Why You Can Trust CNET Oppo R9 Plus review: Big screen, big power, big battery
This 6-inch phone from Oppo has more power and more battery life than you'd expect for its mid-range price.
It seems that these days one of the worst insults you can deliver to a phone is that it looks like an iPhone. My colleague Aloysius Low called out the smaller size Oppo R9 for this, as did Daniel Van Boom on the Meizu Pro 6.
Oppo R9 Plus
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
The Oppo R9 Plus keeps the Apple-esque trend going, but unlike my colleagues I actually think the phone looks great, even if the rose-gold shade isn't my favourite.
The R9 Plus has a 6-inch screen, compared to the 5.5-inch of the R9. The bigger screen has the same 1,920x1,080-pixel resolution, which means a slight reduction in pixels-per-inch from the R9 (367 vs 401), but you're not going to notice. The rear camera has been upped from 13-megapixels to 16-megapixels but, again, that's not going to change your world. (The front camera is the same 16-megapixels as the R9 -- it's a selfie-lover's dream.)
What you will notice is the big in both battery and processing power that the R9 Plus offers over the R9. The Plus has the Snapdragon 652 CPU. It's a 1.8GHz octa-core chip, but what matters is that it has a big uptick in both general performance and graphics processing power over the basic R9 model. In fact, in our benchmark testing, it was up there with the Sony Xperia X and the Huawei Mate 8.
Battery life is the other big bonus. With a 4,120mAh battery, I was expecting something good, but the R9 Plus exceeded my expectations with a test result of 17 hours and 30 minutes. That makes it one of the best batteries we've seen this year.
More importantly, all this is coming at just AU$100 more than the R9 -- AU$699. That's around $530 or £395, although we're still waiting for official pricing and availability outside of the Asia-Pacific region.
It may be an iPhone clone, but the Oppo R9 Plus packs enough power in to make it a worthwhile option for a mid-range Android phone. And unless you're absolutely against using a 6-inch screen, it's a better option than the R9 given its small additional cost.