Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “OnePlus 11 Review: An Impressive Phone From An Inconsistent Brand”.
This video is sponsored by telomobile. Most smartphones follow a predictable path year after year, adding features and capabilities until they’re, so capable there’s well, there’s not much more to improve upon, but, as OnePlus has reminded us time and again, it does not make most smartphones. If you’re a longtime OnePlus fan you’ve seen major changes every single year, sometimes the phone has wireless charging. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes you can buy it at T-Mobile, sometimes not so much. The telephoto camera changes from 2x to 3x back to 2x. The USB port on the power brick goes from a type to type c back to a as we learned last year, even the signature alert slider isn’t safe, having been deleted from the in-betweener OnePlus 10t. Only to reappear here the good news, despite the maddening inconsistency of the brand that built it, the OnePlus 11, is actually a very solid smartphone refreshingly, devoid of a pro moniker. It doesn’t need and with more positive than negative surprises, hiding beneath its glossy surface. That gloss is Gorilla, Glass, five on the back victus up front and it’s protected by a factory installed screen protector that I’d like a lot more. If it wasn’t so cheap as it is, it started to bubble and scratch within days of my unboxing.
So I ditched it that glass has been merged with the expected aluminum and forged into the expected elongated candy bar coated, with an oleophobic finish that doesn’t quite keep up with the fingerprint problem. I buy the matte black one if you’re worried about that, there’s a rather uncommon ip64 protection rating, indicating its dust proof and resistant to splashing water from any direction. That explains the gasket on the SIM tray, which phone jugglers will be happy to know is double-sided to accommodate two 5G SIM cards. Otherwise, the only standout in a physical sense is the obvious attention lavished on the camera, module, which is big – and I dare say, quite beautiful – and an outlandish kind of way. There’S enough detail here that you don’t actually take all of it in the first time.
Your eye lands on it only with repeated exposure does the coin like reeded edge around its perimeter pop out and only in person. Can you truly appreciate the sense of flow that’s been baked into the stainless steel? I like it. Well we’re already talking about it. So, let’s not bury the lead. The camera array here packs a new spectral sensor with 13 channels now up from six or eight on prior models, which OnePlus says, lets it more accurately reproduce color for comparison shots I put the 11 up against my go-to still photo.
Shooter, the pixel 7 Pro and while I fully admit it might just be that OnePlus is over saturating a bit. I was surprised by how often I preferred the OnePlus result to the pixels and apps in any context at all. I really appreciated much of what the 11 gave me before during and after shots of my dad’s famous chili recipe modified, of course by me, slotted, shelving for tea accessories at a local coffee shop, modified also by me, Brooklyn San Diego, on the ground in the air. I got a lot of good stuff in my three weeks with this phone camera and now shutter speed is still a challenge fast. Moving subjects had a dimly lit bar that just opened in my neighborhood were tough to freeze in the frame, and the same was true of this deeply unfortunate selfie but in admittedly easier static shots of the same bar. The OnePlus did quite well and in a sunset, selfie setting its front-facing camera, preserved more of the warmth and life in the scene than the pixel’s cooler rendering, and that makes the compromises. Oneplus has settled for all the more frustrating. I said it before a 2X telephoto on a 2023 phone is a waste of space and that’s borne out when we start zooming in the quality starts buckling at 5x, bounces back sometimes at 10x, but then really falls off a cliff at the maximum 20 times Zoom. Where to be fair, even the pixel can’t always deliver a winner, but at least the pixel is, in the conversation, combined with the edge and dynamic range that you just knew was going to go to the Google pixel. The aforementioned blur problems with fast moving subjects and the fact that the pixel’s video is a slightly less offensive flavor of bad well um. I would take the pixel camera if I were forced to choose one of these when you remember that OnePlus paid camera Legend Hasselblad 150 million dollars to kick off their strategic partnership three years ago, you’re justified in wondering whether it was all worth it. Here’S my answer from a results standpoint absolutely not, and I’m gon na drop this camera the minute.
The review is done and I don’t think I’m gon na miss it, but from a strategy standpoint I do think it was worth it because, while this may be a compromised camera at least it’s not a boring one new this year is a portrait mode. That’S specifically tuned to replicate certain Hasselblad lenses, also nowhere a handful of Hasselblad Masters mode, color filters to amp those portraits up or lend some attitude to your landscape. Shots. You’Ve still got the Pro Camera controls with raw capability and my favorite that weirdo x-pan mode that I last covered in my Oppo Find end review.
Oh, let’s not forget, no matter what camera mode you’re in a custom capture sound based on the distinctive mechanical shutter release from a Hasselblad camera are the gimmicks 100 percent fun gimmicks, so they soothe the sting or at least take the focus off those photographic compromises. If that happens to enough people at the purchase Point well, I guess the thinking on oneplus’s part was that 150 million dollars was worth it and you know I would wager that that’s the way the numbers have probably gone. You know people often ask me how I keep so many phones in my daily rotation. Big part of the answer is a lot of SIM cards like this one from my sponsor telemobile over the past two months from Brooklyn to Raleigh, to Vegas to Punta Gorda and Beyond.
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Mr mobile sent you one place. Oneplus doesn’t compromise is in performance and for the first time in a while, I can say that I actually noticed this time when I was shooting with the camera. I never missed a shot because I was waiting on the phone, which is more than I can say for the sometimes Pokey pixel. You definitely feel the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 and the upgraded Ram that OnePlus packed in here, which is amped Up by smarter memory management and a very fast, stunningly beautiful display that I immediately forced to maximum resolution because well that’s the way I figure the Target customer Will use it and note that didn’t impair my battery life? I always made it to the end of a day, even a heavy one, with no problem and when the time came to recharge. I was absolutely floored by that charging speed. Remember I skipped the OnePlus 10t.
So seeing a phone with a 5000 milliamp hour battery go from zero to full in less than half an hour with a charger that comes in the box at no additional charge, I was, I was genuinely stunned, almost as stunning, but far less fortunate. Dropping the phone on a wireless charger to be greeted by the flashing light of an error code. Look I don’t mean to harp on this because I know it doesn’t matter to some people, but this is why it’s hard to trust OnePlus.
This company resisted adding wireless charging for years and when the criticism became too loud to ignore OnePlus finally said what some of you are probably saying in the comments right now: wireless charging sucks because it’s too slow so OnePlus built a phone with wireless charging. That was faster than anything else sold in America, bra freaking vo, I said. Finally, I also said, and now that those OnePlus 9 customers are ready to upgrade well, the charging docks that they may already own are useless to charge the OnePlus 11, because there’s no wireless charging of any kind same for the extra cables for the dash. I mean warp, I mean Super Boop chargers they may have bought, which have switched back to USB a from C from a and I’m still missing the pop-up selfie camera that gave me the uninterrupted display canvas that OnePlus taught me to love only to then cruelly yank. It away in favor of a generic hole, punch decisions like this just reinforce the perception that as cool as its phones sometimes are OnePlus just isn’t capable of staying consistent that as much as it likes to say that it’s a different kind of company that truly listens To its community, the reality is that it’s mostly just another phone maker, slowly being merged into its sister company Oppo itself, just one brand in a portfolio of assets owned by yet another multinational Goliath. But if you don’t care about any of that, the good news is that the good news is still just as good as it was at the top.
The OnePlus 11 is slick and Speedy, and, while you can’t get it at a carrier store in the states, the unlocked price is competitive enough. It’S a buck under 700 to start topping out at 799. If you want more RAM and storage or you just like the color green, that’s proximate to current pixel pricing, depending where you shop and the OnePlus 11 gets enough right that I do think it deserves to be there this year and to end on one last piece Of potentially good news, it should last a long time too OnePlus promises four years of Android platform and five years of Android security updates. A level of software support longevity that, up to this point, only Apple and Samsung have committed to.
Of course, I say potential because whether that actually comes to pass will depend on whether OnePlus actually decides to pick a direction and follow through for once, given the company’s track record. I’D pick another reason to buy this phone, but fortunately, in this case there are plenty. This review was produced following three weeks with a OnePlus 11 review sample provided by OnePlus, but I never give manufacturers any editorial control over my review content. The company did not approve, contribute to or even see this video prior to publication. The loan sponsor of this review is telomobile from Michael Fisher, thanks for watching and stay mobile.
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