OnePlus 8 Pro Review By MobileTechReview

This is Lisa from mobile tech review and this is the 1+8 pro, so it's their first total go for it flagship, Android smartphone. So what does that get you a few features that they used to be missing. Like official ip68 water resistance, they, you used to say that the phone was, but they didn't want to pay for the certification and raise the price yet DIANA. So now it is officially ip68 water resistance. You also get wireless charging finally yay and not just wireless charging, but the fastest wireless charging we've seen yet on a phone 30 watt, so Samsung phones do 15. I phone do 10.

That gives you an idea. I will talk about that a little more than some catches with that wireless charging stuff. We've also got a wonderful six point: seven eight inch AMOLED display OLED display and it's 10 bit is low blue light. It's super color accurate, according to display mate nice to look at a little too curved on the sides for my taste now that phones are getting a little flatter again like the Samsung Galaxy S 20 family, the accidental edge press. Are you know my nerves a little, even if it's still a kind of pretty look? The latest snapdragon 865 CPU 5 g inside, gets complicated that we're gonna talk about that now too.

So what do I mean is complicated about that 5g thing. Well, it's available on more carriers than ever, which is to say it used to just be T-Mobile and now Verizon will be selling it to but haha, that's just the 1+8, not the 8 pro. The 8 pro is still being sold direct by one plus as an unlocked phone, so you can buy, and you can use it on Verizon or you can use on AT&T or T-Mobile and Sprint. Now technically is part of T-Mobile, but when it comes to 5g, if you want 5g, which is the millimeter wave superfast, but not very available for Aiken kind, you got to buy the regular eight from Verizon. The eight pro doesn't support them.

If you buy this phone and use it on T-Mobile, that's the best-case scenario. So you get low and mid-band 5g mid-bands really when Sprint has, but it's getting subsumed into T-Mobile them, and we've been using it on their low bands 5gn. Actually, it's really doing well, it's a little faster and a bit better reception than the McLaren version that OnePlus was selling before with AT&T, because they won't let any 5g phone on their network unless they have certified it. You don't get any 5g now that's up to AT&T and that would only be their lobe and support it. They're, not the high millimeter-wave, but will they in the future support that me? Don't know so the best case of to unlock in the United.

States is T-Mobile if you're in a different country- and you have different deals and different carriers. Of course, it would be different to you. The phone does support a huge number of LTE 4G bands. Like we've seen in a reasonable number of 5g bands, you can see on screen what those bands are now in terms of the looks and the build of the phone and all that sort of thing. You know what plus has not been a slouch since the days they were a $500 to $600, Android, smartphone and that's kind of the sweet spot of where maybe one plus is for a lot of you people still.

You got almost all the flagship you stuff, you got a great display. It might not have been the maximum resolution, but you did get the fast and CPU and a beautiful oxygen OS skin on Android for five or six hundred dollars, and now we're talking about nine hundred to a thousand dollars, depending on whether you wanted with innings of RAM and 128 gigs of storage or twelve gigs of ram din, 256 gigs of storage, no micro, SD card slot to expand them so yeah, I can't say the build has gotten so much better say from the OnePlus 7 series, but I love the new finishes, particularly our insulation green, which is a Blue green. You can call blue, you can call it green, and you wouldn't be wrong in either case, but it's a matte finish or a very frosted finish, and it looks nice and doesn't show fingerprints as much. It's still slippery, though there's that and that one is only available in the 8 gig / 128 gigs of storage model. If you go up to the more expensive version, then you can get an ultramarine blue, which is pretty or black your choice of those the camera design on the back is pretty clean, and it's the shall we say old-fashioned strip, the cameras and not the big rectangle or quad cameras or whatever you want.

But yes, there are four cameras here. Three of them are very good. One of them is pretty pointless. We have a 48 megapixel main camera and a 48 megapixel ultra-wide camera, both of those using Sony sensors with pretty fast lenses, and we have a telephoto lens and that one does 3x optical zoom, so lossless, and it looks quite good, we'll talk a little more about the cameras later. The fourth camera is a color filter, camera and really that was a waste I'm, sorry, one plus of engineering, time and money, and all that you can see on screen what that does.

It just adds bizarre color tints, depending on which one you choose or there's a vivid or there's a black and white and stuff and I. Don't really think that this is adding anything over the usual software filters that we see everybody put on their phones in terms of biometrics. We have the usual in display fingerprint scanner, that's the optical kind. The good news is that's very fast. The bad news is it's not as secure as Samsung's, slower kind of ultrasonic, fingerprint scanner and there's face ID, and it's your regular 2d face ID, not super secure.

Somebody could fool it with a picture of you. Whatever you know, you know who you are if that really might be an issue for you, but it's very quick, uh-huh speaking of that no more pop-up selfie camera. Instead, we have a tiny hole, punch camera, and I'm. Okay, with that I mean when they came up with the clever pop-up cameras, it was to address the fact that most phones were had big ugly notches up top hello, iPhone 11 Pro max. You still do have that in fact, so now hole, punch cameras have also not just gotten smaller they've gotten even smaller.

It's pretty unobtrusive I'm fine, with that over a more complex and somewhat slower way of doing, say, facial recognition, you know that pop-up camera I know it complaints with that nicely done. When it comes to the software, we have Android ten with the usual oxygen OS, which is a very nice clean overlay over Android. That is fast. It has a couple of useful tweaks and all that sort of things, so I'm done with that I think that's when the selling plus is for OnePlus. Now, there's still one thing that isn't here yet, though OnePlus says they hear, you and they're going to be adding, but we don't know much more than that and that's always on display.

There is an ambient display, at least so. You can tap the phone and a wake-up and show you notifications, o'clock. Whatever it is, you want and if you pick it up, it'll wake up to, so this is an improvement of wraps. It does nothing if you pick up or touch the phone right. So, that's that's that, in terms of performance, you know, unplug phones always feel fast and fluid and 120 Hertz display only house because everything just Scrolls along like it's more painted on the screen than anything else benchmarks fine, performs great in games and speaking of that hundred twenty Hertz display on like Samsung, where you can only at the lower fulled plus resolution OnePlus will let you use it even in HD+ resolution, which is quite high, it's up to you, and they warn you.

You know that is going to hit your battery life hard. So since this is 120 hertz display, you can do this kind of party trick that probably nobody actually wants it. In fact, you can down vote it. If you look at the settings and that's to kind of up sample videos, so you's sort of like TVs that do the same. They take thirty frames per second content.

They make it a hundred twenty frames. So yeah you get that soap. Xperia effect, it doesn't look so natural. The phone does have a dual SIM carrier, but in the United States, where we're using it with a T-Mobile SIM and with an AT&T, it's only activating one, SIM I, don't know if that's gonna change in the future. So if you're in the United, States and you're counting on dual SIM functionality from the 8th unlocked version, it's not here right now the phone has stereo speakers.

OnePlus is always proud of that. It's nice to have the audio is kind of average, though, and yet they're not beating the s20 family of phones, for example, in terms of money or quality, or even the iPhone 11, but it's fine. Actually, it's cousin, the OPPO find x2 pro that we reviewed close relative in fact made this same parent company that one had really impressive audio compared to this of everything. Well, the speakers might not be anything out of the ordinary one thing that is the excellent haptics on this phone. One plus has been doing a good job with that.

So, if you like it to vibrate, you got it here. As ever with one place you get that nice slider switch on the side, so you can switch between vibrate and silence and while ringing very easily other amenities include Wi-Fi, six Bluetooth, five, and you've got NFC and you can use that with Google Pay. So no, so it's good and pretty flagship II right. So let's talk about the cameras a little more compared to the 1 plus 7 generation of phones where the camera roll I was kind of bumpy. They did software updates that really helped a lot for the initial roll.

That was me. This is really solid stuff and especially for those of you who, like that ultra wide-angle, which is often in the second-class citizen compared to the main camera, both of these being 48 megapixels, Sony sensor cameras. They both take perfect shots. I will say one thing, though, that OnePlus does over sharpen a, and it's okay in alarm situations, but if you're doing a landscape, a lot of leaves grass trees, that sort of thing it can quickly become overwhelming and over detailed looking, it doesn't look digitally nasty, though it just kind of looks like so many photoshopping as much as it could into detailed perfection. So I leave it up to you whether you like that versus a more naturalistic look, and if you thought that Samsung over saturated photos OnePlus is there to just amp it up a little more man, the colors in these pictures.

Of course, that said most people, you know they're, not professional photographers they're, just doing this to take gorgeous pictures to share and if they're really crispy and sharp, and they're really super colorful. Probably a lot of people are gonna, be happy with this. So overall I'm pretty impressed with what they've done here: I, don't I wish I had minus 20, plus or iPhone 11 Pro, or anything like that. It's well done. Overall, you get 4k video recording and up to 60 frames per second.

They have the standard. Sixteen by nine are their sin, the sin of. However, you say it IN II. You know a cinematic super wide screen recording option. There is no 8k video recording, unlike thinking of Samsung Galaxy, has 20 family of phones, but I.

Think right now, that's not really the most useful feature. Anyway. No there is no HEV C recording right now for those who want that more efficient video, codec, again I think a lot of people won't care, except for the fact that you don't have a super lot of storage on either version of this phone and there's no expandable storage. So, if you're into recording a lot of video, you probably will be mindful of how quickly you can fill it up. You can use about 500 Meg's a minute, for example, shooting 4k video at 60 frames per second.

The telephoto lens is quite good as an 8 megapixel, and it's 3x optical zoom, like I, said we don't have any real fancy, hybrid things like the s20 ultra those from Samsung, but up to 3x, which is optical. It takes nice sharp shots, no disappointment, no complaints about the fact. It's only 8 megapixels I, like the results that I'm getting yeah. If you do want a digital zoom, it will degrade quickly. So you have to be happy with 3x, which is better than average and beats the iPhone.

That's still at 2, X 4 optical zoom. When it comes to a battery and charging. Let's get into this, and so, so good in the bandwidth. One plus the good is they've always been pushing the envelope for how fast you can charge your phone, and now they're doing the same thing with wireless charging, and they said that they didn't do wireless charging sooner, because wireless charging was pretty slow right, and now we're up to 15 watts with most Android phones and that's decent, so they roll it out with 30 watts. So we're talking fifty percent of a charge and a half an hour on a wireless charger that is Super-duper fast.

Well, that's cool and here's the trick, not unlike they're wired chargers. If you want to get that speed, you have to buy their seventy dollar wireless charger, which is like a stand, has a big fan on the back, because wireless charging generates a lot of heat, so yeah. If you put on any other QI wireless charger, you have, so you have a 15 month, Samsung sitting around or whatever, then it's just going to charge it five watts which is pretty slow. So it's proprietary just like their work charger. It's the warp, 30 T charger, 30 watt charger, but you got to use their charger if you want to get that maximum charging speed, not bad forty, five hundred and ten Williams.

So that's about like the s 20 plus, which is its most direct competitor, I, would say in terms of size and price, though it is a little bigger and bulkier than the s 20 plus, and that's noticeable on hand. Let me tell you, but the battery life's, not quite as good as yes, 20, plus both of them running on the same team, mobile 5g network, to keep things fair, because 5 G's a little more of a power consumer better like this good on this definitely an all-day phone. Unless you are playing games all the time or whatever GPS and your way through life, it's pretty much an all-day phone or six hours of screen on time at best five and a half to six hours at best, so pretty good, not the best we've seen like pretty solid. It definitely does better than the 1 + 17 pro 5g McLaren on T-Mobile, very long name there, which has always been battery life challenge, but that was kind of an interim moving towards 5g phone and not really great optimization for the power consumption. So what about this versus the 8? This obviously is not a smackdown.

We will be reviewing the regular one plus eight as well, and with this one you gain the telephoto camera, which I personally like a lot. It gives more flattering portrait shots when you're taking pictures of people. It's great, if you like, to take the occasional pet baby squirrel, whatever we're getting close, distracts them, and they stop doing whatever cute thing. They're doing versus the dedicated low resolution macro camera on the regular 8i I. Just don't see a need for that, especially because there's already macro mode on the 8 Pro, and it does a pretty nice job.

You are getting a little bigger screen here, but you know it's not that big, a difference, they're not hugely different, but I would say. The 8 is probably more comfortable for more hands. It's about the size of the s 20 plus, so not as bulky none as much of a big boy. Also, lighter to this phone. The 8 pro is 199 grams.

That's one heavy phone in favor of the one plus eight, not pro. If you're in the United States, is that if you are a Verizon or T-Mobile customer, you can get it from your carrier directly, and you get more optimized 5g, mostly when it comes to Verizon. It would seem oh, but you're doing ok anyway and lastly, 90 Hertz, refresh rate for the 8 vs 120 Hertz they're, both pretty nice I mean 120. Hertz is a little nicer, but given the fact it is like $200 difference in price. It's not $200 nicer.

So that's the one plus 8 Pro, it's a very nice phone for their first flagship effort. I'll say that they have gotten all the things that they needed to get done, done here. This is I, don't have any real major dings on this phone other than the iffy 5g, compared to some other phones that you're gonna, see offering by carriers that are going to cover all the bands and all the kinds of 5 G's are available in your country. But beyond that, one thing I do wish is that they would still also do their sweet spot. The reason why many of us came to love one Plus phones is that 5 to $600 phone that gave you a lot of the things you cared about really fast performance is very nice display a good-looking phone, but without having to spend like a thousand dollars.

You know, so I hope that they continue that effort to I'm a super mobile tech review be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel for more cool tag, videos and thumbs up. If you like this vid.

Source : MobileTechReview