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Oppo F9 Pro Review

7.5/10
7.5/10



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Oppo is known for innovative design, selfie-centric, affordable smartphones. It’s surprising to see another addition to Oppo’s F series of phones – the Oppo F9 Pro, just six months after the launch of the Oppo F7. The Oppo F9 Pro has an impressive diamond-cut floral pattern glass back, VOOC Flash Charge that supposedly offers 2 hours of talk time after just 5 minutes of charge and also the interesting, minimal waterdrop notch bezel display. All of these features can be yours for Rs. 23,990*. Let’s see if the F9 Pro attracts crowds, and if ithas something extraordinary to offer than the recently launched Oppo F7.

Design and Build

The first thing that strikes us about the Oppo F9 Pro is the shiny, coloured gradient finish on the back. This phone is available in three colour shades –starry purple, twilight blue and sunrise red. All the three colours are attractive. The starry purple version has a gradient of magenta and dark purple with a fine gold shimmer on it. The other two, twilight blue and sunrise red have a gradient of two colours each and a diamond cut pattern. The back of the phone has a glossy texture, which attracts fingerprints easily. We had to wipe the back of the phone often while using it. Thinking of a protective case for the F9 Pro might not be the right solution. With its beautiful gradient design glass back, you have no choices but to buy a transparent phone case. The packaging box comes with one.

The front of the F9 Pro has a 6.3-inch screen with a waterdrop notch. The Oppo F9 Pro is the first phone to sport a tiny notch in place of the thick ones seen on most phones, even the premium ones. The screen is large and pleasing enough with 90.8 per cent body-to-screen ratio. The front camera sits in the center of the notch with a tiny earpiece above it. Oppo has made a perfect use of the notch display, leaving a lot of space for the screen.

On the back, there is a dual-camera setup and a LED placed in a horizontal layout. The metal ring surrounding the cameras protrudes a bit from the surface. There is a fingerprint sensor at the center of the back cover, which perfectly blends with the colour of the phone. The dual SIM slot and volume rockers are on left side of the phone, whereas the power button is on the right. The base of the F9 Pro sports a 3.5mm headphone jack, speaker grill and a microUSB 2.0 port.

The phone is 7.9mm thick and weighs 169g. It is lighter than the Oppo Find X that weighs 186g. The phone is thin and has a good grip to hold it in one hand, but it’s difficult to reach every corner of the 6.3-inch screen if you have small hands.


8.0/10

Features

It was nice to look at a large 6.3-inch display, sporting a full HD+ resolution of 2340 x 1080 pixels. The tiny notch has an impressive 25 MP front camera with Sensor HDR. Oppo claims that the HDR technology has been further tweaked a step further for better pictures. The F9 Pro features 16MP f/1.8 + 2MP f/2.4 dual cameras at the back. The camera should be capable of capturing excellent photos. We will test its performance and see if it makes any difference a little later.

The main highlight of the Oppo F9 Pro is the 3,500 mAh battery with VOOC Flash Charging technology. The adapter of the F9 Pro has all the circuitry built into it, which prevents the phone from overheating while charging. Oppo also claims that the phone uses low voltage and high current for charging the phone, which they claim lets you have two hours of talk time with just 5 minutes of charging.

Talking about the hardware, the F9 Pro is packed with a MediaTek Helio P60 octa-core processor along with 6GB of RAM and 64 GB of internal storage with support for a microSD card. There is no mention about the capacity of the expandable storage on Oppo’s official website. Third-party sites mention it has 256GB. Talking about the Helio P60 processor, it is a premium and capable chipset that has AI processing as a highlight.

In addition, the phone runs on Android 8.1 with Oppo’s ColorOS 5.2 topped on it. This is the latest version of ColorOS, which is heavily customizable. In terms of connectivity, there aren’t any major additions. There is dual-SIM support, along with 4G VoLTE, Bluetooth 4.2, Wi-Fi 802.11ac, GPS, USB 2.0, DLNA support and also a 3.5mm earphone jack. The F9 Pro does not support NFC, which is a bit odd.


7.5/10

Performance

We had a good experience using the F9 Pro. The phone runs on Android 8.1 Oreo powered with ColorOS 5.2. The interface is neat and clean and is customizable. The default Smart Slidebar on the homescreen lets you categorize apps and settings with easy access. You can view recent apps in the first section, set quick tools in the second and add your favourite apps in the third section. There is no app drawer, so all your installed apps appear on the home screen. The app icons appear quite large.

Both, the fingerprint and face unlock features are very fast and also accurate. To start using the face unlock feature, you need to manually enable “Use face to unlock the screen” option, which is disabled by default. If not enabled, you will be prompted to swipe up the screen even when using the face unlock feature. Other options of unlocking the phone include using a passcode or pattern. Swiping from left to right on the phone's screen takes you to the "Smart Assistant" menu. You can add widgets and app shortcuts here. There is a quick function, weather, favourite contacts and photos viewed in a tabular format. The settings on the phone are highly customizable. There are a lot of smart gestures and shortcuts too.

The camera app has a lot of things to play with. There is camera mode slider, which includes time-lapse, slow motion shooting, video, photo, portrait, sticker modes, panorama and an expert mode. Switching between camera modes is a bit annoying, since the slider was placed just above the navigation buttons. We ended up activating the navigation buttons quite often.

The front camera clicks really good photos. We liked clicking photos using the portrait mode, since the app prompted us to move away or closer to the background, to capture good portrait photos. One thing we noticed in the portrait mode was that the focusing was not very fast. It takes time identifying the main object and the background. Slo-Mo and normal videos don’t turn out too well. The camera shoots Full HD videos, but it is disappointing the lack of 4K video recording. Colours were fine, but videos don’t have much detail in them. All the videos had excess sharpness, which spoils the quality.

The 25MP front-facing camera clicked decent photos under bright lights. When trying to click wider selfies, the background details looked murky and grainy. The beautification mode detects face very fast. When we clicked on the AI beautification mode, it made drastic changes to the skin tone and these were not adjustable either. Though, the AI mode has 6 AI beautification modes, the difference between each one of them is barely noticeable. The photos were sharp, but not very natural looking.

We also ran several benchmarks on the Oppo F9 Pro. We got a score of 1,35,300 in the AnTuTu benchmark. This benchmark tests the phone for the overall CPU, GPU and memory performance. The scores obtained were quite good. Similarly, the CPU performance in the Geekbench single core and multi-core tests earned scores of 1502 and 5679 respectively. This score was fair and as expected from a phone in this price range. To check the graphic performance, we ran 3D Mark Sling Shot Extreme. The Oppo F9 Pro scored 1077 in OpenGL, whereas the overall Vulkan score was 941. Casual gaming on the F9 Pro was fine. The phone was able to run games such as Subway Surfers and Asphalt: Street Storm without stuttering.

The VOOC charger that comes bundled with the Oppo F9 Pro was able to charge 27 percent of battery in just 15 minutes. That was really fast than the standard charging. Talking about the sound quality of the F9 Pro was not really impressive. You can easily notice that’s the case because of the mono speaker on the bottom right. Cranking up the volume to the maximum distorts the quality and makes it sound hollow.


7.5/10

Verdict

The Oppo F9 Pro turns out to be good in sheer performance. The phone is slim, lightweight with a unique waterdrop notch and an attractive gradient finish on the back. It is definitely more impressive than the Oppo F7. There is also a robust fingerprint and face unlocking feature. The VOOC charging technology in the F9 Pro was really impressive. Talking about the camera, the dual camera on the phone was able to click decent pictures. It would be more fun if there were more settings to click better photos, but this is a minor complaint. The sound quality still remains the area of improvement. 


7.5/10