Oppo R9s Plus

Once upon a time, phablet versions of phones were simply larger than their regular-sized counterparts. Take phone, make bigger, sell. Now, though, pick up an Android with a screen larger than 5.9”, and you’re in for a treat. The extra room in the chassis offers manufacturers the chance to bolster the screen resolution, increase the battery capacity, and improve the camera’s capability. 

While much of what we said in our R9s review stands true here, Oppo has improved upon that brilliant performer in a few ways, ticking two of those boxes, though the company’s philosophy of ‘bigger equals better’ sometimes comes back to bite it. As you’ll see, though, for a this is phablet that punches well above its weight in the mid-range price bracket.

The Oppo R9s Plus retails at AU$698 compared to the AU$599 for the R9s. For this additional AU$99, the result is a mid-range beauty that impresses with its feature set, and also demonstrating that the Chinese company knows how to make a handsome unit., despite a few niggles with the interface. 

Mid-range it may be, Oppo clearly has its eye on the phablet everyone else wants to best: the Apple iPhone 7. And it has the bulletpoint stats to do it, as Oppo’s R9s Plus is taller, wider and yet thinner and lighter than Apple’s largest offering to date.

Design

• Bigger than it looks thanks to bezels
• 64GB of internal storage can be expanded to 256GB
• Dual Nano SIM option
• Home button fingerprint scanner is super-quick

At first glance the Oppo R9s Plus looks like it’s bursting out of its frame, thanks to the screen taking up 72% of the front of the unit. Crucially, it looks more than that, even giving Samsung’s Galaxy S8 a  Like its smaller sibling, the phone is quite slippery despite the extra 0.7mm depth and slight gradient from the middle of the frame to the screen. Again, Oppo includes a basic silicone case with the phone, and the company has already installed a screen protector in case it does tumble out of your hand and onto the bathroom floor. 

A capacitive touch button sits dead centre under the screen, and it’s wedged almost at the very end of the bottom of the frame. This button is blazingly fast, like the regular R9s, and will both wake the phone up and send you to the last active app or open screen. However, getting your thumb on it one-handed can be tricky at first. Because of the dimensions of the phone, those with Trumpian digits may find it see-sawing out of their grip.

Oppo has aped the Samsung layout, with the back button sitting to the right of the home key, and the recents to the left. This gives that screen full, glorious use of the real estate on offer. The power key sits on the right hand edge about a third of the way from the top, and the volume buttons directly opposite on the left hand side. For the Donalds of this world it can be a bit of stretch to swing your thumb from the home key up to the power or volume.

The dual SIM tray on the right allows for two nano-SIM cards, or one SIM card and a microSD card. Go for the latter option and you can bolster the R9s Plus’ 64GB onboard storage up to 256GB. Like the R9s, a speaker grille, a micro USB port and 3.5mm headphone jack are placed along the bottom edge of the frame.

Imperceptible antenna lines run horizontally across the rear of the R9s Plus, laid out in two sets of three. They’re very fine, and sit well outside of the perimeter of your palm. If there’s one thing we do wish the R9s Plus had, it’s NFC. Android Pay is a total no-go here.

Screen

• 1080p AMOLED screen
• Very similar to iOS layout

Oppo has increased the physical size of its AMOLED screen by 0.4-inches diagonally, but the resolution – like the R9s – is still locked at 1080p. Compared side-by-side to a 2K screen it feels a little off, and there are no options built into the OS to scale the size of icons. 

That criticism holds little weight if you were to pick this up without having a higher-end phone next to it as the display is clear and bright, though it’s best to crank the slider up to about 60%.

With barely-there side bezels (and the right case), this is a great media machine. Movies and YouTube clips are lovely and clear on the 6-inch display, and there’s plenty of room for editing photos. 

It could be said that the colours are a little over-saturated, though it's tough to knock it for being as vibrant as it is – we'd take a screen that's too colourful over one that's drab and muted any day of the week.

Interface

• Oppo’s ColorOS is based on Android 6.0
• Notification drawer is annoying to get to
• Shortcut gestures are a great addition

Oppo’s own ColorOS 3.0 is based on Android 6.0 Marshmallow, and anyone coming here from iOS will be more at home than those used to a stock Google layout. While the Samsung S8, Google Pixel and Sony Xperia offer an app drawer, icons run consecutively across the home screens on the R9s Plus.

You’re locked into a 4 x 5 grid, though we craved the option to change this to a 5 x 5, and there isn’t an option to quickly sort these into alphabetical order - you’ll have to sort this out for yourself. Hold the home key down and the button will pulse twice, taking you to a Google search and contextual results based on what’s on your screen, and you search history (if you decide to opt in to this).

Many features are copied over from the R9s - understandable as both phones run the same software - for better or worse. Swiping down from the top of the screen opens the quick options menu, rather than taking you straight to your notifications. You’ll have to then swipe right to get to those, and then swipe right again to clear them. 

  

Gesture controls also return, though these aren’t activated by default. Two of the most useful - flashlight and camera - can be activated when the screen is off. Simply head to Settings, Gestures & Motion, Screen-off Gestures to quickly and easily get these functions going. More customised versions to launch other apps can be added, and we’d be surprised if other manufacturers didn’t pinch this for themselves.

One quirk is we noticed is when the phone enters ‘Quiet Time’. Ringtone and notification volume is reduced to its minimum at night time – not so unusual for Android phones, but the words ‘Quiet Time’ take over the top of the notification bar where the actual clock is. The result? You won’t be able to read the time in your notification area when ‘Quiet Time’ is on, meaning you’ll have to hit the home key and check your widget.

Camera

• 16MP front and back cameras for all occasions
• Beautify 4.0 makes a welcome return

Rather impressively, the Oppo R9s Plus, just like the Oppo R9S before it, has 16MP rear and front-facing cameras. The primary camera features a customised 1/2.8 inch Sony-developed IMX398 sensor with an extra-wide F1.7 aperture for improved low-light photography, created for the R9s and R9S Plus. 

In our experience, it performed almost exactly like the R9S, in that it took great photos during daylight hours. 

In low light situations, shots of perfectly still objects worked quite well, accurately capturing images with very little noise present. Introduce movement however, and these shots end up blurry.

Video capture works well, though again like the R9S, it shoots best at 1080p or below. 4K capture at 30fp is available, our test footage at this resolution was quite choppy, particularly any kind of movement. 

Still, the Oppo R9s Plus' primary sensor is wonderful for day-to-day photography. This is thanks to the camera’s dual PDAF (phase detection autofocus) technology, which allows the phone to snap into focus fairly quickly, so you don't have to worry about missing the moment.

Flip the phone over, and you have a 16MP camera that provides a great selfie experience. Its 1/3 inch sensor sports a F2.0 aperture for surprisingly good low light shots. Oppo's Beautify 4.0 software is back and has some minor tweaks to make you look even more youthful and rosy.

Music

• Software-based equaliser offers some customisation
• Volume needs to be up high to enjoy music and movies

Oppo’s built-in equaliser offers ten different presets, with room for a custom setting. There are three sliders to change bass, baritone and treble, and they’re find if you’re not too fussy. With the ‘Real HD Sound’ turned on, tracks played through Google Music came through with a touch more clarity, and with enough fiddling it could bring a bit more life to Spotify.

Get used to whacking the volume to about 75%, even in quiet areas, to really hear what the R9s Plus can do. At times it can be surprising, though we’re not sure we’d really back the manufacturer’s claims that its system makes music sound just like a live venue. Thankfully, there are no tacky reverb or echo effects. 

Music over Bluetooth to a set of Bose QC35 headphones played with no stutter or lag, though the volume controls here didn’t correspond to the volume on the R9s Plus. To save our ears, we set the volume on the phone to around 80%, then tweaked the volume on the QC35 set as we needed it.

Performance

• Outpaces Google Pixel XL
• Keen multitasker

The R9s is hardly a slouch, and the R9s Plus ups its stats. You get the same powerful Octa-core processor (a Snapdragon 625 running at 1.96GHz) and the same GPU (an Adreno 506 GPU). Remarkably, an extra 2GB of RAM has been squeezed in, pushing the total to 6GB. 

Running the GeekBench 4 CPU test, the Oppo R9s Plus trounces its smaller sibling, and puts it within spitting distance of the Google Pixel XL. The PCMark benchmark results are unusually incongruent though, showing a score of 4953 compared to the 7001 on the R9s. Even at 4953, the R9s Plus only just misses out on scuppering the Google Pixel XL (4965) but waggles its fingers at the Samsung S7 Edge (4713).

Nonetheless, these are numbers you can be happy with, and in the real world you have a very snappy and sharp phone wedged in your pocket.

Battery

• Battery will last all day
• Terrific fast charging

The larger phone affords a greater capacity 4,000mAh powerplant compared to the 3,010mAh battery in the R9s. For everyday browsing and messages, the phone’s overkill, and the 6-inch screen gives you a ton of room for editing photos and watching YouTube. Again, PCMark shows impressive results for the battery test, giving a very desirable 14 hours and 48 minutes of run time. 

We ran a few taxing games - XCOM Enemy Unknown, and Grand Theft Auto Chinatown Wars - and were left impressed. We say it a lot, but that screen gives so much scope to really enjoy the action. 

And, if you do sap the battery, plug it in for 30 minutes to get an extra 2 hours of run time thanks to Oppo's proprietary VOOC 'Flash Charge' technology.

Verdict

The smaller Oppo R9s was already a fantastic mid-range phone in its own right, and now, the Oppo R9s Plus has come along to improve upon it in a number of ways. 

We liked
It's got a larger battery, more screen real estate, and Oppo has even managed to squeeze in a further 2GB of RAM, bringing the total to 6GB – which is an incredibly impressive amount for a phone to have at this price point. 

We disliked
The lack of NFC functionality is admittedly a bummer, and ColorOS is not going to be everyone's cup of tea. We also found that using this large phone with one hand can be troublesome.

Final verdict
Simply put, this is the best phone Oppo has made to date. If you're looking for a premium phone experience without spending a fortune, the Oppo R9s Plus is easy to recommend. Though we originally dubbed the regular R9s as the king of mid-range phones, the crown has now been stolen for that phone's big brother. All hail the new king.