 Ultra is durable, featuring a combination of IP68 and IP69 dust and water resistance, along with Oppo’s crystal shield screen protection – though with a pre-applied screen protector out of the box, scratches aren’t something you’ll need to worry about for a while. 

If there’s an elephant in the room, it’d be the phone’s overall size and weight. Measuring 9.1mm thick and 236g in its Tundra Umber finish, it’s not exactly the lightest phone on the market – but then again, camera-focused Ultra phones are usually pretty chonky. 

The Xiaomi 17 Ultra is 8.3mm thick and 223g, while the Vivo X300 Ultra is a similar 8.2mm and 232g – but that doesn’t mean it’s not noticeable, even coming from the not-exactly-thin Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra as I have. It’s not egregiously heavy to the point where you feel fatigued – I’ve got used to it over the past few weeks just fine – and the trade-off in areas like camera and battery life makes this a worthy sacrifice in my mind. 

Some of you may disagree, and that’s fine; if weight and thickness are important to you, you’ve got the iPhone Air and Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge to consider. 

Screen

• Top-notch 6.8-inch AMOLED screen
• LTPO-enabled 144Hz refresh rate
• Bright, detailed and highly customisable

The Oppo Find X9 Ultra’s 6.8-inch AMOLED screen is an absolute treat for the eyes – but then again, if you’ve been keeping up with Oppo’s latest releases, that’s no real surprise. 

In many ways it’s similar to the Find X9 Pro’s excellent panel, sporting the same QHD+ resolution and an LTPO-enabled 120Hz refresh rate, with the option to boost to 144Hz for extra frames per second when gaming. 

It is a smidgen bigger than the 6.7-inch Pro model, however, and its corners are slightly more angular too. They’re still rounded, but the reduced width brings them closer to the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra’s screen than to the X9 Pro’s – and as a result, looks and feels that little bit cleaner and more premium. I’ve no idea why, really, but it does.  

As always with Oppo, the bezels are both uniform and vanishingly thin, giving some of the best panels around from Samsung, Honor and co a run for their money, which further adds to that high-end look on offer. 

There’s plenty of screen real estate on offer here as a result, which is great not only when acting as a viewfinder when taking snaps – the main reason you’ll buy this phone – but when scrolling through apps or watching an episode of The Boys on the go, and the vibrant AMOLED tech also lends itself well to colourful games like Archero 2. It’s bright, with a 3600nit peak brightness, vivid, and with that QHD+ resolution, it’s pixel-perfect. 

There are plenty of eye-care features here that are pretty standard in high-end Oppo phones, including PWM dimming, viewing distance and eye comfort reminders, and plenty of screen customisation options if you like your screens more or less punchy. 

All of this makes for a panel that, really, is almost impossible to fault. It’d be nice to see something like Samsung’s anti-reflective screen coating or even a take on the S26 Ultra’s privacy screen tech, but these are more wishes than something I expected. 

Cameras

• Advanced five-camera array on the rear
• Leading performance across the board
• 10x periscope lens is a rare treat

Oppo’s Ultra phones have always been about camera tech, but with the X9 Ultra, it has really kicked things up a notch. While there are plenty of flagships with disappointing secondary cameras, it feels like Oppo has given every lens the TLC it needs, creating a camera system you can actually trust in most scenarios.

That means that, for once, you’re not forced to default to the main camera for the best quality snaps. There are four high-end shooters on the rear, along with a fifth ‘true colour’ camera that keeps the white balance and tones aligned across the lenses. In essence, it means that blue skies and skin tones don’t shift or jump when you zoom in across the various lenses, a level of consistency that’s still pretty rare. 

The main camera remains the star, of course, sporting the Lytia 901 sensor boosted to a whopping 200MP. While the 1/1.12-inch sensor is a hair smaller than the 1-inch giants used by the X8 Ultra and competing Xiaomi 17 Ultra, the massive f/1.5 aperture drinks in an incredible amount of light.

That translates to images that feel, for lack of a better word, expensive. There’s a richness to the contrast and a level of detail that looks more natural than over-sharpened, while avoiding the neon-heavy saturation of Samsung devices. Oppo’s refined colour science produces vibrant yet realistic results that can also be tweaked with a range of Hasselblad-approved filters. 

The 200MP 3x telephoto is the lens that you’ll be using more often than you first expect, mainly because it uses a massive 1/12.8-inch sensor that’s larger than the main camera in many rival flagships. 

Because of that size and the wide f/2.2 aperture, the photo quality is really impressive. There’s a shallow depth of field that makes subjects pop with as creamy, professional bokeh rather than the cut-out look of software portrait modes – though that customisable bokeh is still available if you like. It’s also so pixel-dense that you can crop to 6x and still get a clean 50MP shot that looks optical, and you won’t find much in the way of obvious digital enhancements up until the 10x mark. 

Then there’s the return of the 10x periscope. Many brands abandoned 10x because the quality usually wasn’t the best, but Oppo’s version uses an improved 50MP sensor and an f/3.5 aperture that pulls in 306% more light than the Galaxy S23 Ultra – the last phone with a proper 10x zoom. 

The inclusion of a reliable 10x zoom lens has really changed the way that I shoot; whereas before I’d stick to around 5x magnification at most to keep images sharp, I no longer have that limitation. The images are crisp and tight, rather than the muddy, digital mess we’ve come to expect at high magnifications, holding on to textures like hair and fabric very well for the most part, even when you push it to 20x or 30x. It certainly makes for a very good concert or football camera. 

Even the 50MP ultrawide manages to hold its own against these impressively high-end lenses. With a 1/1.95-inch sensor and an f/2.0 aperture, landscape shots maintain a high level of sharpness right up to the edges without the telltale stretching or distortion you see on many ultrawide lenses. It’s also one of the few ultrawides that doesn’t fall apart the second you step indoors or into a dimly lit restaurant. 

When the light drops, the main sensor is still king, but the gap is smaller than ever. The 3x handles dark street scenes with more poise than most phones’ main cameras, and while the 10x snapper needs a light source to really sing, it’s remarkably capable at night, all things considered. 

Video is equally polished, offering 4K@60fps Dolby Vision across all lenses, with the main and 3x lenses pushing to 4K@120fps. For pros, the O-Log2 support is great, but for everyone else, the real-time LUT previews and burn-in mean you get a cinematic, finished look the second you hit record.

Ultimately, the Oppo Find X9 Ultra offers a complete pro-level toolkit. It’s a phone where you no longer have to think, “which lens is the good one?” – because they all are. It easily challenges Apple and Google for the best camera phone crown, with only the most elite Chinese Ultra flagships offering any real debate. 

Performance

• Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 power
• Great for gamers and power users
• Healthy RAM and storage allocation

Breaking the trend of Oppo’s flagship collection using the (less popular, but just as powerful) MediaTek Dimensity 9500, the X9 Ultra sports the full-fat Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 along with a healthy helping of 12GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. 

Realistically, you’re not going to notice much of a difference processor-wise compared to the MediaTek-powered X9 Pro, but the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 does take a healthy win in specific areas like ray-traced gaming performance – something it does very well, even with the full QHD+ resolution enabled.

I’ve had absolutely no complaints playing even demanding games like Call of Duty Mobile and the newly released The Division Resurgence with the highest textures enabled. The phone manages to keep relatively cool, even after close to an hour of constant gameplay, and though 3DMark’s stress test benchmark of 50.1% stability doesn’t exactly inspire confidence, that is a very demanding test that most phones struggle with. 

Outside of gaming, the phone performs equally well. The Snapdragon’s power, combined with Oppo’s ColorOS and its rapid animations, means things feel buttery smooth, whether scrolling through TikTok or editing photos in Lightroom. 

Everything feels slick and responsive – aside from the camera processing, which, oddly, takes a few seconds to ‘pop’ into its final form after you take a snap, much like you see on cheap phones. Still, that’s a relatively minor complaint, and could well be a bug – I am using pre-release software, after all. 

That everyday experience pretty much aligns with benchmark tests, with the X9 Ultra’s Geekbench 6 multi-core CPU test results of 11.019 putting it above even phones like the Galaxy S26 Ultra and OnePlus 15 with the same chipset. The GPU is equally as strong, hitting 50.6fps in the ray-traced Solar Bay test, and with a Geekbench AI score of 25,132, it handles the variety of baked-in AI tools with ease.

It’s safe to say that the Find X9 Ultra will deliver a top-end experience, regardless of whether you’re editing 4K HDR footage you’ve just shot or simply scrolling through apps, and that excess of power means it’ll stay rapid for some time to come. 

Software

• OxygenOS 16 is a treat to use
• Highly customisable software
• New AI tools to play with

I’ve already waxed lyrical about Oppo’s ColorOS 16 extensively in my Find X9 Pro review – and it’s safe to say that I’m a fan of what Oppo is doing here.

I think Oppo’s implementation of Android surpasses even Google’s in some respects, with a far more customisable interface and a stylish lock screen customisation system that closely resembles the iPhone 17 Pro’s. It just looks more visually appealing as a result, with even minor elements like the ability to expand app icons to include shortcuts to specific features, such as navigating home in Google Maps. 

It’s a polished, well-designed, user-friendly interface with a minimal learning curve, especially compared to other customised Android skins like Honor’s MagicOS and Xiaomi’s HyperOS. 

With that said, Oppo has introduced a few new features as part of its 16.1 update, not yet available on the rest of the X9 range, that further improve the experience. There are plenty of small elements, like being able to swipe down on your lock screen notifications to switch to a less intrusive capsule design, but the Camera app redesign is probably the most noticeable change.

It’s now, nicely put, very ‘inspired’ by Apple’s updated Camera UI in iOS 26, with fewer icons and buttons clogging up the viewfinder for a much cleaner look well-suited to the point-and-shooters out there. The more advanced options are still there, but they require a few more taps to access – in the default Photo mode, anyway. The Master mode still features a range of on-screen controls for pro-level tweaks on the fly. 

And, it wouldn’t be a 2026 software update without new AI features. The AI Mind Space, where you can store screenshots, photos and voice clips for easy retrieval later, now supports automatic bill logging, allowing you to log expenses, and it also works with physical receipts. 

There’s also what Opo is calling the AI Mind Pilot, a new app that uses multiple AI models (Gemini, DeepSeek, and Perplexity for now) to answer your queries simultaneously and can also use context from data stored in the AI Mind Space app. It should allow you to spot any errors between the responses, one of the big problems with AI chatbots right now, though the rollout is limited to the Asian market for now. 

Oppo is also joining Samsung and Google in supporting Quick Share with Apple devices, though it isn’t available just yet – according to my testing at least. 

Battery life

• Massive 7050mAh battery
• Easy all-day battery life, and then some
• Rapid 100W wired and 50W wireless charging

As we’ve already seen from the likes of the regular Find X9 and the Find X9 Pro, Oppo is putting some seriously big batteries in its latest flagship collection – and that of course continues with the X9 Ultra. 

Though it’s not quite as big as that of its cheaper brethren, at 7050mAh, it’s both 1000mAh bigger than the X8 Ultra and still frankly massive compared to much of the Ultra competition. For context, Samsung sticks with a 5000mAh cell in its big-screen Galaxy S26 Ultra, while the Xiaomi 17 Ultra has a 6000mAh cell and the Vivo X300 Ultra uses a 6,600mAh alternative.

That’s a roundabout way of saying that the Find X9 Ultra has pretty phenomenal battery life, regardless of what you’re up to. I really pushed the X9 Ultra to the limits with optional features like the always-on display, full QHD+ resolution, and all the screen-boosting tech active, and it hasn’t wavered once over the past three weeks of daily use.

It’s a phone that’ll easily get me through less demanding days (usually working from home, with a bit of scrolling in the evenings) with 60-70% battery left in the tank. Even on busier days when I’m taking advantage of the top-end camera system, playing demanding games like The Division Resurgence and chatting away on apps like WhatsApp, the phone rarely dipped beneath the 40% mark after around 18 hours off charge.

In essence, it’s a phone that’ll just keep on going, even if the battery isn’t quite as big as others in the X9 collection, and even the most demanding users will find it hard to fault. And, with both 100W wired and 50W wireless charging support, it’s pretty rapid on the refill side of things too.

I saw 36% charge in 15 minutes, 67% in half an hour and a full charge in 58 minutes when plugged in – though with the caveat that you’ll need SuperVOOC-branded wired and wireless chargers to hit those top speeds, and neither comes in the box. It is well worth investing in the wired charger at the very least.  

There’s no MagSafe-esque magnet system here without the use of a magnetic case, but that’s still relatively new on the Android side of things.

Should you buy it?