It took over a week to evaluate the latest high midrange smartphone from OPPO Philippines. With some additional things compared to F7, is the OPPO F9 worth it on Php 17,990? Here's our OPPO F9 review
Now that they put in 6 GB RAM inside, at least some of the heaviness of the ColorOS in general (most of the time in their previous models, it will gonna eat at least 50% of it) reduced this time. From day in to night out, somehow with the apps already out in the multitasking mode, the phone will gonna give between 3.5-3.9 GB of RAM remaining. Their version of this custom UI was more colorful this time and the thing that I loved on the F7 continues in here, all of the toggles that I need in the pulldown menu are still visible in here.
The familiar SoC from the F7 can be seen on the F9 so connectivity department was fine from calls, texts, mobile data, WiFi, OTG and the most critical aspect compared to the previous Mediatek chipsets that we seen, GPS
The most noticeable difference to the F9 is their "slider menu" which can be comparable to the "edge menu" of Galaxy S9 (it was not discussed from either the global or local launch of it. Thru that feature, you can have a shortcut to your fave apps like camera and screenshot. The latter was definitely useful to those notes and pictures might you want to save in an instant. Not all apps are working thru that slider (as you can add your own set of apps there) so it's gonna be a guessing game on this one
Here are the benchmark numbers. Same numbers but at least the F9 was not definitely a downgrade
With 300 mAh battery compared to the F7, the F9 got plus some additional minutes in our video battery rundown test at 18 hours and 20 minutes. Used it as our main driver for over a week on heavy mode with around 6 hours of screen-on-time, it usually gave me 1.25 days of usage. The welcome change is the return of VOOC charging (since the F1 Plus on the F series) which usually fully charge the phone for around 90 minutes. It was also a blessing when one time, we had low battery in the morning and we had an hour to prepare in our workstation to go out for a series of media events
There is not that much changes on the camera UI of F9 compared to the previous to the available modes on the rear and selfie cameras even the pro mode, what we can say - improvements on their portrait lighting mode. Picture quality on both cameras? They did the right things in terms of color accuracy and less noise on low-light areas
OPPO F9 rear camera samples
OPPO F9 front camera sample
OPPO F9 is currently priced at Php 17,990 which has Php 3,000 higher over the F7. The SRP is a-ok for me even that they used the same processor but for the additional camera, bit bigger screen size, new design language, bigger battery, plus 50% more RAM and VOOC charging. The ColorOS improved this time over the previous model. It will be 4.25 out of 5 for me on OPPO F9
