OPPO Find X10 Pro Max has one stellar feature, and I’m not talking about the camera system

Ask OPPO what makes the Find X10 Pro Max special, and you’ll hear about the cameras: three 200MP sensors, a Hasselblad teleconverter and a new imaging engine. It’s a camera-first flagship at Rs 1,99,999, and I’ll get to all of that in my full review. But after using it as my primary phone, the thing that has stuck with me is something else entirely.

That’s down to a number I’m still a little surprised by. In our PCMark battery test, which drains the phone from 100 to 20 percent, the Find X10 Pro Max lasted 20 hours and 43 minutes. That’s the best result we’ve recorded for a flagship, and it leaves every other flagship in its bracket clearly behind.

OPPO Find X10 Pro Max’s battery life leads the pack

To see how big that is, look at the rest of the 1 lakh and above bracket. The closest flagship is the Pixel 11 Pro (review) at 17 hours and 48 minutes, nearly three hours behind. The Find X10 Pro Max lasted at least 16 percent longer than any other flagship in the group, more than 40 percent longer than the Galaxy S26 Ultra (review) and almost 50 percent longer than the Pixel 11 Pro XL (review).

iPhones aren’t in this comparison because PCMark isn’t available on iOS. The Find X10 Pro Max isn’t the longest-lasting phone we’ve tested this year. A few mid-rangers with huge batteries score higher, like the Redmi Note 17 Pro Max (review), which managed almost 24 hours on a 10,000mAh cell. But among flagships, the Find X10 Pro Max is clearly ahead.

Among flagships, the Find X10 Pro Max outlasted its closest rival in our PCMark battery test by nearly three hours.

It’s not just the bigger battery

The obvious explanation is the 8,000mAh cell, and it does a lot of the work. It’s about 13 percent bigger than the Find X9 Ultra’s 7,050mAh battery, and the Find X10 Pro Max lasted 21 percent longer, a gap of more than three and a half hours. But capacity isn’t the whole story. The Find X9 Pro has a 7,500mAh battery, only about 7 percent smaller, and the Find X10 Pro Max lasted 29 percent longer than it.

So something else is helping too. I believe it’s a mix of the 2nm Dimensity 9600 Pro chipset and whatever OPPO has done to ColorOS 17 to rein in background drain, though I can’t tell you how much each one contributes. What I can tell you is that it doesn’t look like a slow chip sipping power, since the phone also posted the highest AnTuTu score in its bracket at 4.2 million.

The gains also seem to show up in everyday use rather than under heavy load. When we pushed the phone with 30 minutes each of Call of Duty and BGMI at maximum settings, it dropped 5 percent each time, which is in line with the rest of the pack. A 60-minute YouTube test cost 3 percent, which is excellent when compared to rivals that dropped between 5-6 percent. Mixed, everyday use is closer to what most of us do all day, and that’s where this phone pulls ahead.

The battery life lets you forgive the charging speed

The one area OPPO didn’t push as far is charging. The Find X10 Pro Max takes 82 minutes to go from 20 to 100 percent over 80W wired charging, which is slower than most phones in its bracket. OPPO’s own Find X9 Ultra, with 100W charging, did the same job in 50 minutes, and the Vivo X300 Ultra and Xiaomi 17 Ultra needed 36 and 40 minutes, respectively.

Did it matter to me during my use? Less than it should have. Fast charging is a safety net for the day your phone is about to die at 4 pm, and a phone that still has plenty left after a full day rarely gets there. I’d still have liked OPPO to bring over the 100W charging from the Find X9 Ultra, because 82 minutes feels long if you do forget to plug it in. But I don’t see myself missing the speed when I’m plugging the phone in far less often.

In my first couple of days with the phone, the battery dropped only around 40 percent through a full day, which was enough to carry it through almost the entire next day too. That makes two full days on a single charge realistic, backed by a PCMark result that no other flagship in our sheet has matched. I’ll be testing whether that holds up over weeks of normal use, including heavy camera days, in my full review.

That doesn’t mean the camera story is any less interesting, and I’m still working through it. Stay tuned for my full review, where I’ll go deeper into the cameras, the charging and whether this battery keeps up its stellar performance over time.