Oppo F9 review: Pretty and cheap

The Oppo F9 is the first smartphone to have a display notch that’s tear-shaped — a feature that appears arbitrary but one we’ll likely be seeing on a lot of Android phones coming out in the near future. That tiny notch, and the phone’s smooth, gradient-colored back make it one of the nicest-looking phones around. 

Besides the design, the Oppo F9 is a perfectly capable midrange smartphone that offers a lot more for the price than you’d get from better-known brands. 

SEE ALSO: Oppo’s Find X is the notch-free, all-display phone of your dreams

I’ve used the Oppo F9 Pro — same as the regular F9 but with 6GB instead of 4GB of RAM — for about a week, and I’ve had a good time with it. It wasn’t blazing fast but it did everything I told it to do in a timely manner. I’ve experienced few bugs (the ones I’ve seen all had to do with the notch, which is just not accounted for by some apps). The 16/2-megapixel camera was decent but not the best around. The 25-megapixel selfie camera was overkill, but, hey, I can’t complain. And ultra-fast battery charging was pretty cool as well. 

We’ve got a looker

The two things that will make you consider this smartphone are its looks and its price (the phone launched in India for 23,990 Rupees or about $338). It’s not the type of design that will immediately make people gather around you to take a peek, but it’s still a very nice-looking phone. The “waterdrop screen” — a 6.3-inch display that has a tiny, teardrop-shaped notch on top, is nicer than your typical notched screens, as seen on phones like the iPhone X and nearly every Android flagship launched this year. The screen has a very high, 90.8% screen-to-body ratio, and although I’ve seen better (like on Oppo’s slide-out Find X smartphone), it’s still impressive. 

The best thing about the waterdrop screen is that it just makes sense. The Essential Phone has a smaller cutout for the camera, but the way Oppo did it actually looks nicer to my eyes, plus it allows for enough space to put the speaker, front camera, and light sensor in there. It’s probably not enough space to fit something like Apple’s Face ID tech in there as well, but the Oppo F9 has a fingerprint sensor on the back which, by my reckoning, still does its job better than the iPhone X’s Face ID. 

There are other design details that make this phone just a bit nicer than most phones. It’s got a gradient back — à la the Huawei P20 Pro — but the gradient is applied to its entire surface, including the sides.  

Besides the gradient, which on my version of the phone was from dark blue to black, the Oppo F9’s back also has a “petal pattern” design, which reveals itself as a diamond-shaped pattern when you turn it around under a light source. The only problem with all this is that most people won’t notice it, as the effects, even the gradient itself, are so subtle. 

A few more notes on the screen. It’s an LCD, not an OLED, so forget about it matching the black levels you’ll get on a newer Samsung flagship phone, for example. It’s also not as bright as screens on top-tier phones like the iPhone X, but it’s not very far, either. As on most phones these days, you can set colors to be warmer or colder, and you can also turn on a “Night Shield” feature which makes the colors even warmer during the night. 

Crazy fast charging, so-so performance 

The F9 is not a competitor to the best phones out there in terms of performance. It has a Mediatek Helio P60 octa-core processor, 6GB of RAM, and 64GB of storage (there’s also a version with just 4GB of RAM), and it works well enough for me not to notice any slowdowns in normal use. Fire up a game of PUBG, though, and it’ll start to stutter. 

Oppo’s crazy-fast VOOC Flash Charge tech worked great, though with one caveat: You have to use Oppo’s proprietary, seven-pin microUSB cable (yes, the Oppo F9 has a microUSB charging port). With it, the Oppo F9’s battery was charged to 9% after 5 minutes, 19% after 10 minutes, and a whopping 56% after 30 minutes. The phone was fully charged after just 73 minutes which is a lot faster than any other smartphone I’ve tested. For comparison, I’ve charged the Huawei P20 Pro, which boasts Huawei’s fast charging tech, from zero to 100% in just under two hours (though note that the P20 Pro has a bigger battery: 4,000mAh vs. Oppo F9’s 3,500mAh). 

With a regular cable, a 10-minute charge brought the battery from zero to 8%, which is what you’d get on most smartphones. So for fast charging you’ll either have to carry Oppo’s special cable everywhere you go (for example, many people charge their phone twice each day: at home during the night, and once again in the office) or buy another cable.

Software-wise, I didn’t mind Oppo’s ColorOS (the company’s proprietary Android fork) too much — though I’ve experienced some of the same issues I did when reviewing the , such as the inability to copy all my apps and settings from another Android phone. It has a few features that are different from the R15 — for example, you get a floating sidebar that I didn’t much care about.

You’ll also want to get rid of some of the pre-loaded apps, several of which I’ve never heard of. In the last couple of years though, all of the big Chinese smartphone makers have polished their software to the point that most users won’t have problems with it, and Oppo is no exception. 

Decent photos, bad bokeh, and huge selfies

These days, a 16-megapixel camera can be amazing or mediocre — I’ve seen both sides of the spectrum numerous times. The Oppo F9’s rear camera, which has a 2-megapixel helper for bokeh-style photos, is just OK. 

I was able to snap some nice photos during the day. In the example below, the Oppo F9 actually took a better photo than Huawei’s P20 Pro, which applied a ton of its AI-assisted effects, resulting in an over-sharpened photo with unnatural colors. 

In the evening, the Oppo F9 could not match the P20 Pro, which produced a brighter, sharper photo with a lot more detail. 

Bokeh on the Oppo F9 ranges from acceptable to awful. For an example of the latter, check out a cropped detail from a bokeh shot I took with the Oppo F9. You can see how the phone’s algorithms struggled to tell the object in focus from the uneven background, resulting in jagged, uneven edges.

The 25-megapixel selfie camera is overkill, but it will produce pretty nice selfies. For best results, turn off all the beauty effects. The selfie camera is particularly good in poorly lit scenarios; you’ll be able to snap a selfie in near total darkness with it.

The Oppo F9’s camera is a testament to how far smartphone camera tech has gone. It’s a pretty cheap midrange phone, but the three cameras do a pretty good all-around job. Yes, you’ll find smartphones that take better photos, but you’ll likely have to pay a lot more for them. 

Much to like

The Oppo F9 might not be available in too many markets (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nepal, Vietnam, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines for now), but it’s a pretty sweet option. 

It looks great, charges crazy fast, takes decent photos, and performs well for its price point. Its only problem is that there are other phones out there that offer more in terms of performance for less money. One example is , which is likely to be a hit in India — but the Pocophone doesn’t have the F9’s waterdrop screen. 

This is pretty much what it boils down to with the Oppo F9 — it’s a good phone, but if you choose it, it’ll probably be because it’s pretty. And that’s perfectly all right.