Oppo Find X9 Ultra Hands-on: 3 things I love, and 1 I hate

Oppo’s new flagship Find X9 Ultra is fully official, and is getting a UK launch. I haven’t had it long enough to give you a full review, but testing it out in China over the few days leading up to the launch event was interesting.

My experience has been mostly positive. This will be one of the best camera phones of the year. Perhaps the best.

You’ll have to wait for the full review to make a judgement, but for now I’ve focused my hands-on time on the things I like most about the Find X9 Ultra – and one thing that really annoys me.

Design (with a caveat)

Within seconds of taking the Find X9 Ultra out of the box, I knew I loved the design. It’s simply stunning – at least in this colorway, and that’s the caveat here. It’s called Tundra Umber and it’s by far my favorite design of the year so far, which I don’t think will be topped.

I’m less enthusiastic about the Canyon Orange, with its new fiberglass back, despite being 0.4mm thinner and 1 gram lighter than its counterpart. Give me the vegan leather back and camera-like styling of the Tundra option any day of the week.

This color exudes class and feels premium in the hand, with exemplary attention to detail in the textures, high-quality materials and subtle flashes such as the orange ring around the camera module.

It’s extremely fitting for a front-facing camera phone developed with Hasselblad, especially when rivals including Xiaomi have moved away from a camera-like design with their latest effort, the 17 Ultra.

Camera performance

It’s no secret that the main reason to buy the Find X9 Ultra is the cameras. After all, it offers a total of 550 MP between the five lenses, including the world’s first 50 MP 10x optical telephoto zoom on a phone.

Camera performance is therefore crucial to its success. I can say: so far so good.

The range of cameras – main, ultra-wide, 3x optical, 10x optical and selfie – gives you a very versatile system without even adding the Earth Explorer Kit. It’s like carrying a high-quality DSLR with a selection of interchangeable lenses, except you don’t have to go to the trouble of swapping them out.

I definitely have a few negatives about the camera performance, but that’s exactly the case and it’s still too early in testing to know how serious they are. What I do know is that I love some of the photos I was able to take.

Chris Martin / Foundry

The quality is, perhaps unsurprisingly, very high. If you take one of those hero photos, I bet most people can’t tell if it was taken with a “real camera” or a phone.

I’m not a frequent user of telephotos, but when they come in handy they are a real boon and can make or break a given shot. An excellent example of this was the panda sanctuary that Oppo took us to during the trip. Not only were the pandas far away, but the huge crowds made it possible to take photos, either above their heads (I have the advantage of being tall) or from other angles that many phones simply wouldn’t be able to handle.

There’s a lot of depth too, if you want to go beyond point and shoot. More expert or adventurous users can switch to Master mode, which minimizes AI processing. Plus, you can use Hasselblad Hi-Res mode along with a host of others, adjusting countless settings and options.

As mentioned earlier, this could be the best camera phone of 2026. Here are a few of my favorite photos from the X9 Ultra so far (reduced for web use).

Battery and charging power

Again, it’s too early to give you a solid report, but the Find X9 Ultra also looks like it will be one of the best phones on the market in terms of battery life and charging.

It packs a 7050mAh battery (almost an extra 1000mAh compared to the X8 Ultra), which for a change means the global version doesn’t have a reduced capacity compared to the Chinese version. This is possible with silicon carbon technology (SiC) with a carbon content of 15%.

It also has impressive charging specs of 100W wired and 50W wireless, albeit without Qi2 magnets for MagSafe-like functionality.

Chris Martin / Foundry

To give you an idea of ​​how well the phone performs, I watched a YouTube video on full brightness for just over 30 minutes and the battery level only dropped a scant 2%.

You could watch more than a day’s worth of continuous video viewing at 100% clarity!

Quick button

On to the thing I hate, and that is the annoying shortcut button. First of all, it’s not the best name because it’s just for the camera. I guess Oppo didn’t just want to copy Apple, but something else could certainly have been invented.

I like the new orange color – an homage to the Hasselblad cameras – but pretty much everything else about it is a pain. That said, this isn’t just an Oppo problem. I’ve found it’s a similar problem elsewhere.

The touch-sensitive button, which is very similar to the power buttons with a fingerprint scanner, is used to launch and control the camera. The problem is that I’ve generally found it to be temperamental and actively useless.

Chris Martin / Foundry

Aside from the fact that it’s difficult to get a grip on the controls (sliding up and down to zoom in and out, for example) it’s simply too far on the side of the phone to be comfortable.

I don’t have small hands, but strangely Oppo has moved it 5mm further to the side, saying that “this optimization makes it more accessible and comfortable to use in both portrait and landscape orientation”.

Well, I totally disagree. Double-tapping to launch the camera is equally frustrating. When it works it’s a handy way to get started shooting quickly, but I’ve often found it refuses to work despite the fact that I can feel the haptic feedback from my presses.

In situations where you want the camera to launch as quickly as possible, such as when a cute baby panda strikes the perfect pose, this can be annoying.

This article was written during a trip organized by Oppo. The brand did not attempt to influence our reporting nor did it view any articles prior to publication.