Oppo F9 Review | All Screen All Fun

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The Oppo F9 is the younger sibling on the F9 Pro. Since it costs less than the F9 Pro, there are some tradeoffs that Oppo has made to keep the cost down. For starters, there is no VOOC fast charging support but other than that, the F9 really impressed me with its features. Let’s dive into the complete in-depth review of the Oppo F9.

Design and Build

Oppo F9 is one of another budget device from Oppo with the latest design elements and trendy color options. Although, the device is made out of plastic so no it isn’t as premium as any other Glass or Metal built smartphones. However, Oppo still manages to make its device eye-catchy through a Diamond cut design on the back which is quite similar to the one found on the Realme 1. It looks quite great but the back panel is entirely made out of plastic mimicking the Glass design. Also, it can be scuffed easily so it’s better to use a case.

Oppo F9 feels pretty great in hand with soft corners and good weight distribution. There are so sharp edges and the device is also quite thin at just 8mm. Single hand usage if possible as the device is also quite light at just 169 grams, but the big display makes it hard to reach the opposite corner without some thumb acrobats. Talking about the color options, there are three-Sunrise Red, Twilight Blue, and Starry Purple.

Upfront, there is a tiny teardrop notch which holds the front camera and an earpiece just above it. Moving along the sides, Power key is located on the right while the volume keys are also on the left. Also, the SIM tray can be found on the left side too. Down at the bottom, there is a Micro USB charging port along with a speaker, and a headphone jack. Turn the f9 around and you will find an Oval fingerprint scanner and a horizontal Dual camera unit located at the top left corner.

Overall, the Oppo F9 Pro looks pretty elegant and has a flashy diamond cut design which looks uniques as there aren’t many phones with such design pattern.

Display

The main attraction of the Oppo F9 is surely the display. It’s big, sharp, immersive and impressive for a budget device. Yes, there is a notch but it’s a teardrop notch like the one on the OnePlus 6T. Though I agree with the people hating on the notch but honestly, the notch on the F9 is so small that you notice it quite often. Also, since the notch is small, more notification icons are visible eliminating the two-three icon limitation with big

Oppo F9 sports a big 6.3 inches IPS LCD display which is protected by a layer of Corning Gorilla Glass 6. The display has Full HD+ resolution and a pixel density of 409 pixels-per-inch. Just as it seems, the display is vibrant, sharp and has good viewing angles. The sunlight visibility is decent but not on par with high-end devices. Talking about the most important of the display, the media consumption is just pleasing. It’s immersive as the notch doesn’t take up much space to interfere with the videos of apps.

Almost every app on the Oppo F9 runs in Full screen except some with doesn’t support the stretched aspect ratio. For a budget device, the display is surprisingly good making Oppo F9 a great buy for people who use their smartphone for on the go media consumption.

Performance and Software

The performance on the Oppo F9 is good but not the best in the price range. There are smartphones like Mi A2, Realme 2 Pro which beats the F9 in terms of performance due to the powerful Snapdragon 660 chipset. The Oppo F9 is powered by the Octa-Core MediaTek HelipoP60 chipset which has four ARM Cortex-A73 cores and four Cortex-A53 cores clocked at a maximum frequency of 2GHz. Coupled with the SoC is the Mali-G72 GPU which handles the graphics related tasks.

Performance on the Oppo F9 is good with no issue running day-to-day apps like Instagram, Facebook, Whatsapp etc. The Helio P60 handles such apps well with no lag and hiccups, however, it shows the sign of weakness when put under a load of heavy apps. Games like PUBG is playable in medium graphics settings although still not totally smooth. However, the game is pretty much playable on the F9 so that’s good. Also, the 4GB RAM handles multitasking well with 64GB of internal storage also expandable up to 256GB through a dedicated MicroSD card slot. Hence, Oppo F9 is a great performer just not for intense gamers.

Moving on to the software and the Oppo F9 is running on the Android Oreo hidden under a layer of Color OS. It looks quite similar to the iOS with some similar features too like swipe down on Home Screen to reveal the universal search option. Also, there are quite a number of application which comes preinstalled out of the box and some of them aren’t removable. Overall, the UI is pretty smooth and responsive but it’s no way near to something the Stock Android or Oxygen OS. Also, there are no commitments from Oppo regarding the Android Pie update, so we just have to wait and watch.

Camera and Battery Life

Oppo F9 sports a Dual camera unit on the back residing a 16-megapixel sensor with f/1.8 aperture and a 2-megapixel depth sensor with f/2.2 aperture. Upfront, there is a 16 Megapixel sensor downgraded from the 23 Megapixel sensor on the F9 Pro. The camera app is pretty decent with usual options like HDR, Panorama, Portrait, Videos etc.

The camera quality is pretty good capturing nice details and colors, although the dynamic range seems to be a little off. Images captured in the day are detailed which at night, the images lose their quality because of the noise. Portrait mode images are OKAY and nothing great since the edge detection is pretty average at best. The front 16 Megapixel camera is good too capturing high details in well-lit conditions but the quality falls when you move indoors or the light condition changes to low.

Under the hood, the Oppo F9 houses a pretty big 3500 mAh battery which isn’t removable. The battery life is great actually with the F9 lasting around 1.5 days depending upon the use. We removed the device from charging at 8 AM, played some games, browse the web, used social media apps quite frequently and a normal amount of call and text. With such usage, the battery was around 30% at the end of the day which is fairly impressive.

Oppo F9 lacks what it the F9 Pro has and that’s the VOOC fast charging. It takes around 150 minutes to completely charge from 0% to 100% through a Micro USB port. Also, there is no wireless charging on the Oppo F9.

More Features

Oppo F9, just like other budget devices support Dual SIM with Dual standby functionality. It also has a dedicated Micro SD card slot which supports a memory card up to 256GB. Apart from that, the connectivity options include LTE, WiFi, Bluetooth v4.2, and A-GPS. There are a bunch of sensors on the F9 including Fingerprint (rear-mounted), accelerometer, gyroscope, proximity, and compass. Although, it lacks NFC and IR blaster something pretty common with Xiaomi smartphones.

The rear-mounted fingerprint scanner is located at an easy to reach position. In our test, it was fairly quick and unlock the device almost every time with a tap from the finger. There is an option for face unlock too which unlocks the device pretty quickly, however, it isn’t fairly secure. At the bottom, there is a single speaker which gets fairly loud, still, the audio quality is pretty average. There is a headphone jack at the bottom too and the output from the jack is pretty clear.

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