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... camera system.

Oppo's X9 Pro already won my smartphone camera of the year last year.

This is the ultra version of that phone...

So it's got a lot of the same tasteful,

relatively minimal processing with just better hardware.

And so that's just a treat.

There's still plenty of processing going on, and it takes a while.

You can actually snap a shot

and then wait two to three seconds to see it finalize everything.

And it can get a bit HDR-y sometimes, but for the most part,

any shot you can imagine, any shot you're thinking of getting,

you can probably get it, and it'll come out really good.

There's just so much versatility with these focal lengths, too.

But there is a difference there.

There's a difference between super versatile... and as good quality as a regular camera.

Those are two different things.

The irony with this, you know, Oppo,

is they clearly want you to think of this as like a Hasselblad camera.

They... bought the licensing, and they use the same accent colors,

and it's got the knurling around the camera ring...

And this is based on the Hasselblad X2D Mark II.

They say it on their website.

I actually own the Hasselblad X2D Mark II.

These are... these are like opposite cameras.

They could not be further apart!

The whole point of an incredible smartphone camera system is to be the most

capable,

versatile, convenient camera possible, no matter where you are,

no matter what situation you're in.

This computer is going to try its absolute hardest to not let you take

a bad picture or video.

It's why it's called computational photography.

The X2D Mark II is a professional,

very deliberate camera that doesn't have computational photography.

It doesn't even have a video mode.

So I think it's actually kind of a mistake to compare these two.

The smartphone will never, I'll just say it,

will never actually replace a high-end professional camera at what it does.

Just physics, you know, they, these sensors get bigger and better every year,

but so do these.

I actually think that's true about everything.

Probably over... like, an RX100-type of camera.

But I think what we're settling on is

that a truly great smartphone camera is obviously really good quality,

but it's one that minimizes the misses and maximizes the makes.

Like, it's like that self-moving basketball hoop that Stuff Made Here, a YouTuber,

made a couple years ago, where no matter what your skill level,

no matter how bad any of your shots are,

you can always end up with a make, you just can't miss!

And if you don't know better, you might even think that that's your skill:

"Wow, every shot looks so great."

"I'm killing it!"

That's what computational photography is trying to do.

A lot of us, you know, enthusiasts, don't love that look.

So if you can do that without the over-processed look,

then that would be great.

So anyway, the updated watermark, I think,

that we're chasing is

that a great smartphone camera can take a really good photo

or video anytime.

That's what we're chasing.

That's not to say you can't have a little fun,

because not only does this, and phones like it,

try to defy physics with things like portrait mode to simulate a larger sensor,

and even the Hasselblad modes with lens emulation to mimic the bokeh of these

bigger,

better lenses, but they're also making literal lens attachment accessories to unlock even more

incredible capability.

This, and also the Vivo X300 Pro,

are at the forefront of

that with these attachments

that are honestly kind of insane.

Like, Oppo has it with Hasselblad, Vivo is doing it with Zeiss.

This phone has a whole specialized case

and lens attachment and battery grip with a two-stage shutter button.

It's truly hilarious that you can carry all this stuff around

and actually take some pretty incredible 400-millimeter zoom photos

that you can technically say you shot on your smartphone.

But at the end of the day,

as good and as fun as this is, it's really impressive.

It's still mimicking the real thing, as good as it's gotten.

So the strength is definitely still in its versatility.

Like, it really reminds me of all the parallels of

when someone tries to turn their iPad into a laptop.

You...

You can kind of do it, kind of...

Like, the software is still not exactly desktop software,

but you can multi-window mostly the same way.

And the web browser is mostly desktop-class, and there's a file manager now,

so that's nice.

And if you ignore the kind of wobbly weight distribution...

Eh... kind of a laptop??

It's cool that it's gotten that good,

but nobody sane would say

that it's a one-to-one replacement for a high-end,

pro-level laptop.

But!

for regular use, stuff that most people are doing: YouTube, video watching, social media,

web browsing, word processing, basic stuff, even some light photo editing and video editing,

it is actually as good as anyone will need.

And that's a smartphone camera.

Professional cameras, of course, will always have their place.

That's what I keep shooting these videos with.

That's what us hobbyists and professionals love.

But I will also keep shooting the Auto Focus channel exclusively on smartphones,

because that's also really fun

and it demonstrates the capabilities

and how good that these keep getting over the years.

The latest episode was actually shot on this X9 Ultra,

so if you want to see what the footage from this phone looks like,

I'll link it below the like button.

It is so good.

Thanks for watching.

And I'm very curious to see your comments below,

what you think of peak slab phone in 2026.

Catch you in the next one.

Peace!