Goodbye OnePlus - OnePlus 8 Pro Long Term Review By Gadgetsu

I don't believe in the word perfect. It means there is nothing more to improve on, nothing to get better at. But that is never the case. There is no perfect dish, perfect painting, perfect person, let alone a perfect phone. But when OnePlus announced their OnePlus 8 Pro, it was quite literally perfect. This phone has everything.

Flagship cameras, spotless UI, a beautiful screen, and oh, don't even get me started on performance. But that was only the beginning... My initial impression with this phone was like a dream. The exterior was beautiful with it’s sleek curves, silky touch, and that gorgeous glacial green colour. Paired with that beautiful body was an equally beautiful screen.

You needed to see the 1300 nit 6.78” QHD 120Hz 10bit HDR10+ Fluid AMOLED display to truly experience it’s glory. Every touch with the finger responded instantly and animations flew by. With its decent pair of speakers, media consumption on this device was very enjoyable, although I wish it had more bass and a balanced sound signature for fuller sound. The snapdragon 865, UFS 3.0 storage and LPDDR5 RAM is also able to tackle anything! Apps open in an instant, every game runs smoothly, and nothing ever lags or stutters. This phone has great haptics that feel sharp and precise, and a speedy in display fingerprint sensor.

There’s an alert slider to toggle between, ring, vibrate, and silent, which I can’t live without, and lastly, crazy fast Warp Charging! This phone is able to charge from 0-70% in just 30 minutes and there’s 30W wireless using OnePlus’s proprietary charger! But if you use any generic cable or QI charger, then you only get 5W… Anyways, OnePlus finally included solid cameras that are almost flagship-level. The main Sony 48 MP sensor is much bigger, with shots looking detailed and sharp, with high saturation and contrast. It does decently in low light as well, although it’s no match for Google's Night Sight. The ultrawide camera on this phone is among one of the best in phones! The detail captured is incredible, and colour is mostly consistent! The ultrawide lens also has a motor that physically moves to allow for an amazing macro mode! Finally, OxygenOS! Along with the Pixel launcher, this is hands down the best Android skin. It has nearly the same feel as stock android with more customizability and speed.

The animations are optimized beautifully for the 120hz display and I would argue that Android 11 on this looks better than stock android! You can’t go back to any other software after using Oxygen OS!!! Or at least I thought... You see, the OnePlus 8 Pro… as beautiful and perfect as it is, lost it’s charm over time. It’s time to unveil the truth about this phone. Now, before you roast me in the comments, you should know that there are tons and tons of other angry users online with problems even worse than mine! Starting with the cameras, OnePlus, don’t call it flagship if they are half baked. You give a useless colour filter that was banned, and you lie to consumers about the telephoto lens that’s not even good! It was the same camera as the OnePlus 7 Pro that claimed a 8MP camera with 3x zoom, but was actually a 13MP 2.2x camera that was cropped in! Yet they still have the guts to market this as a 3x zoom lens but using the words lossless zoom instead of optical zoom. And it’s garbage anyways! There is a severe lack of detail, horrible in low light, inconsistent colours and a lack of contrast! And that brings me to Portrait mode, one of the absolute WORST portrait modes I have ever used in my life.

Edge detection and colours are terrible, the result looks horrible, and it can't even focus properly! Honestly, my OnePlus 6T with GCAM takes better portraits than this! And for video, there’s a stutter at the beginning, severe audio sync issues, and horrible focus! I think OnePlus is purposely handicapping the camera to make the OnePlus 9 Pro look better, because in their Android 11 update, OnePlus REMOVED THE NEW FOCUS TRACKING SYSTEM and downgraded the portrait video mode to 1080p 30 fps. The selfie camera is also pretty bad and lacks 4k support like other flagships… And with all these problems, I don’t think OnePlus has the right to call this a flagship phone… Now, the display… The hype about the display was short-lived once users started complaining about severe problems like hole punch banding, black crush, screen retention, and most commonly, green tint. For almost 1000USD, HOW IS THAT ACCEPTABLE!!! With my particular unit, I’ve faced mild green tint and severe screen retention. Green tint is more visible in lower brightness, so OnePlus sneakily increased the minimum brightness to make it less visible, instead of trying to fix it. Screen retention is even worse! I could be texting my friend for 5 minutes, and there's just an imprint of our chat stuck everywhere I go??? I would’ve returned this phone if it wasn't for OxygenOS, but OnePlus’s software has absolutely gone DOWN THE DRAIN! I have only gotten a few of the many promised software updates and they are always months behind on security patches too! The big Oxygen OS 11 upgrade was the big turning point… I still find it funny how it TOOK THEM 3 HILARIOUSLY FAILED ATTEMPTS to deliver a half-baked Android 11 update!!! Each time, they would delete the update and try again because of bugs! Even after their failed attempts, OxygenOS has just been an absolutely terrible experience.

Not just for me, but for many many angry users… The phone has been consistently slow, laggy, and freezes out of nowhere!!! Apps are crashing all the time and even the System UI crashes! The whole phone just turns black and then pops a little POP UP message, unfortunately, System UI has crashed… WHAT IN THE WORLD DOES THAT MEAN!!! And animations that are supposed to be fast just acts CHOPPY!! Even the notifications are laggy, I’m not joking! Notifications sometimes don't come in at all until you open the phone, and BOOM, a flood of notifications start piling in for minutes, vibrating the phone out of existence. Also, the battery life is getting worse after each update!!! I can’t even get 4-5 hours of screen on time anymore and have to charge 2-3 times a day depending on my usage! And lastly, the MOST ANNOYING PART OF OXYGEN OS: BUGS, BUGS, BUGS!!! I SWEAR WITH EVERY SINGLE UPDATE, THEY TRY TO FIX THE BUGS, BUT NEW ONES COME IN. There's fingerprint scanner freezes, gallery app crashes after taking screenshots, notification shade getting stuck… SPEAKING OF NOTIFICATIONS, THE STUPID ANDOIRD 11 MEDIA CONTROLLER IS ALWAYS THERE EVEN IF YOU'RE NOT PLAYING ANYTHING... AND EVERY TIME I SWIPE IT AWAY, IT MAGICALLY APPEARS BACK. But that's not all! Images from social media sites gets stuck, forcing a restart; Google Chrome flashes different shades of grey, AND NOT TO MENTION THE LAG AND FREEZES I ENCOUNTER EVERY MINUTE! THIS IS NOT THE EXPERIENCE ANY CONSUMER SHOULD FEEL.

AND THIS HAPPENED ON MY ONEPLUS 6T TOO, EVEN AFTER RESETS!?! I GAVE SO MANY CHANCES TO THEM TO FIX AND UPDATE THEIR SOFTWARE BUT THEY HAVE FAILED ME AND OTHER CONSUMERS OVER AND OVER AGAIN. Now that the rant is over, I want to say that I am seriously not exaggerating by any means. On forums, you can find a whole community of OnePlus users who are way more mad. I honestly really wanted to love this phone, and it was the perfect phone, until OnePlus started to fall as a company… Their promise of a smooth android experience, gone. Their promise of fast updates, gone… They even broke their promise of 3 years of updates in their budget Nord phones.

If OnePlus can’t listen to consumers and fix their problems, I'm sure they will start to lose many many customers… Hey guys, if you stayed all the way to the end of the video, I wanted to give you a huge thank you for putting up with my ranting! If you liked this video, be sure to like this video, but if you didn’t, remember to click the thumbs down button twice. Remember to subscribe down below for some awesome tech content! Alright, stay safe and see you guys later!.

Source : Gadgetsu