I Can't Stop Recommending This Flagship Phone From 2025

I review phones for a living, which means I am supposed to be the least loyal person you know. A new device shows up every few weeks; I use it, I write about it, I put it back in the box. That is the job. So it genuinely surprised me when I looked up somewhere around month four and realised the same phone had been in my pocket the entire time, and that I had started recommending it to people who did not ask.

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OPPO Find X9 Pro that launched back in 2025.

Recommending last year's flagship to someone who is saving up for a new and shiny flagship phone always invites the same follow-up question, which is why I am not naming something newer. What follows is my attempt at answering that properly, including the parts of this phone that have annoyed me.

Still Holds Its Initial Price Tag

You have probably felt this already if you have shopped for anything with a memory inside it this year. RAM and storage prices have gone up, and that increase has quietly rippled outward into phones, laptops, PC components, tablets, all of it. Building a budget for tech in 2026 feels like negotiating with someone who keeps changing their mind.

And, with that context, the Find X9 Pro launched at Rs 1,10,000 for the 16GB + 512GB variant. I checked Flipkart while writing this, and it is still Rs 1,10,000. It has simply refused to participate in the market's mood.

I want to be careful here, because that is a statement with a shelf life. I have no confidence it stays true through the next few months, and if you are on the fence, that stability is worth factoring in. For comparison, the Vivo X300 Pro, which is an excellent phone and one I would have no problem recommending on its own merits, is now sitting around Rs 1,20,000. The Pixel 10 Pro is the other name in this bracket, and it happens to be the phone the Find X9 Pro pushed out of my pocket.

This Phone Needs Its Case From Day One

I had used the Find X8 Pro and the Find X8 Ultra before this, so I had a reasonably clear idea of what OPPO does with its flagships. The X9 Pro still ended up changing more than I assumed it would, and the differences show up across almost every parameter, starting with the design.

The circular camera module from the X8 Pro is gone, replaced by a boxy island on the top left, and that is the change everyone notices first. The change that actually matters day to day is the frame. The X8 Pro curved at the edges, the X9 Pro is flat, and after a few weeks with the flat one I stopped missing curves entirely. The flat back panel makes it easier to grip the phone for me, considering its size.

My unit is Titanium Charcoal, which is one of the subtler colour options on this phone. It carries a slight red tint that gives it an almost rust-like appearance in some light. I usually go for phones in black or navy blue, like the one on my Galaxy Z Fold 7, so this was a fresh look for me, and it never gets as loud as some of the other options do.

Now, the phone is heavy. I made peace with the weight quickly, except for one recurring situation. Lying in bed at night watching Instagram reels, I hold this thing with a level of concentration normally reserved for handling someone else's baby, because a 7500mAh flagship with a sturdy build falling from that height would leave a mark on my face that no amount of editing would fix. And, let’s not forget the pain I would have to induce.

And that brings me to the actual problem, which is that without a case, the Find X9 Pro is genuinely slippery. The back has a smooth finish that looks great in photos and gives your fingers almost nothing to hold on to in real life, and the weight works against you here as well, because once it starts sliding there is enough mass behind it that you are not catching it in time.

It has escaped my hand more times than I want to count over these months, usually while I was doing something completely ordinary like standing up from a chair, pulling it out of a pocket, or reaching across a table for something else. Almost every one of those falls happened from around waist height, and the result is dents on three sides of the frame. So if you are buying this phone, use the case that comes in the box from the first day. I did not, and my unit now wears the evidence.

The IP68 and IP69 ratings have earned their keep too. I spent a stretch shooting B-roll in the rain during my trip to Taipei for Computex for our OPPO Find X9 Ultra coverage, holding this phone out in the open while quietly recalculating how expensive that decision might turn out to be. It came through completely fine.

The Display Does Everything I Need Without Trying Hard

Displays are the least interesting part of most flagship reviews in 2026, because almost everyone has figured this out. So instead of talking about the 6.8-inch LTPO AMOLED panel in the abstract, let me tell you what I actually did with it.

I watched all of Peaky Blinders on this screen. Then I restarted Breaking Bad and went through the whole thing again on Netflix. Then Four Seasons, followed by multiple reruns of The Office, Friends, and Big Bang Theory.

That is a lot of hours spent in dimly lit rooms and heavily shadowed scenes where the shadow detail is doing most of the storytelling, plus a fair amount of bright, saturated stuff in between, and I never once found myself squinting or straining to work out what was happening on screen. It has been a good companion on daily commutes and on longer flights too, where this is usually the only screen I have with me. The bezels are thin enough that the phone gets out of the way.

Outdoor visibility is where a lot of otherwise good panels fall apart, and this is the part of the display I have tested hardest without meaning to. A large chunk of my day involves being outside with a phone in my hand, either while commuting or while shooting product photos in the open, and Indian afternoon light is unforgiving in a way that specification sheets never quite prepare you for. The Find X9 Pro handles it. Auto brightness ramps up quickly rather than making me wait a beat and then overshooting, and once it settles, the screen stays readable at angles. Even the smaller everyday things, like reading a message while standing on a road in the middle of the day, have never involved cupping my hand over the screen.

The speakers deserve a proper mention here, because I ended up leaning on them far more than I expected to. It is a stereo setup and it gets genuinely loud, loud enough that I have been asked to turn it down more than once while watching something in the living room at night, which I am choosing to read as a compliment to the hardware rather than a comment on my habits.

What matters more than the peak volume is how much of my day happens without headphones. There is music playing while I set up a shoot, a show running in the background while I clear emails, and the completely indefensible half hour of reels at full blast when I should be working.

At this price the interesting question is not whether the speakers get loud, it is whether they hold together once you push them, and these do. There is no audible distortion at the top of the slider, the mids do not collapse when a scene gets busy, and there is enough separation between the two drivers that dialogue stays anchored in the centre while the rest of the mix fills in around it.

The Chip Has Not Given Me a Reason to Complain Yet

I have been using this as my daily driver for six to seven months now, and it still opens apps the second I tap on them. My day runs on Google Docs, Google Sheets, Basecamp, Slack, reading articles in Chrome, a hard pivot into Instagram for a doomscrolling session I will not be defending, and WhatsApp sitting underneath all of it. Every one of those apps opens instantly and stays exactly where I left it when I come back, and I have not caught a single random stutter or glitch while switching between them, which sounds like a low bar until you remember how many flagships stop clearing it by month five.

If numbers help, AnTuTu crosses the 3 million mark and Geekbench single core and multi core results land exactly where a phone at this price should land. BGMI is the more useful test, because I play it with friends almost every other day and those sessions run long. The phone will go up to Smooth and Ultra Extreme at 120fps if you want the frame rate, but I keep it on HDR plus Extreme because I would rather have the visuals, and it sits locked at 60fps there through two and three hour stretches without wobbling in the moments that usually cause trouble.

The back panel does start warming up around the 30 minute mark, and warm is the accurate word here rather than hot, since it sits just above where the camera island is and never gets to the point where I want to put the phone down. What matters more is what happens after that warmth arrives, which is nothing. I have not seen the frame rate drop off an hour into a session.

It Quietly Replaced My Camera for Work

For most buyers, the cameras are the reason this phone is in the conversation at all, and that is a reasonable place to start. There is a 50MP primary, a 50MP ultra wide with a 120 degree field of view, and a 200MP periscope telephoto handling 3x optical zoom.

The most convincing thing I can say about these cameras is that they quietly took over my work. Somewhere along the way, I stopped carrying a proper camera for the product shots we publish on the site, not because I sat down and made that decision, but because reaching into my pocket was faster and the results kept coming back fine. My routine now is embarrassingly simple. Portrait mode, 3x, shoot, and move on, and the edge detection has been consistent enough that I stopped zooming in afterward to check whether it had chewed off the corner of a laptop lid.

It is not flawless though, and one afternoon in particular still bothers me. I was shooting the feature image for the Galaxy Book6 Pro and the background blur went completely strange in a way I still cannot explain. I tried again, and then again, and got the same odd result every time, so I gave up and went back to the actual camera. One bad shoot across six or seven months is a trade I will happily take, but you should know it happens.

That same 3x is what I reach for with people as well, and it has quietly become my favorite focal length on this phone. In daylight, the word I keep coming back to is reliable, and I mean that as praise rather than as a polite way of saying boring. I would much rather carry a camera that hands me a good, ready-to-post photo every single time than one that produces something spectacular once in five tries and leaves me guessing in between.

Video has become just as big a part of this for me. A lot of the B-roll you see in our recent Gizbot videos was shot on this phone, and plenty of our shorts and reels came straight off the front camera. Stabilisation was good, the quality was good, and I had a fair idea of what to expect from it, which is why I call it reliable.

The Battery Is the Second String to Its Bow

There is a 7500mAh cell in here, and I want to be direct about its role in this story. I did not switch away from the Pixel 10 Pro because of the cameras. I switched because I got tired of thinking about charging, and the Pixel's battery life was not close.

Even with a full workday plus all the shooting on top, I comfortably land at a day and a half, and closer to two days when I am not filming. I have not planned my day around a power outlet in months.

Charging runs at 80W, and a full top-up takes roughly an hour and ten minutes. I rarely bother. Pushing it to 50 or 60 percent before walking out of the house is enough to get me comfortably through to the evening.