So This is Peak Smartphone

Summary

Using the Oppo Find X9 Ultra as a launching point, Marques Brownlee argues we have arrived at “peak slab phone” — the moving goalpost has effectively been reached for the traditional non-folding flagship. He frames the case through his five pillars (display, battery, build, performance, camera) and walks through how each of the first four watermarks has been substantively achieved: large flat bright OLEDs with one-nit lows and high-frequency PWM dimming; silicon-carbon batteries pushing 6,000-7,000+ mAh that turn flagships into two-day phones; Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5-class chips with smooth software; and IP69 metal-rail builds with slightly improved-but-still-glass screens.

The unsolved pillar is camera, and Brownlee argues it can never be fully solved — it’s a battle against physics. The X9 Ultra makes the case anyway: a 200MP main, a 200MP 3x telephoto (bigger than most phones’ main sensor), a 50MP 10x periscope, a 50MP ultrawide, a dedicated True Color sensor, and a Hasselblad partnership. He owns the actual Hasselblad X2D Mark II that this phone is supposedly modeled after and reminds viewers they’re “opposite cameras” — the X2D has no computational photography and not even a video mode, while the X9 Ultra exists to “minimize the misses and maximize the makes” no matter the user’s skill.

The conclusion: the camera watermark has shifted from “as good as a real camera” to “takes a really good photo or video any time,” and we’re effectively there. Plus Hasselblad/Zeiss-style lens attachments and battery grips push it further. He compares it to the iPad-as-laptop debate — versatile, “good enough” for nearly everyone, but never a true replacement for the dedicated tool.

Highlights

”Peak slab phone is a moving goalpost”

“And it’s got me thinking a lot about peak slab phone, which is of course a moving goalpost.” — Marques Brownlee, 0:29

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”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 camera, like if you can ace all five of those things, then you have a great phone.” — Marques Brownlee, 1:50

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”These phones are just too good to die in a single day”

“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 going to work no matter what.” — Marques Brownlee, 3:09

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”Hasselblad and X9 Ultra are opposite cameras”

“I actually own the Hasselblad X2D Mark II, these are, these are like opposite cameras… The X2D Mark II is a professional, very deliberate camera that doesn’t have computational photography. It doesn’t even have a video mode.” — Marques Brownlee, 8:51

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”Minimize the misses, maximize the makes”

“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.” — Marques Brownlee, 9:46

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Key Points

• Oppo Find X9 Ultra specs (0:19) - Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, 7,000mAh battery, 6.8” OLED, 200MP camera system
• The five pillars (1:50) - Display, battery, build, performance, camera
• Display watermark achieved (2:19) - Large flat bright OLEDs, sub-1-nit lows, high-frequency PWM, optional privacy displays
• Silicon carbon battery boom (3:09) - In two years flagship batteries jumped from 5,000 to 7,000+ mAh
• Two-day phones are normal (3:09) - 7-8 hours screen-on time and ending the day with 60% left
• Performance plateau (4:43) - Year-over-year gains only show up in benchmarks and graphics-heavy games
• Build = solved (5:09) - Metal rails, IP69 dust/water, “slightly improved glass every year that’s still glass”
• Camera is the unfinished pillar (5:25) - Smartphone presentations went from 1-2 slides to 20+ on cameras alone
• The 17-phone shoot experiment (5:39) - Shot the same picture on every iPhone, Samsung, and Pixel generation back-to-back
• Camera watermark is changing (6:24) - From “match a real camera” (impossible — physics) to “always get a good shot”
• X9 Ultra camera array (7:13) - 200MP main + 200MP 3x tele + 50MP 10x + 50MP ultrawide + dedicated True Color sensor
• 3x tele bigger than most main sensors (7:29) - The 200MP telephoto sensor is bigger than most phones’ main camera
• Hasselblad partnership is mostly aesthetic (8:38) - Knurling, accent colors, Hasselblad lens emulation modes
• Computational photography defined (10:21) - Trying to make the phone “not let you take a bad picture or video”
• Lens attachments and battery grips (10:41) - Hasselblad and Zeiss-style accessories with two-stage shutters and 400mm zoom
• Smartphone-as-camera ≈ iPad-as-laptop (11:45) - Versatile and good enough for almost everyone, but not a true 1:1 replacement
• Auto Focus episode shot on X9 Ultra (12:54) - Linked the channel’s latest video showing what the X9 Ultra footage looks like

Mentions

Companies

• Oppo (0:06) - Maker of the Find X9 Ultra and Find N6
• Samsung (0:06) - S26 Ultra mentioned as comparison
• Hasselblad (6:57) - Camera partner; X2D Mark II sensor and lens emulation
• Vivo (11:03) - X100 Pro with Zeiss collaboration on lens accessories
• Zeiss (11:03) - Vivo’s optical partner
• Apple (12:00) - iPad-as-laptop analogy
• HTC (3:09) - HTC Thunderbolt referenced as the bad-old-days battery example
• Sony (9:24) - RX100 referenced as the threshold above which dedicated cameras still beat phones

Products & Technologies

• Oppo Find X9 Ultra (0:06) - The phone in hand; current “peak slab”
• Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra (0:06) - Cited as feeling “not so Ultra” compared
• Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 (0:19) - Chipset
• Silicon carbon batteries (3:09) - The technology pushing capacity past 6,000-7,000mAh
• Hasselblad X2D Mark II (8:51) - Brownlee owns one; the X9 Ultra is “based on” it
• Sony RX100 (9:24) - Reference threshold for “smartphone can replace it”
• Privacy display (2:57) - Special display feature emerging on bleeding-edge phones
• PWM dimming (2:48) - High-frequency dimming for low-light comfort
• True Color camera (7:40) - Oppo’s dedicated white-balance sensor
• MKBHD Auto Focus (12:46) - Brownlee’s smartphone-only camera channel; latest episode shot on X9 Ultra

People

• Stuff Made Here (9:46) - YouTuber referenced for the self-moving basketball hoop analogy

Surprising Quotes

“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.” — Marques Brownlee, 3:09

“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.” — Marques Brownlee, 7:29

“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.” — Marques Brownlee, 8:51

“The smartphone will never, I’ll just say it, will never actually replace a high-end professional camera at what it does. It’s just physics.” — Marques Brownlee, 9:24

“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.” — Marques Brownlee, 11:14

Transcript

Marques Brownlee: 0:00 So, this is peak slab phone. For now, anyway. We got to talk about it.

Marques Brownlee: 0:06 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, 7,000 milliamp hour battery, 6.8 inch super bright OLED, and an insane 200 megapixel camera system on the back. It is ridiculous.

Marques Brownlee: 0:29 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.

Marques Brownlee: 0:54 And that’s really exciting. Peak slab phone though, is 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.

Marques Brownlee: 1:18 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. Ultra-wide 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.

Marques Brownlee: 1:46 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 camera, 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.

Marques Brownlee: 2:15 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, 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.

Marques Brownlee: 2:48 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 one 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.

Marques Brownlee: 3:09 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 3000 milliamp hour barrier that all these flagships hit and then 3500 and it just kept getting better and better. The average screen on time for a good phone before it died went from 2 hours to 3 to 4 and then 5. Anybody spending 5 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 going to work no matter what. I gave my battery award last year to a phone that could get me 7 to 8 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 a 50-watt wireless charging like this with the right accessory. So basically we got there. These phones have incredible batteries kind of no matter what. Box checked. Watermark reached.

Marques Brownlee: 4:43 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 going to 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 I, you know, performance is definitely box checked.

Marques Brownlee: 5:09 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.

Marques Brownlee: 5:25 So then there’s great cameras. 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. I 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…

Marques Brownlee: 6:00 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 the 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 this huge plateau multicamera system just dominating the back of the phone.

Marques Brownlee: 6:24 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 at getting close. Like this X9 Ultra is the most ridiculous camera system I’ve ever seen and next year, sure, there’s probably going to be an even more ridiculous one, but let’s look at this.

Marques Brownlee: 6:57 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.

Marques Brownlee: 7:21 200 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 ultra-wide 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.

Marques Brownlee: 7:57 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 the finalized 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.

Marques Brownlee: 8:30 But there is a difference there, there’s a difference between super versatile and as good quality as 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.

Marques Brownlee: 8:57 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. That’s why it’s called computational photography.

Marques Brownlee: 9:15 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. It’s just physics. You know, 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.

Marques Brownlee: 9:46 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.

Marques Brownlee: 10:21 A lot of us, you know, enthusiasts don’t love that look. So if you can do that without the overprocessed 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.

Marques Brownlee: 10:41 Now, 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 X100 Pro are at the forefront of that with these attachments that are honestly kind of insane. Like Oppo has it with Hasselblad, Vivo’s 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.

Marques Brownlee: 11:30 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- it’s a- 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…

Marques Brownlee: 12:00 The 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.

Marques Brownlee: 12:36 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. Uh, but I will also keep shooting the Autofocus 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.

Marques Brownlee: 13:03 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.