OPPO R9, R9 Plus coming 17th March; Pricing leaks


oppo r9 render

OPPO announced only today that the R9 and the R9 Plus will be made official on the 17th of March, i.e., 10 days from today.

OPPO are going all-out on the spec war with these phones. Both phones will have AMOLED displays, 4GB RAM, 64GB on-board storage and 16 mega-pixel cameras on the front… and the rear.

As for the spec bit that’ll differentiate between the phones, it’ll be the screen. The R9 will get a 5.5-inch panel, while the R9 Plus will ship with a 6-inch one.

Both phones will also feature VOOC fast charging (no Super VOOC here folks, sorry!).

Gizchina News of the week


GizChina-1

Incidentally, pricing for both phones also leaked today. According to the leaked flier, the OPPO R9 will go for 2498 Yuan ($383/€347), while its bigger sibling will be priced 2998 Yuan ($460/€417) for 64GB and 3298 Yuan ($505/€459) for the 128GB version.

Given OPPO’s usual pricing strategies, and considering these fliers have some truth about them, the R9 could actually challenge some affordable flagships, the Xiaomi Mi 5 for instance.

Previous Xiaomi Mi5 unboxing video
Next Ulefone Power for $169, Xiaomi Mi 4 for $153 and more

62 Comments

  1. March 7, 2016

    Hm, must say I expected higher price, so that’s a nice surprise.

    • Rob
      March 7, 2016

      Don’t worry, by the time resellers get hold of them you will get your higher price!

  2. Z-PH
    March 7, 2016

    stolen from Nubia My Prague ?????????

  3. MaxPower
    March 7, 2016

    Those are not prices that we would expect from Oppo and this is proving me again that Xiaomi is behind this.

    Whether you like Xiaomi or not, we all have to give them credit to have lowered the bar of pricing.

    To stay competitive other companies have to give up on some profit and we all benefit from this.

    • March 7, 2016

      Well, can’t disagree with that but if you go deeper you’ll see that Oppo even started to support european lte bands (check r7s for example). You don’t have to unlock bootloader to add multilanguage rom into it. And tbh I find Color OS more mature than Miui. I like new mi5 very much, but that “we don’t give a f*ck about eu” is just keeping me to stay away from Xiaomi. Hope you’ll enjoy ur RN3 for a long time 🙂

      • MaxPower
        March 7, 2016

        I’m sure they give a f…, the more they sell the more money they make.
        Between China and India the MI5 will go out of stock in seconds and they can’t keep out with the demand.

        Adding lte band 20 is not enough to expand abroad.
        You need logistic points, customer care, and deal with different taxation and import duties.

        You can’t risk to screw up before even planning to get into a new country. They are working on brand awareness right now.
        They are doing it in the right way.

        • March 7, 2016

          That brand awareness has been here since Mi2, continued with Mi3 etc. That Xiaomi hype has already been here for years. I remember Barra said once why Xiaomis won’t get officially into US – because devices don’t support US LTE bands. Yes, Mi5 has been sold out in few seconds, And will be again, But show me a company that wouldn’t like to do the same with Europe, US etc.. Then you ask yourself if they don’t want your money. And the model without repair shops (service) in EU works fine for OP for example (even if there’s lack of a customer care). We live in era when everything can be shipped from China and to China.

          • MaxPower
            March 7, 2016

            You forget that this is a niche market.
            How many Oneplus do you think have been sold in Europe compared to Huawei, Samsung, LG etc?

            There are countries where custom fees + vat are ridiculous (Germany, Italy, France…)
            Shipping China to China is not as simple as you are making look like.

            I’ve seen so many comments here where people complain about vat+customs, especially when we talk about expensive phones like Oppo, Vivo. Everybody saying that for that money they would go for a Samsung because they have local support.
            And I’m talking about people into Chinese phones already, not regular customers that don’t have no idea about these phones.

            Go take a look at MI Facebook page.
            It’s all about Indian customers there and most of them complain about the quality of customer care and post sale experience.

            Barra said that the US is not in their expansion plans yet because they want to hit developing countries first. He also added that they will get there, but not soon.

            • balcobomber25
              March 8, 2016

              The European market is huge but I am willing to bet less than 10% have even heard of Xiaomi and of that 10% about half have positive images of them. Just go on any Android site that isn’t about Chinese phones and look at the comments about Xiaomi. It would take a lot more than just adding Band 20 for them to achieve signifciant sales in Europe.

              People think it’s so easy for them to produce millions more phones than they already are. They don’t have the production capacity right now to meet the demand in India, China and Brazil nevermind Europe. I often see the “OnePlus did it in a year” comments. OnePlus is wholly owned by OPPO who already sells in several countries around the world.

            • Adam Irvine
              March 8, 2016

              A quick reply to the last few lines thought Balco… I know you keep banging on about OPPO owning OnePlus etc… But look at it this way (from the consumers eyes…)

              Plenty of people around the globe have heard of OnePlus, but I bet not as many in the WEST have heard of OPPO…

            • balcobomber25
              March 8, 2016

              It doesn’t matter if people heard of it or not. OPPO had the production capacity, the capital, the licensing etc to sell in Europe. Oneplus wasnt starting from scratch, Xiaomi would be. People only heard about OnePlus because of CM. Take away that and they wouldn’t have sold nearly as much there.

          • Adam Irvine
            March 7, 2016

            I agree with you really, I’ve never understood how OnePlus could do it and to be fair to them, do it quite well indeed and the others like Xiaomi, Meizu etc not…

            They obviously don’t give a sh1t about the EU or English speaking countries for that matter…

            Its a shame really as I work with a bunch of guys that would love the latest and greatest from Xiaomi but either can’t get it or won’t get it because of the lack of English software…

            I do believe they’re missing out on big sales because where I’m from in the UK, word of mouth is better than any advertising campaign and my colleagues etc all loved my OnePlus One when I first got it so much so that 5 of them went and got one as soon as they could!

            • MaxPower
              March 7, 2016

              Adam, they can’t handle the demand.

              Oneplus made it through due to their invitation system.
              without it they couldn’t keep up with the demand.
              And i add that without the invitation system they would have sold 20M of OP1 and not just 1M.
              But obviously they didn’t have the structure to supply it.

              On big numbers only Huawei (among the Chineses) can handle the high demand, not even Xiaomi.

            • Adam Irvine
              March 8, 2016

              I’ll take that…

              But I will say, that I’m sure they could grab some pretty hefty investment from 3rd parties if necessary to up their production capacity to satisfy the demand..?

            • MaxPower
              March 8, 2016

              Let’s consider OnePlus 1 for a moment:
              A great phone (hardware and software) priced like the cheapest SD400 Samsung.
              They obviously didn’t sell it at cost but there was not much margin of profit like any Samsung,LG, HTC…

              Even if this phone had all the requirements to be a success, there was still a margin of failure that a start-up can’t chance to risk.

              They could easily borrowed money from Oppo but what if the project didn’t take off like they were hoping to?
              They would have been ended up with overstock and that would have messed up their whole project.

              Samsung can handle overstock, they recoup the money with the very first batch of the product.
              The second batch (I’m simplifying to the bone here, please pass me this example) is all profit, the last batches get discounted and then the rest goes on salvage (that’s what basically happens in the retail field).

              Oneplus found a workaround to pass their limitation, if you remember they also pushed mostly the 64GB version through the invite, because it was more profitable.

              As customer I hated their invitation system, but I say kudos to them for have handled that situation that way.

            • balcobomber25
              March 8, 2016

              OnePlus could it because their parent company OPPO was already selling in several major European markets.

              Their biggest push right now is India which is one of the largest English speaking countries in the world. They also sell in Malaysia, Philippines, Hong Kong and Singapore which all have a significant portion of the population that speaks English (most were former English colonies). So no offense but this “don’t care about English speaking countries” is pure BS over not having band 20.

            • Adam Irvine
              March 8, 2016

              Yep fair enough, no offence taken… I didn’t explain properly because I was typing it out on my phone at the time and couldn’t be a$$ed to carry on…

              What I meant about the not caring about English speaking countries doesn’t relate to their phones solely, but more as a brand thing i.e. You can’t buy many of the Xiaomi products because of the lack of English language support…

              MiTV Box
              Their TVs
              Router
              Yi Camera

              to name a few…

              Now again, I’m sure that doesn’t mean that they don’t care about English speaking countries so I do take that back to some extent, but I wish they would put more effort in at least! Even if its a decision based on demand for their products in those markets, I think they’re being fed the wrong info if that’s the case because I’m sure the demand is there for all of their products! They just seem to get it right whatever product they make…

        • Öysan Kulbay
          March 7, 2016

          Adding LTE Band 20 adds another potential 100 million customers. I’d buy MI 5 Plus over S7 Edge any day.

          • MaxPower
            March 7, 2016

            Agree with you.

            But then what? Can they keep up with the demand? What about those that buy from resellers with a messed up Rom? I’m not bringing unrealistic scenarios, it happened already.

            They are a software company first, MIUI was born before they started selling phones.

            We don’t know the whole story, let’s put it that way.

            Saying that they don’t care of European customers doesn’t make any sense to me.

      • Öysan Kulbay
        March 7, 2016

        Absolutely correct mate.

      • balcobomber25
        March 8, 2016

        I don’t like the new Mi5 but if they “didn’t give a F” the Mi5 would be a $600 phone. The locked bootloader is because they DO care about their customers. They don’t want resellers to add in viruses, malware and adware to MIUI which ruins the experience for the customer.

        • March 8, 2016

          You didn’t understand me with my locked bootloader argument – the point was to show at bilingual OS only. So if you want (or need) to fully use and understand OS, you have to unlock it. Nothing less and nothing more.

          • balcobomber25
            March 8, 2016

            And you can unlock it, fill out a form and it gets unlocked.

            • March 9, 2016

              And we are getting to the point – with OPPO you don’t have to unlock it to use multilingual ROM as it is already there. Also you don’t have to be scared if it voids your warranty or not. Because with Xiaomi you never know 🙂 I remember back in 2014 on XDA when Xiaomi devices were “banned” – yes, you could find some “debloated” roms for their devices, but that was all. Their source codes used to be more secret than nuclear rockets codes. When I look at Xiaomi now, seems to me like they are grabbing things from modules for xposed and then they implement into their fw. Always the same story 🙂 I got into that hype too, and believe me – if mi5 was on the market when they introduced it I would buy it. Lucky me I didn’t 🙂

    • Assefa Hanson
      March 7, 2016

      but thhe xiaomi magic isnt working on vivo 🙁

      • MaxPower
        March 7, 2016

        True that 😀

    • balcobomber25
      March 8, 2016

      I credit Xiaomi with a number of sub brands: Honor, OnePlus, Zuk and IUNI and Lenovo acquiring Moto.

  4. denkem
    March 7, 2016

    Hm, must say I expected higher price, so that’s a nice surprise.

    • Rob
      March 8, 2016

      Don’t worry, by the time resellers get hold of them you will get your higher price!

  5. Freeje
    March 7, 2016

    Wow! The 128GB looks tempting. What is the CPU?

    • MaxPower
      March 7, 2016

      Qualcomm Snapdragon 652 (former SD620)
      Octacore 4xA72 + 4xA53 @ 1.8GHZ

  6. Z-PH
    March 7, 2016

    stolen from Nubia My Prague ?????????

  7. MaxPower
    March 7, 2016

    Those are not prices that we would expect from Oppo and this is proving me again that Xiaomi is behind this.

    Whether you like Xiaomi or not, we all have to give them credit to have lowered the bar of pricing.

    To stay competitive other companies have to give up on some profit and we all benefit from this.

    • denkem
      March 7, 2016

      Well, can’t disagree with that but if you go deeper you’ll see that Oppo even started to support european lte bands (check r7s for example). You don’t have to unlock bootloader to add multilanguage rom into it. And tbh I find Color OS more mature than Miui. I like new mi5 very much, but that “we don’t give a f*ck about eu” is just keeping me to stay away from Xiaomi. Hope you’ll enjoy ur RN3 for a long time 🙂

    • MaxPower
      March 7, 2016

      I’m sure they give a f…, the more they sell the more money they make.
      Between China and India the MI5 will go out of stock in seconds and they can’t keep out with the demand.

      Adding lte band 20 is not enough to expand abroad.
      You need logistic points, customer care, and deal with different taxation and import duties.

      You can’t risk to screw up before even planning to get into a new country. They are working on brand awareness right now.
      They are doing it in the right way.

    • denkem
      March 7, 2016

      That brand awareness has been here since Mi2, continued with Mi3 etc. That Xiaomi hype has already been here for years. I remember Barra said once why Xiaomis won’t get officially into US – because devices don’t support US LTE bands. Yes, Mi5 has been sold out in few seconds, And will be again, But show me a company that wouldn’t like to do the same with Europe, US etc.. Then you ask yourself if they don’t want your money. And the model without repair shops (service) in EU works fine for OP for example (even if there’s lack of a customer care). We live in era when everything can be shipped from China and to China.

    • MaxPower
      March 7, 2016

      You forget that this is a niche market.
      How many Oneplus do you think have been sold in Europe compared to Huawei, Samsung, LG etc?

      There are countries where custom fees + vat are ridiculous (Germany, Italy, France…)
      Shipping China to China is not as simple as you are making look like.

      I’ve seen so many comments here where people complain about vat+customs, especially when we talk about expensive phones like Oppo, Vivo. Everybody saying that for that money they would go for a Samsung because they have local support.
      And I’m talking about people into Chinese phones already, not regular customers that don’t have no idea about these phones.

      Go take a look at MI Facebook page.
      It’s all about Indian customers there and most of them complain about the quality of customer care and post sale experience.

      Barra said that the US is not in their expansion plans yet because they want to hit developing countries first. He also added that they will get there, but not soon.

    • Pezzo
      March 7, 2016

      Absolutely correct mate.

    • Pezzo
      March 7, 2016

      Adding LTE Band 20 adds another potential 100 million customers. I’d buy MI 5 Plus over S7 Edge any day.

    • MaxPower
      March 7, 2016

      Agree with you.

      But then what? Can they keep up with the demand? What about those that buy from resellers with a messed up Rom? I’m not bringing unrealistic scenarios, it happened already.

      They are a software company first, MIUI was born before they started selling phones.

      We don’t know the whole story, let’s put it that way.

      Saying that they don’t care of European customers doesn’t make any sense to me.

    • Assefa Hanson
      March 7, 2016

      but thhe xiaomi magic isnt working on vivo 🙁

    • Adam Irvine
      March 7, 2016

      I agree with you really, I’ve never understood how OnePlus could do it and to be fair to them, do it quite well indeed and the others like Xiaomi, Meizu etc not…

      They obviously don’t give a sh1t about the EU or English speaking countries for that matter…

      Its a shame really as I work with a bunch of guys that would love the latest and greatest from Xiaomi but either can’t get it or won’t get it because of the lack of English software…

      I do believe they’re missing out on big sales because where I’m from in the UK, word of mouth is better than any advertising campaign and my colleagues etc all loved my OnePlus One when I first got it so much so that 5 of them went and got one as soon as they could!

    • MaxPower
      March 7, 2016

      True that 😀

    • MaxPower
      March 7, 2016

      Adam, they can’t handle the demand.

      Oneplus made it through due to their invitation system.
      without it they couldn’t keep up with the demand.
      And i add that without the invitation system they would have sold 20M of OP1 and not just 1M.
      But obviously they didn’t have the structure to supply it.

      On big numbers only Huawei (among the Chineses) can handle the high demand, not even Xiaomi.

    • balcobomber25
      March 8, 2016

      I credit Xiaomi with a number of sub brands: Honor, OnePlus, Zuk and IUNI and Lenovo acquiring Moto.

    • balcobomber25
      March 8, 2016

      I don’t like the new Mi5 but if they “didn’t give a F” the Mi5 would be a $600 phone. The locked bootloader is because they DO care about their customers. They don’t want resellers to add in viruses, malware and adware to MIUI which ruins the experience for the customer.

    • balcobomber25
      March 8, 2016

      OnePlus could it because their parent company OPPO was already selling in several major European markets.

      Their biggest push right now is India which is one of the largest English speaking countries in the world. They also sell in Malaysia, Philippines, Hong Kong and Singapore which all have a significant portion of the population that speaks English (most were former English colonies). So no offense but this “don’t care about English speaking countries” is pure BS over not having band 20.

    • balcobomber25
      March 8, 2016

      The European market is huge but I am willing to bet less than 10% have even heard of Xiaomi and of that 10% about half have positive images of them. Just go on any Android site that isn’t about Chinese phones and look at the comments about Xiaomi. It would take a lot more than just adding Band 20 for them to achieve signifciant sales in Europe.

      People think it’s so easy for them to produce millions more phones than they already are. They don’t have the production capacity right now to meet the demand in India, China and Brazil nevermind Europe. I often see the “OnePlus did it in a year” comments. OnePlus is wholly owned by OPPO who already sells in several countries around the world.

    • Adam Irvine
      March 8, 2016

      I’ll take that…

      But I will say, that I’m sure they could grab some pretty hefty investment from 3rd parties if necessary to up their production capacity to satisfy the demand..?

    • Adam Irvine
      March 8, 2016

      Yep fair enough, no offence taken… I didn’t explain properly because I was typing it out on my phone at the time and couldn’t be a$$ed to carry on…

      What I meant about the not caring about English speaking countries doesn’t relate to their phones solely, but more as a brand thing i.e. You can’t buy many of the Xiaomi products because of the lack of English language support…

      MiTV Box
      Their TVs
      Router
      Yi Camera

      to name a few…

      Now again, I’m sure that doesn’t mean that they don’t care about English speaking countries so I do take that back to some extent, but I wish they would put more effort in at least! Even if its a decision based on demand for their products in those markets, I think they’re being fed the wrong info if that’s the case because I’m sure the demand is there for all of their products! They just seem to get it right whatever product they make…

    • Adam Irvine
      March 8, 2016

      A quick reply to the last few lines thought Balco… I know you keep banging on about OPPO owning OnePlus etc… But look at it this way (from the consumers eyes…)

      Plenty of people around the globe have heard of OnePlus, but I bet not as many in the WEST have heard of OPPO…

    • balcobomber25
      March 8, 2016

      It doesn’t matter if people heard of it or not. OPPO had the production capacity, the capital, the licensing etc to sell in Europe. Oneplus wasnt starting from scratch, Xiaomi would be. People only heard about OnePlus because of CM. Take away that and they wouldn’t have sold nearly as much there. Just look at the OP2…

    • MaxPower
      March 8, 2016

      Let’s consider OnePlus 1 for a moment:
      A great phone (hardware and software) priced like the cheapest SD400 Samsung.
      They obviously didn’t sell it at cost but there was not much margin of profit like any Samsung,LG, HTC…

      Even if this phone had all the requirements to be a success, there was still a margin of failure that a start-up can’t chance to risk.

      They could easily borrowed money from Oppo but what if the project didn’t take off like they were hoping to?
      They would have been ended up with overstock and that would have messed up their whole project.

      Samsung can handle overstock, they recoup the money with the very first batch of the product.
      The second batch (I’m simplifying to the bone here, please pass me this example) is all profit, the last batches get discounted and then the rest goes on salvage (that’s what basically happens in the retail field).

      Oneplus found a workaround to pass their limitation, if you remember they also pushed mostly the 64GB version through the invite, because it was more profitable.

      As customer I hated their invitation system, but I say kudos to them for have handled that situation that way.

    • denkem
      March 8, 2016

      You didn’t understand me with my locked bootloader argument – the point was to show at bilingual OS only. So if you want (or need) to fully use and understand OS, you have to unlock it. Nothing less and nothing more.

    • balcobomber25
      March 9, 2016

      And you can unlock it, fill out a form and it gets unlocked.

    • denkem
      March 9, 2016

      And we are getting to the point – with OPPO you don’t have to unlock it to use multilingual ROM as it is already there. Also you don’t have to be scared if it voids your warranty or not. Because with Xiaomi you never know 🙂 I remember back in 2014 on XDA when Xiaomi devices were “banned” – yes, you could find some “debloated” roms for their devices, but that was all. Their source codes used to be more secret than nuclear rockets codes. When I look at Xiaomi now, seems to me like they are grabbing things from modules for xposed and then they implement into their fw. Always the same story 🙂 I got into that hype too, and believe me – if mi5 was on the market when they introduced it I would buy it. Lucky me I didn’t 🙂

  8. G'n'T
    March 7, 2016

    At that lower than expected price point, the R9 is looking very tempting. Hopefully that big home button also houses a front finger print scanner.

  9. Guest
    March 7, 2016

    Wow! The 128GB looks tempting. What is the CPU?

    • MaxPower
      March 7, 2016

      Qualcomm Snapdragon 652 (former SD620)
      Octacore 4xA72 + 4xA53 @ 1.8GHZ

  10. G'n'T
    March 7, 2016

    At that lower than expected price point, the R9 is looking very tempting. Hopefully that big home button also houses a front finger print scanner.

  11. March 8, 2016

    The prices of Oppo’s Phone are a little big high in my opinion, but these models looks great.

  12. Móviles Android Chinos
    March 8, 2016

    The prices of Oppo’s Phone are a little big high in my opinion, but these models looks great.