Update, Oct 28th:

Follow the handset’s announcement last week, the OPPO R9s is now on sale in China with a modest 2,799 Yuan (approximately $415) price tag. The smartphone is available to purchase through a variety of offline and online stores in the country, including OPPO’s official website. Unfortunately, there’s no sign of the OPPO R9s Plus just yet, which was announced at the same time as the R9s. OPPO says that we will have to wait until December for that model to go on sale. In the meantime, the R9s is available in rose gold and regular gold color options. The company says that it has stocked up on 1 million of the handsets in advance, in order to keep up with consumer demand. There’s good reason for such a claim too, as OPPO has just become China’s number one smartphone manufacturer for the first time, according to IDC research data. The vendor’s market share is up a notable 5.8% year-on-year in the country, securing the company a 17.5% market share or 20.1 million shipments for Q3 2016. Vivo came in second place with 19.2 million shipments and a 16.7% share, followed by Huawei (18 million, 15.7%), Xiaomi (10 million, 8.7%), and Apple (8.2 million, 7.1%). Importantly, OPPO and Vivo have been on upward trends in the past year, while Xiaomi and Apple have seen sales in the country fall by around 50 percent. iCharts We’ll have to wait and see how long OPPO will take to release the smartphone in other regions, and hopefully the phone will make it as far as the US. For a closer look at the handset’s hardware specifications, keep on reading.

Original, Oct 19th:

If you’ve been eager for 16 million pixel selfies, OPPO has you covered. At an event in China, the Chinese manufacturer lifted the lid on its new R9s and R9s Plus smartphones, both of which feature 16MP front and rear cameras.

The R9s is the smaller of the two metal-clad devices, with a 5.5-inch 1080p display and Snapdragon 625 processor, while the R9s Plus comes with a 6-inch 1080p screen and Snapdragon 653 chipset.

Similar to the OPPO F1s series, the handsets have a particular focus on photography. They feature a Sony IMX398 sensor with f/1.7 aperture on the rear and a 16-megapixel front-facing camera with f/2.0 aperture. The smaller R9s lacks OIS and dual-LED flash, but these are in place on the larger R9s Plus.

Both R9s and R9s Plus make use of a combined fingerprint sensor / home button and benefit from OPPO’s proprietary flash-charging system VOOC – said to boost devices by 75 percent in 30 minutes – for their respective 3,010mAh and 4,000mAh batteries.

Rounding off the vital specs is 4GB RAM for the R9s and 6GB RAM for the R9s Plus, in addition to 64GB internal storage space expandable via microSD card (up to 128GB).

The devices will run Android 6.0 Marshmallow out of the box with OPPO’s ColorOS 3.0 skin on top when they go on sale – the OPPO R9s is launching in China on October 28 and the R9s Plus following in December. There’s currently no word on US pricing or availability, but we’ll let you know when we learn more.

What are your thoughts on the new OPPO duo? Let us know in the comments.