Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “OnePlus 8 Pro Review: Finally a Flagship!”.
Hey, what’s up guys mkbhd here we’re back and yeah, you got me. I’Ve been using the oneplus 8 pro daily for about two weeks now and i got ta say they did it. They finally did it. They just went ahead and made a flagship like a bonafide, complete feeling flagship phone. Finally, now there are still a few snags and i will nitpick about those because that’s what you do in a phone that starts now at 900 bucks, but still, nevertheless, really happy to see them finally commit to something like this, and it’s been a long time coming.
So today, as you may have seen, oneplus launched their newest highest end phone. It’S the oneplus 8 pro taking yet another step up in the ladder of their phones getting slightly more expensive every year. But alongside it, they also dropped the oneplus 8, which is sort of more like a premium mid-range phone that starts at 6.99 so that that will be its own, separate video that will come out later. Once i fully daily drive this phone switch to it, give it that treatment.
Um! That’S going to be a tough video to make without all kinds of reflections, but definitely subscribe to see that video first, when it comes out hit the red button below. If you haven’t already that’s coming up, but until then we’re talking about this guy, the eight pro the flagship, so the bleeding edge high end specs shouldn’t be a surprise. When we see a new one plus phone, i mean beside the fact that they slowly tease out all the specs the weeks leading up to the phone’s launch. It’S kind of what they’re known for you know, placing what feels like the highest and best available specs for the highest end performance, all in one phone, and we still have a very familiar oneplus, design and experience.
Here too, they still have their logo on the back and still things like the alert slider that i’m surprised, more phones haven’t copied yet still oxygen os one of my favorite clean android skins with all of its features, but wait, stop pause. What have the nitpicks always been with oneplus phones, one is that their cameras are always just not quite measuring up to the flagships and two that they always tend to leave out these sort of fringe features that don’t feel essential but still feel like you should have Them if you’re gon na claim that you’re a flagship things like wireless charging and ip68 certification, well, guess what they finally went and added this year, an improved camera, wireless charging and an official ip68 water and dust resistance rating. Finally, but you know what let me start from the top with the new design for the oneplus 8 pro, you can see it here.
I really like a lot of it. Uh the new matte finish and this blue color are pretty sick. I don’t have a lot of matte blue phones, but this one is nice, it’s punchy and clean.
So it’s easily my favorite blue phone – and this finish is nice. It doesn’t really show too many fingerprints. Of course, you can also grab this ultra matte tear down skin from our channel sponsor dbrand, which also feels great, and you can see the wireless charging coil in the back plus. It’S also got a few easter eggs hidden in the design which are pretty dope, but anyway, yeah the shape of the phone is boxy, which i’ve always really liked, plus there’s this new little design accent ridge into the top of the phone. So generally, i think it’s one of the absolute better looking phones out there, but i still get to nitpick because, like i said 900 phone, that’s what’s gon na happen, this camera bump, while it’s not as ugly as some of the others out there. It still is pretty big, like it’s annoyingly rocks on a table big for sticking out of the phone that much so i got ta point that out, but again you can put a case on it and get rid of that. Then you get around to the front and you’re looking at the new display, which is an upgrade to pretty much all the ways that count, but also technically, technically a slight downgrade too. So this is a 6.78 inch. 1440P 120 hertz amoled display, and it’s really really good, oneplus and displaymates say it’s their most color accurate display ever you know the best, a plus they’ve ever given, etc, etc. They’Re kind of starting to sound a lot like dxomark. At this point, look i believe you, the color’s great, the calibration is great, but what i notice more often is number one. It’S definitely a lot brighter than last year, which is sweet and then of course, the flagship feature for 2020 for all these new flagships, which is the smooth 120 hertz refresh rate plus 240 hertz touch sampling rate, and it is awesome.
I’Ve been looking forward to this couple specifics on it one. Yes, it does let you run both high refresh rate and high resolution at the same time and that’s exactly what i’ve been doing 1440p at 120 hertz at the expense of battery. But you know live your life, then! Yes, it is technically a variable refresh rate.
So, even when you have it set to 120 hertz just like last year, it will step down to 60 hertz, occasionally when you’re just sitting around not doing anything or if you’re, on a home screen or, if you’re in some app that won’t use that, like waze Or google maps or snapchat or a game or something then yes, there is still an optical fingerprint reader. Underneath that screen it doesn’t appear to be any bigger or faster, but still fairly reliable. For me and yes, the edges are still curved over both sides, and this is my least favorite feature of this display.
I still get accidental touches like really i i realize the idea is, it looks cool and it’s edgeless and futuristic, but i think it’s time to slow that down and i think samsung’s perfected, that balance this year between curving the glass a little bit and still having A flat working surface with no accidental touches so just saying, and also by now from all these beauty angles of the screen. Certainly, you’ve noticed that hole, punch camera in the top left corner for the selfie shooter for the oneplus 8 pro hot take the pop-up camera was the pop-up. Camera was better than the hole punch, and this is a downgrade like i get that the pop-up camera was a moving part.
I was the first to point that out a moving part and a phone is always a part to pay attention to, but we haven’t had any durability problems with them for the past two years, we’ve seen them in phones and, of course, having that part hidden inside Allows you a fully uninterrupted screen with no hole punch and when it closes down into the phone and you’re, not using it, it’s blocked by the rest of the phone. So that’s an added security benefit, so it seems like the pop-up camera was the way to go. So why do they remove the pop-up camera and change back to a hole punch? I don’t know, maybe to look a little bit more, like the other flagships, maybe to save a little bit of money, maybe maybe to guarantee the ip68 water certification, maybe just a little bit of all these things also side note.
I would like to see some of these phones offering 120 hertz screens also offer a 90 hertz mode in between 60 and 120.. So we already know we can step down to 1080p to save battery life. I think it would be nice to be able to step down to 90 hertz to save battery life too. Just an idea. Some of the gaming phones have done this already, but i want to see more flagships doing it too. So there’s a free idea.
So all of the oneplus 8 internal specs are high end top end. You know snapdragon 865, 8 or 12 gigs of fast lpddr5 ram. It’S that super fast ufs, 3.0 storage and the battery also gets an upgrade because on top of all that, it’s a 5g capable phone with 120 hertz big display. So you get a 4 510 milliamp hour battery.
It’S not the biggest battery in the world. But for me it did just fine. Like i said, i’ve been using the phone with my high brightness high gps use at 1440p, 120 hertz and i’ve been getting to the end of the day pretty comfortably.
I could kill this phone in a day and i’ve noticed that, but if i didn’t want to, i would step down to 1080p and i would save a lot of pixel pushing and a lot of battery and that’s a nice backup to have generally. For me. I’M talking about like a six hour screen on time for this phone six and a half hours.
If you want to reference back to other videos, that’s really good uh, but also something to note is for me. The charging habits of your phone can change what you think of the battery and oneplus phones are known for having fast charging this one’s no exception. You still have their high speed warp charge 30t comes in the box and that can get you from zero to half battery in like 25 minutes. But what’s new to this phone is wireless charging. Finally, oneplus is putting the little charging coil behind the glass back and enabling wireless charging, and, on top of all that, even better, it’s fast wireless charging, so 30 watt wireless charging is what they’re, claiming and sharing with everyone which is really nice. That’S fast! That’S going to top up from zero to half battery in half an hour, but there’s a catch.
You only get fast, 30 watt wireless charging with this phone. With this exact s, brand new 70 dollar, one plus wireless charging stand you need this accessory to get 30 watts wireless charging on this phone, and that’s because it is not 30 watts of purely qi. Wireless charging, so oneplus has worked on this special high-end wireless charging. Tech and to be fair, it works exactly as advertised. The stand is nice. It has some little quiet fans in there and it does some special voltage and thermal management to get the peak 30 watts wireless charging out of it.
But if you put another qi enabled phone on that wireless charger, it charges slower and if you put the oneplus 8 pro on any other qi wireless charger, it charges slower because that tech was proprietary. So the oneplus 8 pro still supports regular qi. Wireless charging, but only universally at 5 watts, which is pretty slow. It’S not it’s. I mean it works, but it’s like it’s pretty slow. So for me, i’m not going to replace the you can’t see it, but i’m not going to replace the wireless charger at my desk with the oneplus one, because i have other qi accessories, like my airpods pro or my iphone or literally any other chi phone that I want to charge faster wirelessly, so i’m just going to stick to wired warp charging in the car and pretty much everywhere. I need it, but at home i have a pixel stand at my desk and i can just leave it there to slowly top up overnight and wake up with 100. So i’m glad to have wireless charging, but that there is that little snag. So then there are the cameras, quad cameras on the back of this phone, and here are the numbers which maybe mean less than ever these days. But it’s a new 48 megapixel main camera with ois.
Then there’s a 48 megapixel ultra wide with macro mode, which fun fact is the same sensor as the primary camera from the oneplus 7 pro then there’s a 3x telephoto camera and believe it or not. The fourth one is a 5 megapixel color filter camera. So that’s your array and i’ll just go ahead and say it. The oneplus 8 pro is a flagship quality camera right in line with galaxy s20 and huawei p40 and just short of the pixel and the iphone there.
I said it: it’s spitting out sharp 12 megapixel images with nice, dynamic range and colors a bit overexposed, sometimes that’s where it misses, but generally, these are nice photos. Also, sorry in advance for slightly less outdoor photos. The whole shelter in place. Quarantine thing clearly means.
I also have less people subjects but yeah. You can tell this, isn’t a confident nice camera no autofocus issues at all, especially when you give it some light, and even sometimes when you don’t it’s nice, i like it, you are still gon na get more fringing with close-up subjects. I take a lot of close-up. Subject: photos and that’s the downside of a big one over 1.4 inch sensor, but again, that just seems like par for the course for flagship cameras.
Right now, big sensor usually sharp photos but get some fringing when your photos are close up subjects. The night mode is pretty good, which is nice. Max zoom is 30x from that telephoto camera. I don’t think it’s very usable at 30x, it’s barely passable galaxy s20.
Ultra is still going to be the zoom champ for that sort of range, but hey 10x is fine and 3x is definitely usable and i have pretty much no use for the hat. Color filter camera uh, the selfie camera you guys have asked for it. I usually don’t get too into the selfie camera and smart phones, but i’ll do it i’ll start taking selfies. Now it’s part of the job, and i got ta say this: one still seems to struggle with proper exposure, and maybe that’s gon na happen more for people with darker skin, like myself, but other than that.
It’S still looking pretty good with detail, and video from this camera is also good, especially with color and stabilization at 4k, and you can see no 8k video here, but you know you’re not touching the iphone when it comes to the absolute best video quality in a Phone right now, but this is still good flagship quality. Color me impressed, i think, uh. I think some people took me saying that the camera was the worst part of the phone last year as like some sort of horrific flaw in it. When really it was like, the rest of the phone was so incredibly good that the okay camera was the downside, but again now we’re looking at a flagship. Quality, camera and they’ve also been notoriously pretty good, with updating them over time and getting better with camera quality. That’S been, nice plus there’ll, probably be a gcam mod in the next couple weeks. Hopefully, if you want those sweet, pixel contrasty photos so yeah thumbs up on the camera, and then oneplus phones have long been some of my favorites specifically because of the software and optimized experience. This is oxygen os on top of android 10 and that’s no exception here. For this phone there’s tons of little tweaks and optimizations and improvements and little tightened up animations all over the place, but it never feels overloaded, like some other overlays. They actually removed the oxygen os shelf to the left of the home screen and it’s just google’s discover page now, like a pixel and there’s really high quality haptics in this phone again, i love that and then in software there’s just a couple new software features here And there that are nicely executed, there’s a new dark mode; 2.0 theme, some new dynamic, wallpapers tucked in there and just a lot of aesthetic tweaks generally, but they do a good job of not feeling overly cartoony and then there’s a new motion: graphics, smoothing toggle! That works with certain apps.
You can see the whole compatibility list here for my phone and it worked pretty well when i tried it for like two minutes, but i feel like i’m against motion, smoothing like on principle at my core. So i turned that off pretty quick. But you might remember that, what’s on my phone video with the galaxy s20, where i go through all the things that i do, the little subtle software tweaks to really make it my daily driver and make it behave the way i want that list of things is So much shorter on a phone like the oneplus 8 pro or a pixel and yeah this. This is going to be my new daily driver, so long story short, they finally made a flagship. They finally did it they’re charging flagship money and they’re, offering pretty much everything. A flagship would uh in a bona fide complete kind of predictable feeling way, but still it’s what we’re looking forward to matter of fact, let me put my predictions down for the oneplus 8t pro that’ll probably come out in like six to eight months, you’re, probably looking At snapdragon 865 plus maybe a little extra ram, uh, probably faster charging faster qi. Wireless charging. I also think maybe they could use a little bit of a darker coating on the selfie camera up in the corner and maybe a special mclaren edition phone and that’s it. But in the meantime this becomes one of the easiest phones to recommend period, even though it’s the most expensive oneplus phone ever, which is a nice headline to write. It still undercuts a lot of the other flagships that it’s now at feature parity with, and i think this is definitely the one you should pick of those either way.
That’S been it thanks for watching catch, you guys, the next one peace .