Oppo Find X9s Review: A little less powerful but equally capable alternative to the Find X9

Pros:

Cons:

Rating: 3.8/5

Price: Rs 79,999 (12 GB/ 256 GB), Rs 89,999 (12 GB/ 512 GB)

Find X9 has seemed like an open challenge in the past couple of months rather than a model name. And if you can’t find that phone in stock either, worry not! The Oppo Find X9s is here, and it isn’t too different.

Typically, Oppo phones in the Find X series with the ‘s’ suffix are scaled down versions of the ones without and more affordable. But the latest from the company seems to be neither. Yes, it is marginally inferior but Oppo has cut very few corners, while bumping up the price due to market dynamics. Let’s figure out if it’s worth its asking price.

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Oppo Find X9s Design: Polished and premium

The Find X9s design is almost identical to the Find X9 with the squarish camera island at the top left at the back and flat edges on the frame. The design is not bad at all, just that every third phone this year looks like that. But no complaints about the build quality; it is absolutely solid and the phone feels great in hand. The smooth matte finish makes it look and feel premium in addition to the Aluminium frame.

The phone is fairly slim at 8 mm and weighs a shade over 200 grams with an even weight distribution. The Sunset Orange colour variant that we got for review is quite pleasant and not as gaudy as the iPhone 17 Pro Max. It not only looks good but also stays free of fingerprints and smudge marks. The Find X9s has IP68/69-rated ingress protection helping it survive high-pressure water jets and immersion up to 1.5 metres for up to 30 minutes.

The volume rocker and the power button are present on the right edge, while the Snap Key that can be assigned different tasks is at the left. The Snap Key placement could have been a little lower but the other buttons are a lot easier to reach. And the latter is applicable for the highly responsive ultrasonic in-display fingerprint scanner as well which is located an inch and a half above the bottom edge. A SIM tray, speaker and a USB-C port can be found along the bottom edge and an IR-blaster is present at the top.

Oppo Find X9s Display: A good display but still not LTPO

Oppo seems to have gone with the same 6.59-inch flat display as the on the X9 with a resolution of 2760 x 1256 pixels and 3600 nits peak brightness. The 10-bit display is compliant with Dolby Vision, and HDR videos from Netflix and Prime Video look lively on the Find X9s screen. The display supports 120 Hz refresh rate. However, this is not a LTPO display, and as a result you do not get a granular variable refresh rate dropping down all the way to 1 Hz. But things are smooth at 120 Hz and it drops down to 60 Hz for use cases that don’t need high refresh rate.

The display is sufficiently bright even when outdoors and the colour accuracy is quite good out of the box. You get three screen colour modes - Standard, Natural and Vivid along with colour temperature adjustments. Natural mode is easy on the eyes, but some may find it a tad soft, while Vivid offers a bit of extra vibrance. The Standard mode provides a perfect balance between the two. You also get Eye Comfort settings that can drop the brightness to a single nit if needed, along with a few more display options to play around with.

Oppo Find X9s Performance: Quite capable

The Oppo Find X9s is powered by a Mediatek Dimensity 9500s SoC, which can be broadly termed as a lower clocked variant of the flagship Dimensity 9500 chip. We will soon see how the two match up and also throw a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 in the mix. You get two variants of the Oppo Find X9s, both with 12 GB LPDDR5X RAM and a choice of either 256 GB or 512 GB UFS 4.1 internal storage. We got the former for review.

We ran our usual set of synthetic benchmarks to gauge its performance. You may check the scores in the image below while we compare them with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 on the Vivo X300 FE and the Dimensity 9500 on the Find X9. In Geekbench 6, the Oppo Find X9s scored 2236 and 7293 in single-core and multi-core tests respectively. In comparison, the Find X9 scored 3267 and 9705 and the Vivo managed 2768 and 8755 in those tests.

The PCMark Work 3.0 benchmark score was also lower in comparison at 12042, with the X9 and X300 FE reaching 13828 and 14650 respectively. To test the gaming capabilities of this phone, we used the 3DMark suite. The story was a lot different there. While the Dimensity 9500 was too powerful for the other two, the Immortalis G925 MC12 GPU on the Dimensity 9500s outperformed the Adreno 829 on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 comfortably.

In the Wild Life Extreme benchmark, the Find X9s managed a score of 6138 which was a little short of 6951 scored by the X9 but way better than X300 FE’s 3812. The story was similar in the Solar Bay benchmark too, with the X9 taking the top honours with a score of 13993 points with 53.21 average FPS. In comparison, the X9s could scale 10901 with 41.45 average frames and the X300 FE could only manage 6453 with 24.54 FPS. Long story short, the Dimensity 9500s on the Find X9s is pretty good for gaming as compared to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 but nowhere near the Dimensity 9500 or the Qualcomm Elites.

Scores aside, the Oppo Find X9s managed to run every game we tried on it smoothly without a stutter at the high visual settings, though not the highest. It would be prudent to lower some settings in demanding games to get good FPS. While the performance of the phone is impressive and there was absolutely no lag in day to day operations, the performance does throttle at higher temperatures. The performance drops to about 60% rather quickly as the temperature rises and then stays there. It seems more like a defense mechanism than a glitch and needs further investigation. We observed something similar with the Find X9 too.

The thermal throttling impacts the gaming performance but not normal day to day operations. The phone does heat up after 30 minutes of gaming but generally runs cool. There were no system crashes in either case. The phone has two speakers, one behind the earpiece and the other at the base of the phone. Collectively they produce a reasonably loud and immersive sound output with good stereo separation. The phone is Bluetooth 6.1 compliant and has dual-band WiFi with support for a/b/g/n/ac/6/7 standards. The call quality and reception were perfectly fine during the course of our testing. The phone supports eSIM too.

Oppo Find X9s Battery: Solid backup, but no wireless charging

Just like the X9, the Find X9s gets a large 7025 mAh Silicon Carbon battery with support for 80W wired charging, with the corresponding fast charger bundled along. However, this phone does not support wireless charging. To get the fastest charging time, one needs to enable Smart Rapid Charging from the Battery section under Settings. Once enabled, you can charge the battery from 1% to 100% in about 80 minutes, which is about 12 minutes slower than what the Find X9 takes, yet acceptable given the battery capacity.

The battery backup here is excellent and the Find X9s lasts over two full days of moderate use without any gaming. Just like the Mediatek Dimensity 9500, the 9500s is powerful as well as power efficient. Long gaming sessions will drain the battery faster, but even then, it should last you for quite a bit. I don’t think this phone supports bypass charging; a good feature to have if you indulge is gaming for long hours.

Oppo Find X9s Camera: An all-rounder

Unlike Vivo who opted for a weak ultra-wide camera on the X300 FE as compared to the X300, Oppo has largely kept the camera setup on the Find X9s similar to the one on the X9. Mind you, they may have used different sensors as Oppo doesn’t share details about the camera sensors on either of the phones, but they have at least retained the trifecta of 50MP cameras here, as well as the collaboration with Hasselblad.

The Find X9s has a 50MP primary camera with OIS (optical image stabilisation), a 50MP telephoto camera with OIS that offers 3X optical zoom and a 50MP ultra-wide camera with 120-degrees FOV and auto-focus, and it doubles up as a macro camera too. As I mentioned, the Oppo Find X9s continues to be graced with Hasselblad’s colour calibration as well as their portrait photography tricks.

The primary camera clicks some impressive shots with good dynamic range. Colours look lively while being close to actual and the images exhibit a good amount of detail. The main camera does a very good job in low light photography too capturing ample detail with minimal noise and largely accurate colours. When the light is low, the Night Mode kicks in automatically and makes things just a tad brighter to capture more detail in darker areas without making the image unnaturally bright.

Even the telephoto camera does a good job in low light, with the 3X zoom samples looking quite crisp. The ultra-wide camera, though serviceable, is not that impressive in low light, especially when it comes to details. The colour reproduction is fine but the images look soft at times. In good lighting, the ultra-wide camera is right up there with the main camera in terms of colours, dynamic range and detail.

The ultra-wide camera has auto-focus and it doubles up as a macro camera. When you get closer to a subject, the phone automatically switches to macro mode; something that can be disabled. The macro shots are pretty good as long as you don’t block the light when you get close. To circumvent the problem, you can also use the telephoto camera for macro photography. The image quality is equally good.

The telephoto camera impresses with some sharp zoomed shots with ample detail and sharpness when using 3X optical zoom. At 6X zoom (digital) one can get very usable shots, though the clarity is a notch lower in comparison. The telephoto camera is handy for portrait photography as well with 1x, 2x and 3x zoom options that mimic popular focal lengths of Hasselblad camera lenses. The foreground and background separation is spot on for humans and pretty decent for other objects too.

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To sum it up, the rear cameras on the Oppo Find X9s do a good all-round job for the segment and cover all the key bases. The 32MP selfie camera does a good job too despite lacking auto-focus, and the skin tones feel natural in proper lighting. The rear cameras can record videos in 4K resolution at 30 and 60 FPS with HDR support. Unlike Find X9, you cannot record 4K videos at 120 FPS here.

You can record Full HD slo-mo videos at up to 240 FPS and in 720p resolution at up to 480 FPS. You get OIS and EIS support to compensate for shaky hands. Captured 4K footage looks sharp and stabilised. The video quality here isn’t class leading but perfectly acceptable for the segment. You can shoot 4K videos at up to 60 FPS using the front camera too with support for HDR and EIS.

Here are some unedited camera samples clicked on the Oppo Find X9s:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/NXnmj4HAqRi6iptRA

OS and user interface

The Oppo Find X9s runs the latest ColorOS 16 based on Android 16. It is clean and largely free of ads. It does come with a bit of bloatware but most of it can be uninstalled except the Oppo apps. Some may not term apps like Snapchat and LinkedIn as bloat, but it is what it is. It remains one of the better Android UIs around and can be customised further. The UI is smooth, lag-free and easy to comprehend even for a novice. If you haven’t used an Oppo phone before but used a OnePlus or Realme, it is pretty much the same.

You get a bunch of AI tools for search, image editing, text and speech translation and more with a strong Google Gemini integration. The Mind Space feature is also available here. It can be accessed using the Snap Key and used for storing and accessing photos, notes and personal files more securely on the phone. There’s more to explore and one can expect further additions and enhancements as the company has promised five years of OS and security updates for this phone to keep it secure and relevant for long.

Verdict: Is Oppo Find X9s worth it?

The Oppo Find X9s is priced at Rs 79,999 for the 12 GB + 256 GB variant and Rs 89,999 for its 12 GB + 512 GB variant, with a one year warranty. That makes it Rs 5,000 more expensive than the launch price of the Oppo Find X9. We saw something similar recently with Vivo too (X300 FE vs X300) where the variant that’s supposed to be more affordable ended up with a higher price tag. Such has been the inflation in RAM and storage prices over the past couple of quarters, but yet, Oppo should have priced it more competitively.

Having said that, the Oppo Find X9s is a good all-round phone with a sturdy build, elegant design, sharp display, excellent battery backup with fast wired charging and competent cameras that cover all the key bases. Add to that a fluid UI and five years of OS and security updates to follow, and you get a well-rounded package that’s worth considering (because everything else is expensive too). But best to wait for upcoming sales to get it for a lower price.

As for alternatives, there are a few that come to mind straight away. The Vivo X300 FE is a solid compact option if you can make do with an average ultra-wide camera. Even better, if you find the Vivo X300 for less than 80K, just take the deal without a second thought. And then you have the Realme GT 8 Pro and iQOO 15 powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 that are still selling for close to 75K if you are looking for something a lot more powerful in the same budget.