So This is Peak Smartphone

So this is peak slab phone?

for now anyway.

We gotta talk about it.

So this is the Oppo Find X9 Ultra.

By the time you see this, I've been testing it for almost a month.

It's their newest maxed-out flagship that makes

Samsung's S26 Ultra feel not so ultra.

Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, 7,050mAh battery,

6.8-inch super bright OLED

and an insane 200-megapixel camera system on the back...

It is ridiculous,

and it's got me thinking a lot about

peak...

slab phone, which is, of course, a moving goalpost.

See, I called Oppo Find N6...

peak foldable a couple weeks ago because

it just feels like we finally reached the watermark of...

just being a great phone that happens to fold in half.

They'd one by one engineered away all of the downsides of a foldable,

from the front bezels to the cameras to the crease

to get to that point.

And that's really exciting. Peak...

slab phone, though,

it's a little harder to define.

Like, there's obviously going to be a better

slab phone in a year,

but you know,

there's so many things that make a great smartphone...

And as far as... special...

watermarks that we're trying to achieve,

I think we've achieved basically all of them except for one.

And hot take,

we're not going to achieve that last one. So hear me out...

If you've been following smartphones like me for the past decade plus,

you've seen

lots of trends

come and go and then some of them stick around.

So curved screens,

they just came and went.

Pop-up cameras, they came and went too.

Ultrawide cameras though, those stuck around.

And so now, as boring as it is,

we've kind of settled on this final form of a default...

high-end, maxed-out flagship smartphone.

Easiest way to see it is to just look at my five pillars of a great smartphone.

I've always said if one phone can have great display,

great battery, great build,

great performance...

and great cameras, like, if you can ace all five of those things,

then you have a great phone.

Now each of these things, you know,

is exciting at different times as we get different innovations,

and they're all changing at different rates.

But for the past 20 years,

all of these categories have felt like they're...

chasing

something... that like drives everything to get better.

So display.

Right, let's just take that as the first example.

Everyone...

for the entire history of smartphones has just wanted a screen on the phone...

that just looks good... all the time...

that's the watermark.

And so over the years of smartphone screens,

they've gotten bigger and bigger, they've gotten thinner bezels.

You know, they tried curved edges for a while,

but it turns out that wasn't it.

And now we've essentially settled on

a large,

flat,

bright...

OLED, high refresh rate, high resolution...

fingerprint reader underneath and a hole punch up at the top for a selfie camera...

They look good outside in the sun now because they get insanely bright,

and they also look good in the dark because they all get all the way down to 1

nit and have high frequency PWM dimming.

So we still get...

higher peak brightness numbers and contrast ratios and occasionally special

features like the privacy display in the bleeding-edge phones.

But for the most part now... in flagships,

they have great displays.

Box checked, watermark achieved.

So then, what about battery? Okay,

everybody wants a great battery in their smartphone.

What does that mean?

Honestly, just, I want my phone to last

all day... no matter what.

Then that's a great battery.

Now, when we first got 4G phones,

I remember my HTC Thunderbolt didn't even last till the end of the school day.

They were terrible batteries.

But phones have gotten more efficient and batteries have

gotten bigger and more dense.

So there was like a 3,000 milliamp-hour barrier that all these flagships hit,

and then 3,500

and it just kept getting better and better.

The average screen-on time for a good phone before it died was...

went from two hours to three to four... and then five.

Anybody spending five hours on their phone in a single day to kill it,

that's getting a bit ridiculous.

But you could still do it, I guess.

But then silicon carbon batteries came along,

like in the last two years.

And so in a few short months,

the normal flagship battery size went from 5,000 milliamp-hours...

to 6,000.

And even higher than that,

the X9 Ultra here has a 7,050 milliamp-hour battery.

So now these phones are just,

they're just too good to die in a single day.

Regular use,

they're gonna work no matter what.

I gave my battery award last year to a phone that could get me seven to eight

hours of screen-on time every single day.

Most of the time that's actually a two-day phone.

Like,

I'll end a normal day with 60% left and then I just don't

even charge it overnight.

But then if you do actually kill it in a day with some insane day,

then they'll have like 100-watt wired charging.

Or 50-watt wireless charging like this with the right accessories.

So basically we got there.

These phones have incredible batteries kinda no matter what.

Box checked, watermark reached.

Now great performance is maybe a little more subjective since that includes

the software and people have different preferences there.

But... generally if you have a high-end chip,

smooth animations and a responsive display,

keep that thing updated for a long time and most people are gonna

feel pretty good about it.

The improvements we get year-over-year these days are like in the highest end...

that you might notice in like graphically intensive games...

or benchmark scores basically.

So you know, performance

is definitely box checked,

and then great build quality is just, I mean it's all there now.

Metal rails,

square... built like a tank.

Slightly improved glass every year that's still glass.

And then IP69 dust and water resistance.

As long as the design isn't ugly,

we're all good here.

So then there's great... cameras and,

and this is the one

where we get kind of stuck a little bit because okay,

we want great cameras.

What does that mean exactly?

You've probably noticed every smartphone presentation now is...

more camera than ever.

It used to be like one or two slides,

now a new phone is like 20 slides about just camera stuff.

Actually just did this little experiment that I've been posting on Shorts and

maybe leave a like or comment on this video if you want to see

like a long-form... breakdown of it all.

But we took a picture on every generation

of the same phone

and put them back-to-back to see the differences and they were fascinating.

I did iPhones, I did also every Samsung phone,

I did every Google phone, we did daylight,

low-light,

backlit. But the one thing that struck me as I was

sitting there, you know, getting my picture taken by 17...

phones in a row and I'm looking at these phones,

I couldn't help but notice how massive...

these cameras got over the years.

It went from a literal pinhole webcam on the back to,

to this... huge...

plateau multi-camera system

just dominating the back of the phone.

I think the camera watermark people want to use now in 2026

is that a smartphone camera system

is

as good as a regular camera.

And if we can achieve that, then we can say it's a great camera.

Unfortunately, this is a battle against physics that...

can never fully be won.

As much as these are doing a hell of a job of getting close like this...

X9 Ultra is the most ridiculous camera system I've ever.

And next year, sure,

there's probably gonna be an even more ridiculous one.

But let's look at this. The whole phone

is built around this camera system.

From the design, like the faux leather on the back,

the orange accent,

the Hasselblad and Oppo text being sideways to the specs themselves.

It's five camera sensors back here, and each one of them is either

the best...

or among the best numbers on paper I've ever seen.

200-megapixel main camera

with the biggest 200-megapixel sensor we've ever seen in a phone

with a wide aperture and OIS.

Then a 200-megapixel 3x telephoto camera.

Literally the biggest telephoto sensor we've ever seen in a phone.

Bigger than a lot of phones' main cameras.

There's also a second zoom.

There's a 50-megapixel 10x camera with sensor-shift stabilization,

and there's a 50-megapixel ultrawide... and...

a dedicated color sensor that they're calling this true color camera to

help get the most accurate white balance in photos and videos.

And, a shocker to absolutely no one, this is a great...