OnePlus 8 Pro review: high expectations
I have the new OnePlus 8 Pro here. I've also got the new regular OnePlus 8, but I've been reviewing the OnePlus 8 Pro for a little while now, and it is a great, I was about to say it'sa great little phone, but this is not a little phone. This is a great, big phone. Anyway, as I've been reviewing the 8 Pro, I keep thinking about what we expect with OnePlus phones now, because the list is getting pretty long. We expect great screens, decentbattery life, fast charging. So a lot of what I'mgonna end up talking about are the things you might nothave expected from OnePlus, which on this phone is wireless charging and IP68 water resistance. Also, you never know whatto expect with OnePlus when it comes to the cameras, so we're gonna talk about that a lot too. One thing you usually expect from OnePlus is a relatively low price, and OnePlus is still undercuttingSamsung with this phone, but it has a starting price of 899, which means that the 8 Pro iskind of an expensive device. If you're looking for somethinga little bit less expensive but still new, take a lookat Jon Porter's review of the regular OnePlus8, which starts at 699, we'll link it down inthe stuff down there. Anyway, the thing about OnePlus is there's always very,very high expectations for these phones, and thequestion about the 8 Pro is, can it meet them? (soft music) So real quick, I wannatalk about the stuff that you could expect froma flagship phone in 2020, including from a flagship OnePlus phone. If they had screwed any of this up, we'd really call 'em out, but they didn't, so we can run through it really fast. First is build quality, I think the build quality inthis thing is really great. I already mentioned that ithas IP68 water resistance. I also love this sort oftranslucent matte back on the back here. The screen, of course, coversalmost the entire front of it. It's very fast, it has a Snapdragon 865 with either eight or 12 Gigs of RAM, or 128 or 256 of storage.
One thing I do wanna call out, though, is I really do like OxygenOS, which is OnePlus's customversion of Android, and that's because the stuffthat they add on top of Android is usually just there tocontrol the phone itself or to control the specialfeatures that OnePlus does. It's not there to tryand get you locked in to some other random ecosystemthat you don't care about. Samsung. I don't actually have asecond camera over there, 'cause I'm shooting from home. Let's move on. Now, one thing you haven'talways been able to expect out of OnePlus phones is a great screen. But they solved that inthe last couple of years and this year with the OnePlus 8 Pro, they just knocked it out of the park. This is an amazing screen. It is 6.78 inches, whichis honestly too big for me, but if you like big phones, you'll probably be happy with it.
They did a hole punch in thecorner, which I actually prefer because it doesn't haveweird mechanical stuff with the pop-up selfie camera. The bezels are very, verytiny in the top and the bottom and it wraps around tothe left and the right. But the big news, of course, is that it has a 120Hz refresh rate, if you want it, andyou definitely want it, because any phone in this class needs to have a high refresh rate screen. It makes scrolling so much nicer looking. The animations are smoother, everything is better at a120Hz, highly recommend it. One thing OnePlus lets youdo that Samsung doesn't is use that 120Hz at itsfull resolution 1440 by 3168. And you can do it, but it will definitelyhurt your battery life, so I kinda recommend you don't. I've been leaving this at1080 about half the time and I haven't noticed that big a hit and I've definitely noticedthe improved battery life. OnePlus is also reallyproud of the color accuracy on this screen, I thinkit looks pretty good. They also have added someother weird features, like there's a motion smoothing feature for videos inside Netflixor inside Amazon Prime, and that sounds awfulbecause motion smoothing is definitely awful on your television, on the phone though itactually didn't offend me quite as much, and I'm not sure why. Anyway, I recommend you leave it off also, because I also noticed ahit on the battery life when I had it turned on. Now, another thing that we were expecting, because we saw all of the leaks, is that this is thevery first OnePlus phone to support wireless charging, so we'll put it on thecharger and ba-da-da-da, it is charging wirelessly, hurray. It'll work with anystandard Qi charging pad, it'll also do reverse wireless charging. But the big new thing isthis charger right here, which costs 70 bucks, by theway, it has a vent and a fan, it is their Warp Chargerand it can charge wirelessly at 30 watts, which is incrediblyfast for wireless charging. They say it can go from zeroto 50% in a half an hour and I tested it, and itdoes, it charges up half way in half an hour, whichis pretty impressive. Now this is the part whereI wish I could tell you what to expect when itcomes to battery life, but it varies really,really widely on this phone depending on what you're doing with it. It's got a 4510-milliamp hour battery, but you can turn on thefull 1440 resolution, you can turn 120Hz display, you can turn on an ambient display, you can turn on the motion smoothing if you're watching a bunch of video. You could do all sorts of stuff to just destroy thisbattery if you want to.
If you turn a bunch of stuff off, you can get through afull day, and I have, and if you turned it all on, you can crush it in like fouror five hours, which I have. I think that I'm confident in saying that this thing can last a full day. However, I'm not confident enough to say that the battery life is stellar. Now, when it comes to camera, I actually never know whatto expect out of OnePlus. Some years they're trash, someyears they're pretty good. But this year with the OnePlus 8 Pro, I'm actually expecting a lot, because again, thisphone starts at 900 bucks and I think that OnePlus mostly delivers. There's like one situationwhere it's a problem, but let's just get into it. The main sensor is 48 megapixels, but it defaults to 12 megapixels,which is the right call, it's technically using a new Sony sensor. There is a telephoto lens,which has, quote unquote, lossless up to 3X starts to be okay and then at 10X and thatreally falls down after that. And then there's an ultra wide sensor, and I actually give OnePlusa lot of credit on this one, because they're using thesensor from last year's 7T, which means that the ultrawide has a much better sensor than ultra wides usually get, and I'm getting good results as a result. I think the ultra wide is pretty good. Also, there is a color filter camera, if you wanna do weird color filter effects without post-processing, I don't know who asked for that. I don't know why it's there. (soft music) Let's just talk results. So on the main sensor, I'mpretty happy with dynamic range, I'm pretty happy with color, and I'm also really,really happy with detail. I love using this phonefor macro photos too. You can get pretty close and get really, reallyfine detail there as well. You can shoot 4K 30 video with their super steadystabilization thing turned on. But again if you really wanna shoot video with a smartphone, I think your best bet isstill an iPhone 11 Pro. Now, when it comes to night mode, I was actually veryimpressed with this thing. It held its own up againsta Pixel 4, iPhone 11 Pro, or a Galaxy S20, did notexpect that out of this phone. So, everything is great, but there is that oneplace where it falls down, and weirdly, it's in like dimlighting, not super-low light, but like twilight kindadark kinda yellow lighting. And here's what happens. So the OnePlus 8 Pro wants to do what a lot of phones wanna do, which is slightly brighten faces, trying to make them more even, and also smooth themout just a little bit. I don't like that very much, but it's fine in most lighting conditions you can't really tell, but for some reason indim lighting condition, this phone's worst tendenciesjust get multiplied, it makes my face way toobright, way too smooth, it over smooths, it's kind of,well, it's kind of a bummer.
Portrait mode is fine, it's portrait mode, it's about what I expected here. Basically, overall, if they canfix that dim lighting issue, they would hit like a solid B-plus or maybe even an A-minus on this thing. They're just not quite there. (upbeat music) I don't know if they do this anymore, but when I was in gradeschool, we didn't get grades, we got these weird report cards that said, does not meet, meet, orexceeds expectations. That's what I wanna dowith the OnePlus 8 Pro, I'm gonna give it a meetexpectations, not an exceeds, but that's because myexpectations were so high. They're charging 900 bucks for this thing, and let's be honest, the Galaxy S20 Plus is gonna be discounted to about this price all of the time, which means that OnePlusdoesn't get free passes anymore when it comes to qualityor the number of features that it offers in this zone, and luckily the OnePlus 8Pro has all those features, and it has the quality. This is a very, very good phone that really isn't missingany premium features. It just needs a little bitmore work on the camera, because hey, it's OnePlus,what else did you expect? Hey, everybody, thankyou so much for watching. I mentioned it before, butI'll say it one more time, Jon Porter reviewed the OnePlus 8. You can click on somethingto watch that video, and you should. Click. Okay. (snapping fingers)
One thing I do wanna call out, though, is I really do like OxygenOS, which is OnePlus's customversion of Android, and that's because the stuffthat they add on top of Android is usually just there tocontrol the phone itself or to control the specialfeatures that OnePlus does. It's not there to tryand get you locked in to some other random ecosystemthat you don't care about. Samsung. I don't actually have asecond camera over there, 'cause I'm shooting from home. Let's move on. Now, one thing you haven'talways been able to expect out of OnePlus phones is a great screen. But they solved that inthe last couple of years and this year with the OnePlus 8 Pro, they just knocked it out of the park. This is an amazing screen. It is 6.78 inches, whichis honestly too big for me, but if you like big phones, you'll probably be happy with it.
They did a hole punch in thecorner, which I actually prefer because it doesn't haveweird mechanical stuff with the pop-up selfie camera. The bezels are very, verytiny in the top and the bottom and it wraps around tothe left and the right. But the big news, of course, is that it has a 120Hz refresh rate, if you want it, andyou definitely want it, because any phone in this class needs to have a high refresh rate screen. It makes scrolling so much nicer looking. The animations are smoother, everything is better at a120Hz, highly recommend it. One thing OnePlus lets youdo that Samsung doesn't is use that 120Hz at itsfull resolution 1440 by 3168. And you can do it, but it will definitelyhurt your battery life, so I kinda recommend you don't. I've been leaving this at1080 about half the time and I haven't noticed that big a hit and I've definitely noticedthe improved battery life. OnePlus is also reallyproud of the color accuracy on this screen, I thinkit looks pretty good. They also have added someother weird features, like there's a motion smoothing feature for videos inside Netflixor inside Amazon Prime, and that sounds awfulbecause motion smoothing is definitely awful on your television, on the phone though itactually didn't offend me quite as much, and I'm not sure why. Anyway, I recommend you leave it off also, because I also noticed ahit on the battery life when I had it turned on. Now, another thing that we were expecting, because we saw all of the leaks, is that this is thevery first OnePlus phone to support wireless charging, so we'll put it on thecharger and ba-da-da-da, it is charging wirelessly, hurray. It'll work with anystandard Qi charging pad, it'll also do reverse wireless charging. But the big new thing isthis charger right here, which costs 70 bucks, by theway, it has a vent and a fan, it is their Warp Chargerand it can charge wirelessly at 30 watts, which is incrediblyfast for wireless charging. They say it can go from zeroto 50% in a half an hour and I tested it, and itdoes, it charges up half way in half an hour, whichis pretty impressive. Now this is the part whereI wish I could tell you what to expect when itcomes to battery life, but it varies really,really widely on this phone depending on what you're doing with it. It's got a 4510-milliamp hour battery, but you can turn on thefull 1440 resolution, you can turn 120Hz display, you can turn on an ambient display, you can turn on the motion smoothing if you're watching a bunch of video. You could do all sorts of stuff to just destroy thisbattery if you want to.
If you turn a bunch of stuff off, you can get through afull day, and I have, and if you turned it all on, you can crush it in like fouror five hours, which I have. I think that I'm confident in saying that this thing can last a full day. However, I'm not confident enough to say that the battery life is stellar. Now, when it comes to camera, I actually never know whatto expect out of OnePlus. Some years they're trash, someyears they're pretty good. But this year with the OnePlus 8 Pro, I'm actually expecting a lot, because again, thisphone starts at 900 bucks and I think that OnePlus mostly delivers. There's like one situationwhere it's a problem, but let's just get into it. The main sensor is 48 megapixels, but it defaults to 12 megapixels,which is the right call, it's technically using a new Sony sensor. There is a telephoto lens,which has, quote unquote, lossless up to 3X starts to be okay and then at 10X and thatreally falls down after that. And then there's an ultra wide sensor, and I actually give OnePlusa lot of credit on this one, because they're using thesensor from last year's 7T, which means that the ultrawide has a much better sensor than ultra wides usually get, and I'm getting good results as a result. I think the ultra wide is pretty good. Also, there is a color filter camera, if you wanna do weird color filter effects without post-processing, I don't know who asked for that. I don't know why it's there. (soft music) Let's just talk results. So on the main sensor, I'mpretty happy with dynamic range, I'm pretty happy with color, and I'm also really,really happy with detail. I love using this phonefor macro photos too. You can get pretty close and get really, reallyfine detail there as well. You can shoot 4K 30 video with their super steadystabilization thing turned on. But again if you really wanna shoot video with a smartphone, I think your best bet isstill an iPhone 11 Pro. Now, when it comes to night mode, I was actually veryimpressed with this thing. It held its own up againsta Pixel 4, iPhone 11 Pro, or a Galaxy S20, did notexpect that out of this phone. So, everything is great, but there is that oneplace where it falls down, and weirdly, it's in like dimlighting, not super-low light, but like twilight kindadark kinda yellow lighting. And here's what happens. So the OnePlus 8 Pro wants to do what a lot of phones wanna do, which is slightly brighten faces, trying to make them more even, and also smooth themout just a little bit. I don't like that very much, but it's fine in most lighting conditions you can't really tell, but for some reason indim lighting condition, this phone's worst tendenciesjust get multiplied, it makes my face way toobright, way too smooth, it over smooths, it's kind of,well, it's kind of a bummer.
Portrait mode is fine, it's portrait mode, it's about what I expected here. Basically, overall, if they canfix that dim lighting issue, they would hit like a solid B-plus or maybe even an A-minus on this thing. They're just not quite there. (upbeat music) I don't know if they do this anymore, but when I was in gradeschool, we didn't get grades, we got these weird report cards that said, does not meet, meet, orexceeds expectations. That's what I wanna dowith the OnePlus 8 Pro, I'm gonna give it a meetexpectations, not an exceeds, but that's because myexpectations were so high. They're charging 900 bucks for this thing, and let's be honest, the Galaxy S20 Plus is gonna be discounted to about this price all of the time, which means that OnePlusdoesn't get free passes anymore when it comes to qualityor the number of features that it offers in this zone, and luckily the OnePlus 8Pro has all those features, and it has the quality. This is a very, very good phone that really isn't missingany premium features. It just needs a little bitmore work on the camera, because hey, it's OnePlus,what else did you expect? Hey, everybody, thankyou so much for watching. I mentioned it before, butI'll say it one more time, Jon Porter reviewed the OnePlus 8. You can click on somethingto watch that video, and you should. Click. Okay. (snapping fingers)
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