Speculation has been making its rounds on the upcoming OPPO R9 smartphone, many of which suggest that it could be OPPO’s new flagship device of the year especially considering the absence of the Find 9. Further “leaked” specifications hinted towards a flagship device too, but thanks to Chinese certification agency TENAA, we now know for certain one fact is true — the R9 is not the flagship you’re looking for.
Two devices passed through TENAA — the R9 and R9 Plus — revealing their internal specifications as well as the smartphone’s overall design. There was no Snapdragon 820 SoC, no Quad HD display, which means it’s no 2016 flagship.
Instead, for the smaller R9, we get a 5.5-inch full HD 1080p AMOLED panel on the front. Inside, it’s powered by a 1.95GHz octa-core processor paired with 4GB of RAM and 32GB of expandable storage. Keeping everything running is a 2,850 mAh battery.
Although the processor’s model name isn’t mentioned, it’s fairly obvious that this isn’t a quad-core Snapdragon 820 chip as the SoC in the R9 is an octa-core unit.
Moving on to the larger R9 Plus we find a larger 6-inch 1080p full HD AMOLED panel on the front, with a 1.8GHz octa-core processor thrumming away inside. Paired with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of expandable storage and a large 4,120 mAh battery, the R9 Plus is definitely the one with a better spec sheet — still no Snapdragon 820 in sight.
Teased as a camera-centric phone, the R9 duo definitely packs the specifications to back that up as they feature two 16-megapixel cameras — one on the front and one on the back — with an LED flash. Besides that, both smartphones feature support for dual SIM 4G LTE connectivity and a rounded metal body.
That’s not all, the smartphones will be sporting a front-mounted fingerprint sensor tucked under an oval home button. We can’t tell from the pictures if it is a physical button, but there is a coloured chrome frame around the button which suggests that it could. This would be the first time OPPO has mounted a fingerprint sensor on the front. Both smartphones will also come running Android Lollipop out-of-the-box.
If you tuned in to our Mobile World Congress 2016 coverage, you would have picked up on OPPO’s blazingly fast Super VOOC charging technology where they fully charged a smartphone in 15 minutes. Now that is an awesome technological development, but unfortunately, it doesn’t look like it will be making its way into the R9.
According to a recent teaser on Gizchina, OPPO advertised that the R9 will give you 2 hours of talk time from a 5-minute charge. That’s the same claim OPPO made for their R7 series of smartphones and those only use regular VOOC. SuperVOOC claims to give you 10 whopping hours of talk time after the same amount of time spent on the plug.
That said, the camera-centric R9 series could potentially feature OPPO’s new 3-axis SmartSensor camera technology. Well, we will all find out soon enough as the launch date has been set for 17th March.
