OnePlus 8 Pro - A Long Term User Review By Hardware Canucks

This is the OnePlus 8 pro the company's answer to the premium android flagship market notice I mentioned flagship, and the reason for that is back in the day, OnePlus was known for marketing their smartphones as flagship killers at perfect price points, but they didn't necessarily excel in every aspect that made a true flagship smartphone. I think I said flagship like 50 times, but anyways things have turned around this year. The 8 pro starts at 900, U. S. or 1400, Canadian, it's the most expensive phone that they've come out with. It's meant to compete with the galaxy s20 series, the Huawei p40 pro, maybe even the iPhones.

If you were to consider that as competition in an android space, but that's totally up to you. It's been about four months since OnePlus announced the 8 pro, and I've been using it extensively over the course of that time period and, as always, OnePlus did roll out some amazing software updates that addressed a lot of the issues that users were experiencing, but I've still got my beef with the 8 pro. So, let's discuss that right after we pay some bills, it's true what they say about the corsair a100 we've got water cooled hardware for cool temperatures, a cool design that stands out with plenty of good Io. It's whisper quiet with an efficient fan and occupies as much space on my desk as my plant, the corsair a100 up to 16 cores with 2080 ti. It does not disappoint check it out below alright, let's start with the design, it's a subtle improvement over the 7 pro, but they've added some tasteful colors to make it stand out from the competition without going too aggressive.

Of course, I've got the ultramarine blue model, and it looks amazing they've, given it a matte texture, that's soft to the touch, and it doesn't get super reflective. The camera bump is tolerable, especially when you compare it to the note 20 ultra, for instance, if it really bothers you, I'd recommend picking up the carbon bumper case, it's pretty slim and gives a nice snug fit for the phone. I've been rocking this for a while, and I really like it. The corners are rounded and the build quality is fantastic. The phone is sandwiched in between two sheets of gorilla glass with a solid aluminum frame, and it's exactly what you would expect at this price point.

They ditched the pop-up selfie camera on the seven pro for the classic punch hole style on the left side of the display. I personally don't mind that, but I'd like to know your thoughts about that, unfortunately, you're still getting a curved display, which I'm typically not a fan of, because I've had numerous issues with palm rejection when I'm browsing through the app drawer or checking mail, especially when using the phone in one hand, it'll just automatically open another app or select another option when my palm gets in contact with the screen, not to mention this is a huge phone. It's the screen spans across 6.78 inches, it's about the same size as the note 20 ultra. So it's pretty difficult to reach the top spots. Basically, what I'm trying to say is if you're, someone with smaller hands, you should probably look elsewhere or if you're used to bigger phones and, if you're perfectly fine using something like this just be prepared to do a lot of this a lot of shifting.

You know, although you just want to make sure that you don't drop your phone because that's the last thing you want. Speaking of the display, OnePlus has packed the eight pro with a fast 120 hertz quad HD AMOLED panel, and for those of you wondering it can do both quad HD and 120 hertz at the same time, unlike some other phones, Samsung and guys. I really enjoyed my time with this display every animation when it comes to opening or exiting an app. The gesture navigation through the operating system is fluid and fast it dynamically adjusts the refresh rate, depending on the type of content you stare at, for example, if you're watching movies or reading an article online, it's circle backs to 60 hertz to preserve battery life. The only odd thing I noticed was when browsing YouTube scrolling through content felt like using a 60hz display.

I had no issues with consistency on my Pixel 4 XL and the note20 ultra. I just thought it was worth mentioning. It's also a very bright screen. If you enable auto brightness, the screen boosts to a whopping 1300 nits when you're in direct sunlight of course. So outdoor visibility is great.

It's one of my favorite features of this phone. Since I've been spending quite a bit of time outdoors during the summer, it's got great color accuracy love the different color profiles that you can play around with through the settings. I think you're really in for a treat, especially if you're used to watching a lot of videos on your smartphone or, if you edit photos for Instagram or other social media platforms. Initially, I did have some issues with the display, so I was experiencing a weird green cast at the lowest brightness setting, but thankfully that was addressed through a software update, so good job OnePlus, the in-display fingerprint sensor is still present on the 8 pro. If you recall watching my 7 pro review, I mentioned how the sensor on that was really fast and accurate.

My success rate was really, really high on that phone, but I can't see the same thing about the eight pro, because I found myself constantly struggling to get past the lock screen, even with my left thumb or my right thumb, it just errors out every single time. So I had to constantly rely on the know: so-called unsecured face unlock system which isn't as advanced or secure as say something like a pixel 4. It was really frustrating. I tried to res can my thumbprint. It didn't really do a lot, so that was really weird not to mention.

This is something very important. If you pull out this phone in pitch black, it's going to blind you literally because it has to shine a bright light to analyze your fingerprint, and it just gets super annoying. Even if you have a night mode or the blue screen filter enabled it won't actually show up on the lock screen. In fact, it'll only trigger itself when you get past that home screen or the lock screen uh to get to your home screen, which is just it's weird, but it's also really it's annoying. The built-in speakers are fantastic, just like the 7 pro the 8 pro features a dual speaker setup with the earpiece, acting as your left channel and the bottom facing as your right.

So there's excellent, stereo imaging it gets really loud, and I never missed any alarms. So I guess that's a good thing. I also appreciate OnePlus for keeping the alert slider on the side. This thing has come in clutch so many times, and I really hope other brands implement this on their smartphones. The haptic motor underneath is all right.

It's certainly not as strong as uncle Sammy glancing over the rest of the specs. Well, as always, OnePlus never disappoints you're, getting a really fast snapdragon 865 soc, it's not the plus chip, but it's not really. A big deal ram is plenty sufficient with 8 gigabytes base or 12 gigabytes. If you really want to push it and storage is either 128 or 256 gigabytes and this phone just flies through applications. I didn't experience any slowdowns or any stutters from my general day-to-day usage apps install really fast on this phone thanks to the UFS 3.0 storage. I think I can't really complain about the performance on the OnePlus 8 pro.

It all comes down to the amazing software integration and support that OnePlus has for their devices speaking of software. Well, there isn't anything new here if you're familiar with oxygen OS, you get plenty of customization options and I really like the stock. Look. That being said, OnePlus is shifting the direction away from this UX design to something that's a little more user-friendly. In fact, I made a separate video going over the beta build that OnePlus is currently working on, which is based on android 11 and, if you're interested in checking it out link will be over here.

I also want to mention the amazing software support that you get with OnePlus devices, not just the 8 pro, but the 7 series, the 6 series pack, even the 5 series, early adopters just get to share their experience and if they encounter any issues, they'll post it on the forums and OnePlus as they're constantly listening to user feedback, they address those issues through software updates. Now, before I get into camera performance, I do want to talk about battery life. OnePlus gave the 8 pro an extra 500 million powers compared to the 7 pro so now, you're looking at roughly 4 500 million powers, I think they did this to compensate for the 120 hertz display. My phone usage is obviously going to be different from everyone out there, but I'm happy to report that I've been getting perfect battery life. Out of this smartphone.

I was easily able to get two days worth of use with light usage, now, keep in mind that I've enabled dark mode full time on this phone so that definitely helps extend battery life. Also, my light usage consists of casually checking Twitter browsing through Instagram. I don't really watch a lot of videos, it's mostly messaging and just casual stuff, and I did test a smartphone during to covet lockdown season. So I never really got a chance to travel and put this to the real test, but hey. If you want ROG phone 3 or phone 2 level battery life, this won't cut it.

I mean it's 4500, William hours, 120 hertz, it's good! It's pretty good, but if you need to top it up quickly, don't you worry, because OnePlus has got your back with their blistering fast warp charge, 30t simply plug in the phone, and it'll charge the device from 0 to 50 in just 20 minutes, and if you want to take things a bit further, you can wirelessly charge the 8 pro using the warp charge, 30 wireless dock, which is sold separately by the way and that charges the phone from 0 to 50 in 30 minutes. This charger is really a unique piece of tech. It comes with a fan to help dissipate the heat, because it's charging at a rapid pace, and it gets as loud as 30 decibels, which on paper might not seem quiet, but it's really not ideal when you have it beside your bed. Luckily, there is a setting on the phone that can turn off the fan, but that will obviously reduce charging speeds. I mean look, you don't have to spend seventy dollars on a fancy piece of charger.

In fact, you can actually buy one right now because it's out of stock at the moment you can still experience wireless charging omni-8 pro, because this still uses the QI protocol, so it'll work with. Basically any QI enabled wireless chargers that you may have lying around. So that's welcoming this one also supports reverse wireless charging, but oddly it won't charge my Pixel Buds. I did look this up online. It seems like this phone is a little picky when it comes to charging devices it did charge my note 20 ultra so yeah, it's weird, but hey.

It's definitely a feature that I personally won't take advantage of all right. Last but not least, let's talk about the camera performance. The 8 pro features a quad camera setup, so there's a 48 megapixel ultra-wide angle, lens a 48 megapixel standard, wide angle lens and an 8 megapixel telephoto lens with 3x optical zoom and up to 30x digital zoom. There is a color filter camera which offers different filters and other gimmicky tricks. Remember photochrome.

There was a huge buzz about that mode being able to see through certain plastic materials and certain clothing material people were really concerned about it, but OnePlus did roll out an update, eventually uh, to address that issue, so it yeah you can't really see through plastic anymore. At least I tried- and I can't, so it's good news, but also bad news for people who thought it was cool, but then also it was really weird, so yeah, but either way. Let's start with the ultra-wide. I'm just going to say this right now guys the 8 pro has one of the best, if not the best, ultra-wide angle, camera period, it's way better than the galaxy s20 series. The dynamic range is incredible: the detail is spot on, and it performs extremely well in low light scenarios as well.

The field of view is perfect to get creative, and I really enjoyed my time using this lens. Switching over to the standard, wide angle, camera and things get even better. OnePlus is using Sony's highest end mix 689 sensors, and it nails white balance perfectly. I absolutely fell in love with the colors being captured by the sensor. HDR processing works really well without being too aggressive.

There's a good balance between saturation and contrast and the detail is astounding. You can really take advantage of the 48 megapixel sensor for larger prints. If that's something that you're into and given that it's a larger sensor with a wider aperture, the depth of field is natural, so you don't have to rely on portrait mode in low light. The sensor does bin itself to produce 12, megapixel images and that's done to reduce noise and the results. Looks great.

I wouldn't say it's pixel level good, but I'll tell you this. It definitely puts Samsung's highest end, s20, ultra to shame the telephoto lens wow just wow. This phone continues to surprise me guys I'm a huge fan of playing around with higher focal lengths, because you can end up with some really cool compositions, especially if you want to get into product photography. I didn't notice any shutter lag with all three sensors so that helped with capturing the right moment. The macro mode on this camera is just nuts.

I had a lot of fun with this mode, though I didn't use it that much but hey. It won't disappoint you, if you're really into it the selfie camera is mediocre. I wasn't impressed with the results. If you're patient enough, you can get away with some good shots. If you really like taking a lot of selfies, you should probably look elsewhere alright.

So this is the video test on the OnePlus 8 pro I'm going to start with the front-facing camera. One of the things I'm not a fan of is the fact that you're not getting a wide-angle sensor, so it's pretty cropped, and I'm actually stretching my hands all the way to make sure that I'm in frame, so that's kind of unfortunate. The dynamic range is alright. It's not really that great, but under good lighting conditions you can get some pretty decent results. What's really cool with the rear facing cameras is that you can use all three sensors to shoot.4K video, whether if it's using the wide angle, ultra-wide or even the telephoto stabilization, is also really, really nice and surprised by the footage coming out of this camera. It's definitely an improvement over the OnePlus 7 pro, and I want to know your thoughts about that in the comments so did OnePlus deliver a true flagship, android smartphone this year, that's worthy enough to compete with the thousand plus dollar smartphones that are currently in the market.

Absolutely the eight pro features, an amazing, build quality and design. The screen is one of the best. The battery life is also perfect, even with 120 hertz mode enabled full time uh the specs are top of the line. You now have support for wireless charging. Finally, on an OnePlus device, I'm sure a lot of OnePlus fans would love that, and it's also got an official ip68 water resistant rating, not to mention the camera performance.

It's incredible, uh, honestly, I would legit put this right underneath the pixel 4 and way above the galaxy s20 series, because the results really do speak for themselves. With that being said, I've still got my issues with this phone. The first thing is, of course, that curved display it doesn't really do any justice when you're using the phone palm detection is really, really bad. It gets super frustrating. Also, the fingerprint sensor, it just didn't work for me and honestly.

The fact that it blinds you in pitch black is just super annoying. I honestly at this point wished, if you know OnePlus was able to just go back to the traditional standard, rear-facing fingerprint sensor I mean I would hands-down get that over something like an in-display fingerprint sensor, because it's physical, it's easy to reach it's practical. I also can't ignore some quality control issues that some users have been experiencing with the 8 pro specifically when it comes to the display. Also, some users have been experiencing Wi-Fi problems as well. Connectivity problems to be more precise.

OnePlus is constantly working on addressing that through software updates. So I guess that's a good thing. Finally, I want to talk about the price 900, it's a lot of money, but I think for that price you are getting a lot in terms of features uh. I think you know it's priced aggressively and compared to the competition. This thing it stands out.

It really does now. Generally OnePlus phones, don't go on sale that often, but when they do, it's worth picking up. So that note, thank you so much for watching if you are an existing OnePlus, 8 user. I want to know your experience using the phone. Has it been great, or has it been not so great, looking forward to your thoughts, and I'll talk to you guys in the next one.

Source : Hardware Canucks