As OPPO unveiled their brand spanking new OPPO Find X9 Ultra, they also released the X9s. And we have it here today. The OPPO Find X9s is a tiny flagship that is aimed towards a more affordable price point, but does it succeed in that? Well, let’s find out in today’s review.
Performance
I think we should begin with the specs and performance first to know where the X9s is positioned. It’s powered by the MediaTek Dimensity 9500s chipset, which is essentially a rebadget Dimensity 9400+. Going with this train of thought, it implies that the X9s is going to be slightly above where the Find X8 is at.
So, when we did our gaming test, we already kinda know what kind of performance we’re going to get since we tested the Dimensity 9400+ and the Dimensity 9500s as well. We tested all the games at the highest graphical settings.
Starting with Genshin Impact, yeah it can run at near 60fps throughout the entire gameplay – and that is actually really good.
Moving to Zenless Zone Zero without letting the phone cool down, we immediately hit a brick wall called the thermal limit. Yeah, it immediately thermal throttled at 41.5°C. Still, it got above 30fps during the entire flower boss fight while thermal throttling – and that’s weirdly impressive still.
Wuthering Waves… yeah this is a problem. You see, we let the device cool down first, then walked around the new area, which is very graphically demanding. It immediately heated up the device since it constantly takes in more than 10W. Then, we moved to the nest fight… and it still works okay at around 30fps. But then… even the screen dims to control the thermals as well. That’s rarely seen on phones these days but it happened on the X9s.
I’d say that the Find X9s is actually okay for gaming, if there’s some way to unlock a higher thermal limit or make it not thermal throttle so quickly. As it stands now, I just can’t recommend this phone if you want to use it for anything intensive, even though it has a very strong chipset.
You can watch the entire gaming test at the top right corner there where we test a few more games, show you the entire frame rate data, the temperature, wattage, render resolution, all of those stuff. Check out that video above.
Battery life
But using a flagship-level chipset does have its advantages in terms of efficiency. The Dimensity 9500s, combined with the 7,025mAh or 26.35Wh battery in the Find X9s, we can get around 25 hours. That’s an amazing battery life, and OPPO is properly utilizing the Dimensity 9500s.
Charging speed
In terms of charging speed, the Find X9s does come with OPPO’s proprietary 80W charger in the box, and it can charge from 15% to completion in about 75 minutes with its default settings. Quite typical.
Then when we selected the fastest charging speed possible in the settings menu, the X9s can charge in just around 55 minutes. That’s 20 minutes faster compared to the default settings and it’s quite significant.
Using our USB-PD PPS charger, the Find X9s can charge in just around 63 minutes and takes in 41W at most, but the temperature is the highest among all the charging tests we did. I mean, it’s not really “high” per se, but it seems to be thermal throttling in this case too. Either way, 41°C on the battery is still very safe but OPPO is really playing it safe.
Screen
Then comes the screen. I really love the size of the Find X9s. It has a 6.59-inch AMOLED display with a resolution of 2760×1256 pixels and goes up to 120Hz refresh rate. Kinda impressive since it has a PPI of around 460.
When we did our test, this display can go up to around 1370 nits at maximum and 1.97 nits minimum. Quite a good range, I’d say.
As for the color profiles, we have a total of 3 of them here. The default color profile will give us pretty okay color gamut coverage. I’d say that at 70% DCI-P3, it’ll look quite desaturated, and the colors don’t pop out as much.
The Natural color profile is about the same as the default color profile, but slightly more desaturated since it only covers 68% of DCI-P3. Not too far off, and I think most people won’t be able to tell the difference between the default and natural color profiles.
Then comes the Vivid color profile that flips everything upside down. It’ll cover around 100% of sRGB and 98.82% of DCI-P3. That means the display will all of a sudden be very saturated, and some people might not like such high color saturation. I mean, there’s really no in-between. It’s either very desaturated or super saturated only. Still, this is a software thing. The display in itself is great.
Software
Now, in terms of the software, the OPPO Find X9s comes with ColorOS 16 and it’s pretty much what we’ve come to expect. The navigation is very smooth and it has a bunch of fancy animations here and there – but for me, I think they’re too slow. So, I made the animations faster by selecting this option. Animations are supposed to tell you where things go, not take up time just to see things fly around.
Either way, the X9s also has the extra button at the side where we can reprogram it to do some other tasks. It can also be used to work with the AI Mind Space. That’s a feature that I personally think is really useful.
There are also ads and bloatware included, which we have to remove or disable them ourselves. Not all of them can be disabled, so take note of that.
Camera
In terms of the cameras, we have a total of 3 of them here. I’m not sure if they’re identical to the Find X8, but OPPO opted for a prime lens instead of a periscope lens for the telephoto on the X9s, but it still retains the aperture of f/2.6.
To have a look at all the pictures and videos taken with the OPPO Find X9s, watch our video at the top of this review.
Design
And the design of the phone? Pretty slick. It’s using the Find X9 series design and all the cameras are parked at the corner. I prefer this design over the huge circle at the center.
Anyway, the phone is sleek, tiny, and I just like the size a lot. Tiny flagships are great, but it’s sad to see that this category of devices is very niche.
A few more things to mention
And a few mroe things to mention about the OPPO Find X9s. It has a USB 2 port at the bottom – yes, I checked. It also does not have display output via USB-C, which is a sign of cost-cutting.
It also has a dual SIM card slot and has eSIM support too. Plus, we also have an IR blaster at the top – which is another great feature to have.
Should you buy the OPPO Find X9s?
Well then, we’ve arrived at the end – should you buy the OPPO Find X9s? It’s a bit difficult to come to a conclusion. I’ll lay out everything on the screen here so we can see properly.
The OPPO Find X9s is at RM3,699 for the 512GB, and the Find X9 is at RM3,999 for an unknown storage capacity since it’s not listed. Between these two… they’re actually very similar to each other. Assuming that the Find X9 at RM3,999 is indeed 512GB as well, then I’d go for the Find X9.
But, we do have other alternatives in the market right now. There’s the Xiaomi 17 which is lower in price, then we also have the Samsung Galaxy S26 with the ever One UI but we’ll have to hunt for a deal since the official retail price is crazy high. Prices of smartphones are weird this year, mainly due to the unforeseen memory crisis.
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