[The Lab] OnePlus 7 Pro Review - dnagpaldg

dnagpaldg, May 20, 2019 :

UNBOXING

The packaging of OnePlus devices is a rather standard affair now, and for the rest of the industry too. The box is white and the signature OnePlus red. There is a small message about the OnePlus Community as a wrapper around the box. The front of the box has the number seven and the company logo on top. Phone name and “The Speed You Need” slogan’s on the sides. Par for the course.



Opening the top of the box shows us the phone in all its glory. The NEVER SETTLE logo and a fingerprint graphic are present on the covering. Under the phone, there is a letter from Pete Lau, the company CEO, and the SIM ejector tool. Lastly, at the bottom of the box we have the new 30W Warp Charger and cable. There is a transparent case and a pre-applied screen protector, which I appreciate enormously. Experience with curved screen Samsungs has proved to me that getting screen protectors or glass will be a nightmare, so it is nice to see OnePlus provide a well-rounded package.




One glaring omission here is the USB-C to 3.5 mm adapter. Even though a lot of us are using Bluetooth headphones, a 3.5 mm headphone is ubiquitous and fool-proof, and it is a shame that it is not supported in any way now. Unfortunately, this is the direction that the market is taking, and OnePlus would get away with it.



As a bonus, the Lab Reviewers also got a case with the phone. I got the Karbon case with the phone and I have been using it since day 1. There is not much to say about the case, but it is sturdy, made of kevlar and covers all corners, so that’s nice. Plus, the fit is about as good as it gets. I have been using this case from the moment I unboxed the phone,and I'm actually pleased with how it does not increase the weight of the phone noticeably.



That just about covers the unboxing. Here's another picture of the phone because it looks so nice.

 

dnagpaldg, May 20, 2019 :

Design

If I have to describe the phone to you without showing it to you, I’d say it is a Samsung Galaxy Note 9 without the top and bottom bezel and a much prettier back. Oh, and the weight is also similar. The OnePlus 7 Pro comes in at 206g. That might seem heavy, but you’ll get used to the weight quite fast and actually lends itself to the sturdy feel of the device.



I have the Mirror Gray version of the device. The choice of colour is a personal one, and I feel that the nuanced look of the grey is better than a less traditional one like blue. You can look at the colour in the pictures below, and I’ll just say that the in-hand feel for this variant is like the Mirror Black OnePlus 6/6T. All this glass does make the phone slippery, but then most of us are going to use a case with it so that’s a moot point.




The sides of the phone are made of metal. The left side has the volume buttons, and the right side holds the power button and the Alert Slider. The buttons are firm and well raised - you won’t accidentally press them. The Alert slider seems to be longer that the older devices and smoother. I absolutely love this, because I often end up muting the OnePlus 6 when I wanted to set it to vibrate.




On the bottom, you have a speaker, the USB-C 3.0 port, and the SIM Tray. The SIM Tray is worth talking about, as it is double sided this time. We still do not have a microSD card slot on the phone, which is sad, but then you do have a 128GB+ of storage on the phone. The bottom microphone is inside the speaker grille.




The top has the fun stuff - a secondary microphone and the fancy pop-up front camera. The camera itself has a motor rated for 300,000 uses. In theory this means you can use the motor 80 times a day for 10 years. OnePlus claims that there is drop protection as the phone will attempt to retract the camera if it detects a fall, but do not go testing that claim. I dropped it from a distance of about a two feet and it retracted the camera in time, so take my word here. They’ve also put up this video of the camera lifting a 22 kg block of cement, though, so it should be durable.




The back of the phone has the camera array, and some logos. Depending on your variant, you’ll get different amount of branding on the back. My variant, the GM 1917 has just the OnePlus Logo and the name on the bottom. This is the cleanest variant. The other variants, especially those shipped to Europe, would most likely also contain some regulatory branding and a 48 MP inscription on the camera assembly. All of it is written under the glass, so it cannot be removed.



In my opinion, the build quality is pretty good and more importantly, the weight is well-distributed. This is a large phone, with its 6.5-inch screen, so it is important for it to not be top-heavy or it’ll just fall out of your hands. Personally, I hate that it is a glass phone, and would have taken even polycarbonate over it. It is a fingerprint magnet, and just increases repair costs by a large amount. Either way, I strongly suggest you use a case with it, since there is practically zero bezel to protect the phone if it falls.

 

dnagpaldg, May 20, 2019 :

Display, stereo speakers and the fingerprint scanner

Let’s come to the display now!


I'll use the same GIF again, because it's pretty and it suits the topic.

OnePlus managed to achieve a screen-to-body ratio of 93.22%, which practically means that the front of the phone is all-screen. The edges are curved, and that improves the look of the phone while thinning it. The top bezel seems to exist solely to house the thin earpiece, which also doubles up as the second earpiece. The chin is almost completely gone. There is the in-display fingerprint scanner here as well.



I’ll talk about the fingerprint sensor before coming to the display itself.

This is supposed to be a third-generation optical sensor by OnePlus. The technology has matured to the point where the device unlocks at speeds comparable to traditional fingerprint scanners. If you’re coming from pretty much any device except the 6T, you’ll find yourself trying to unlock it with an index finger out of habit for most of the first week. We’ve all been there. Another thing worth pointing out is that the sensor might work better if you register fingerprint data in the dark. I haven’t tested it, but the logic is sound.

Now, let’s come to the big feature : the display.




OnePlus has spent a lot of money on the display. “You break the front panel, be ready to shell out 30% of the cost of the phone in repairs” amount of money. The technical parts are:

• Its curved.
• Its an AMOLED,and a Samsung AMOLED.
• Its QHD+
• Its 90Hz
• There’s options to choose colour profiles

Colour profiles are provided. The vivid profile seems to liked by a lot of people. I used the Display P3 setting personally, because I felt it reproduced colours more naturally.



The display is rounded off at the corners. It was not a welcome change in the OnePlus 6 and 6T, but is now a necessity on the 7 Pro. There is no bezel to round off, so the display is made this way. And also, it should redistribute stress when the phone falls down.

I cannot show you how 90 Hz feels because you’re likely to see this on a 60 Hz screen. But I can tell you that it improves the small things a lot. You do not need so much overflow when you reach the end of the menu because the 90 Hz display renders it in a smaller space. You can scroll through a page without having to wait for the text to recalibrate. In my opinion, the 90 Hz display is the bigger highlight here instead of the QHD+ screen. There is a small effect on battery since the screen refreshes so much more, but I kept it at 90 Hz anyway - the smoothness improves that much.

You’re not going to notice the difference between FHD+ and QHD+ resolutions : this is why OnePlus got away with using 1080p screens for so long. It would save you some battery life to set the device to FHD+ instead of the current setting. The display is still very sharp and you save on battery.



The sound that comes out of these speakers is good even at high volumes. By smartphone standards, I could make out the nuances in the music. Stereo speakers come in handy when you’re watching videos and audio is playing through the speakers. There is Dolby Atmos thrown in as well. Overall, these are by far the best speakers we’ve ever had on a OnePlus device. Obviously, it would be naive to expect crazy loud volumes, but it will suffice indoors. If you're watching something on your phone, it will be an extremely pleasurable experience considering these speakers with one of the top display panels on the market.

 

dnagpaldg, May 20, 2019 :

Benchmarks and Real-Life Performance

In terms of real-life performance, the device (mostly) never hung up on me despite whatever I’ve been doing, and multitasking was smooth. Editing images worked well. There has been only one time that the device hung up on me, when I tried to edit 4K@60fps video on it. Editing images, running 31 tabs on Chrome works well and fast. I do not play games on my phone, so I cannot give you an estimate there. With the amount of RAM and the chipset you’re buying, anything less would have been subpar.




For the sake of it, I ran some benchmarking tests on the phone. Personally, I feel these apps are a relic of the past because nobody is going to put the phone through this. Look at the screenshots below to get an idea.

• Geekbench Single Core - 3453
• Geekbench Multi-Core - 10763
• 3DMark Sling Shot Extreme (OpenGL ES 3.1) - 5328
• 3DMark Sling Shot Extreme (Vulkan) - 4835
• 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited - 59856
• AnTuTu - 374790

In this picture, I want you to look at the lowest and highest battery temperature. Granted, I ran three tests here back to back, but even the battery temperature never exceeded 38 C. Also, the OnePlus 7 Pro manages to score above almost everything thrown at it, coming close to the performance of the iPhones.

Instead, the more important thing today is the cooling system on the phone. Heating issues can cause performance throttling, and sustained performance is more importance than peak performance for any user. There is a liquid cooling system on the device, and it works well. The CPU did not get too hot all week, even after benchmarking. That is impressive by all means. Similarly, the Warp charger delivers a lot of power to the device, but makes sure that the battery is not being heated too much. Points to OnePlus!

 

dnagpaldg, May 22, 2019 :

Oxygen OS

The OnePlus 7 Pro ships with OxygenOS 9.5.3 . Its fast and sensible, and offers you a lot of customisation options. I’m writing for the Community and so I do not need to explain the general layout, and I’ll just point out the new features.



The first thing I want to ask OnePlus is : why can’t I uninstall Netflix? Even if Amazon Kindle and Shopping were put there, atleast they could be uninstalled. This one cannot be.


There’s DC Dimming in the OnePlus Laboratory menu. It’s supposed to control brightness by varying input current, but can increase screen flickering. At lower brightness, I did see the screen flicker when I was going through a PDF, but I also had reading mode on (more on it later). The tech seems intriguing, but for OLED devices, it is more gimmick than utility.


Then there is the Zen Mode. It is something I’m pretty excited to see in a phone. I’m a student who was using the Forest app when studying earlier, and I did close that app more times than I should. Zen Mode basically shuts you out of the phone for a certain length of time. This is probably useless for someone in an office, but for someone who needs to get something done in the real world like studies, this will prove invaluable. Frankly, this can become a million times better if only OnePlus let us set the time ourselves. Digital Wellbeing is not available outside the US, and this is something that can be touted in its place.






OnePlus has redesigned the reply UI for messages when you are watching a video. For supported apps, it’ll go split screen and show you a floating keyboard while the actual video keeps playing. I am still undecided about the feature.



A major annoyance with the earlier UI was that the keyboard would start from the bottom of the phone, and without a sizeable chin it meant that we had to hold the phone very low. Thankfully, OnePlus has fixed it now and the keyboard is at a raised level now, which means we can hold the phone securely when typing.


Notice the small gap at the bottom? That makes a huge difference.

OnePlus gestures are awesome. There are still buttons and the Google gesture system, but this one is my favourite because (1) They are intuitive and (2) they do not involve a bar that takes up screen space and causes pixel burn-in. Don't want to take my word, okay, but then there is an app by (not on XDA, BY XDA) to port just those gestures. The reduced (absent) chin does mean that you have to swipe from the bottom of the phone, so you'll end up holding it lower mostly. There might be a chance that you're uncomfortable with the way you need to swipe, and that is okay - this is a large phone and sometimes you'd rather use two hands on it. If you've got large hands, you'll love them.


There is a screen recorder in the phone now. It’s nice and its functional, but it obviously does not work on some apps like Netflix to protect copyrights. The screenshot taking experience has been improved though, with the button for a scrolling screenshot put right under the preview. You can open and edit the screenshot immediately and then share it. These are small things that make the overall experience much better.



Another thing is Night Mode 2.0 . It gets really, really dim when you need it be. There is also the option of setting the colour profile for night mode, by which I mean how much of that amber tint you want on the screen. Aside from it, there is a reading mode, which needs some improvement. Basically it turns the screen black and white and maxes the contrast.


Then there is the haptic engine and vibration motor on the phone - Phenomenal. They bring the entire experience to another level, which might be the reason why we saw it get hyped up before the launch. The haptic experience is everywhere in the phone - when you type, when you unlock it, and even when you’re using the dial on pro mode. There is no way to turn it off though, which is a sad considering customizability is something OnePlus prides itself on.


The gaming mode is called Fnatic mode. They’re a CounterStrike team, and the most legendary one at that. I have not tested it, but the implementation seems to be extremely good. You can get text-only notifications without the banners, making them much less obtrusive. It will try to boost your cell signal to reduce latency. And then it does all the regular stuff like making sure your game gets maximum resources, muting calls and texts.


Oxygen OS standard features like screen off gestures and the shelf are still there. A parking location feature has been added to it, which lets you save the coordinates or a picture of where exactly you stored your car. This is probably more helpful when you park it in a large parking lot in your office/mall, but relatively useless otherwise.

 

dnagpaldg, May 22, 2019 :

Telephony

Coming to connectivity, the phone checks all the boxes. It locked on to GPS in about 20 seconds, worst case. I received the North American variant of the phone and it is working with all Indian carriers, so thats nice too. Telephony is nice on the phone, but the best thing is its proximity sensor placement.

I had a major issue with the OnePlus 6 - as the proximity sensor was put on the centrally located notch, it would often turn on the screen during the call and start doing weird stuff like muting the call, turning on the flashlight or pulling down the notification shade. The proximity sensor on this phone thankfully turns off the display at a reasonable distance from the ear. These are small things that do not look like issues unless you've had them.

If you want to check carrier compatibility for the phone, OnePlus has a tool : https://www.oneplus.in/7pro?from=head#/specs
Open the link, and then go to the connectivity section. There is a carrier list sorted by country.



Atleast in my variant, the call recording feature is gone. I do not know if others used it, but I preferred to record official calls so that I could play them back when I had forgotten an address or something.

 

dnagpaldg, Jun 6, 2019 :

VIDEO

The video recording on the phone improves drastically from earlier phones and bests most of its competitors. The audio recording for the video has leaped forward, and the realism, noise reduction is much lowered.There is also EIS, and frankly the best EIS I've seen. Videos get more stable. then there is 60 fps. Videos feel much more professionally made, and it is the result of all these efforts.

Coming to the videos, I'm putting links here. I took them out of the Delhi Metro so you might know what you're supposedly looking at - roads and Delhi skies (greyer than the West so trust me, its colour accurate). It should highlight the difference between 60 FPS and 30 FPS. My personal recommendation is to always use the 60 FPS mode at 1080P. If you have an argument to not do so, you already know enough about videography to not need this advice.

For others, notice how at 60 FPS, the fast-moving railing seems to become well-defined in direction. That is proof that these videos are smoother overall.

There is timelapse and slow motion as well. OnePlus has a handy editor to let us choose where to slow down the video. I have put a slow motion video here.







CAMERA

I did not upload my review of the camera earlier to give OnePlus the time to iron out release issues with its algorithms. If you were to compare day one YouTube reviewers with the Lab reviews, you’ll see that the latter have immensely better samples - because we waited for these updates. The phone you’re going to buy is going to ship with these updates, so you can be sure that your device will deliver stellar results when you buy it.

Here is a link to some pictures that I clicked with the rear camera: https://ibb.co/album/meLMqa .


Every picture is unedited and put as-is. I can improve things with post-processing, so do not remind me.

The current smartphone specs race is over cameras. While we have reached the point of diminishing returns in processors, RAM and display, the industry makes great leaps forward in the camera department each year. While we can ship Android Pie all the way back to the OnePlus 3, it cannot compete with the 6 or the 6T simply because the hardware has improved!

OnePlus has spent a lot of R&D money into the camera setup for the 7 Pro, and it shows. There are three cameras now :

This is all top of the line hardware, so the software is going to be the key differentiator. We saw the same thing happen with the OnePlus 6 - it took about a month for the camera to get to flagship levels, but nobody has questioned it since. Speaking of the software, I’ll quickly cover the UI of the stock camera app here: its the same as the 6/6T.

The main camera clicks 12 MP photos - binning 4 pixels into 1 to get a 12 MP picture from a 48 MP sensor. If you want a 48MP picture, however, just go to Pro mode and select JPG-48MP from the image type menu. The device also clicks RAW images. The pro mode has dials to adjusting the exposure, shutter speed, focus, ISO and white balance. It is an addictive pleasure to use those dials with the new haptic motor. The pro mode also has options for flash and other lights.



Pro mode lets you take awesome macros, but on the OnePlus 7 Pro, you can get those results with just the auto mode. Simply touch to focus, and voila! The AF system on the OnePlus 7 Pro utilises laser autofocus, phase detection autofocus and continous autofocus. The device always picked the correct focus and it did it fast. Quite a lot of times, things I would've done with pro mode happened better on Auto mode, especially macros.


This is auto mode. It is a tricky picture because there are so many tips that it could've tried to bring into focus on this pineapple.


Pro mode macro.


Coming to the photo quality, it is the best camera OnePlus has ever produced, and goes head-to-head with the Huawei P30 Pro, Samsung S10+, iPhone Xs, and Google Pixel. The company has focused on colour accuracy over instagrammable pictures. Some would like that, others would point to other chinese brand smartphones. Regardless, it is understood that only the former can be edited into the later and not vice versa. The focusing is also pretty good,
and intelligent scene detection has been implemented to this phone.



Before even talking about the camera modes, I’ll praise the OIS and EIS on the device. I have shaky hands, and OIS covers up for that pretty well. It stabilises images I take out a car going 60 kmph (37 mph) without any signs of blur, it stabilises images I take while walking, basically almost anything that a person can throw at it. Put simply, OIS improves the image more than any lens can.


The main lens is a 48MP sensor, but it clubs four pixels in one big pixel to capture more artifacts and give you better pictures. It is extremely amazing and gives flagship level photos.



There is an ultrawide camera on the OnePlus 7 Pro. You would either use it sometimes, or a lot - there is no in-between. The first thing you’ll notice with the ultrawide lens is that there is distortion at the edges, so its best if you leave some margin when you click the picture. It works with the same processing algorithms as the other two cameras and therefre pictures are similar. The images are slightly darker than the main camera, but that was expected due to it having smaller pixels. I used it a lot, as it conveniently allowed me to take pictures of people at full length without having to go farther back (think clubs, discos, etc). One thing you'll notice about the ultrawide sensor is that its shutter speed is a tiny bit more than the main lens, as seen below.




The telephoto lens is the best I’ve used till date. It is a 2.2x lens, but the camera has a quick toggle to hybrid 3x zoom. How this happens is that that the telephoto lens is actually 13MP, but it crops the image to 8MP and gets a lossless 0.8x cropping zoom. Also, the lens itself has a focal length that gives it a 2.2x optical zoom over the main camera. Therefore, the combined zoom is 3x HYBRID zoom, which is still lossless. Seeing that, it makes sense why OnePlus advertised it as 3x zoom, since the sensor itself was designed (by Sony, not OP) to crop-zoom from 13MP to 8MP.



Paranoma mode works well and stitches objects properly even when they are extremely close to the camera, which is commendable. A lot of the time devices try to keep exposure and other details locked when clicking a panaroma, which messes the sky up if you accidentally get the sun in the picture. I don't know what OnePlus does, but I did not see that happen here.




OnePlus has absolutely nailed the portrait mode. The telephoto lens is now 2.2x, so that means you have to take the picture from a farther distance, which is very inconveniencing at times, but it does improve the portrait mode performance.The edge detection is accurate everywhere, and the Bokeh seems to be natural. One thing I wanted on the portrait mode is the ability to adjust Bokeh strength, because it seems to be a personal preference. I feel that iPhones have very strong Bokeh effect, which means I can only use its portrait mode for very close up objects. The OnePlus 7 Pro has a softer bokeh than that, which does allow you to take pictures from a slightly longer distance and use the portrait mode for things like chest-level portraits, and portraits of objects.

Nightscape has become extremely useful. It clicks pictures almost as fast as auto mode, which makes it much more useful when you hand might be shaky. The colours come out accurate and preserve a lot of details. Performance has improved across the board, no doubt about that. With Nightscape 1.0 there was the issue of greens leaning towards yellow; not here. There is overall smoothening of the of the picture, as seen in these pictures of clouds. If brightness was increased crassly, it would devastate the sky.



The front camera has portrait and auto mode, besides video. It clicks great pictures and manages to get a good portrait with a single camera. Moreover, security enthusiasts have reason to cheer since the pop-up camera means it is mostly hidden from view and nobody can record you.



SUMMARY -
Overall, I must say I liked the pictures a lot. Colours are accurate and images focus fast, focus properly. The exposure and sharpening levels are typical OnePlus - a tad bit overexposed but that may be my own preference. I see that the HDR works more towards preserving detail and getting to a more median tone than blindly pumping up colours to make it look like its doing something. The nightscape and portrait modes are very well developed now, and depending on how you like your photos, might be among the best in the market. Pixel binning on the main camera makes an obvious difference to quality, and in a good way. OnePlus has improved on the 6/6T a lot and given us a great camera. If you buy this camera, be assured that it is one of the top cameras in the market today.

 

dnagpaldg, Jun 6, 2019 :

MY DAY, POWERED BY THE ONEPLUS 7 PRO
OR
HOW THIS DEVICE INTEGRATES INTO MY WORKFLOW

I wake up in the morning with the alarm on the phone. My phone is low on battery, so it put it on charge and get ready for college. Takes me about 20 minutes and I leave the room, phone in hand, charged enough to last 3 hours or so of classes. I'm sitting in a lecture hall while the professor shows lecture slides. I see a question and use the 3x zoom to click a picture of it. Its lossless, so I get a great picture and I can tally it with my class notes later on. The guy on my side notices that I've got a OnePlus 7 Pro, and asks to play around. He's awestruck when he sees how fast my fingerprint sensor is. He asks me about the curved display, and I do the one thing I like the most about this phone - I open up a PDF and put the phone on landscape. Then I just scroll as the curved edges make it look like paper is coming out of the device! My wide-eyed acquaintance has seen enough of my flex, so I go back to reddit.

I need to check the time, I just lift my phone. Ambient Display is unbelievably useful. Halfway through the third class of the day, someone's phone rings in the class. Anxiously I put a finger on the alert slider without getting my phone out of my pocket: I remembered to keep it on vibrate.

There is time to kill now, I have a free hour. I catch up on social media, going through photos on the QHD+ screen. I realise that reading is much faster and I can keep scrolling through text now whilst reading it - the 90Hz display never disappoints me. Now my friends come out of their class, and we're sitting in the cafeteria. I record random boomerang videos on my phone. My friends taunt me for being on my phone too much, so I put it on Zen Mode and then curse them as they start staring at their phones now that mine is useless

We've got nothing better to do, so I decide to play some music on my phone. Stereo speakers + Dolby = good, loud music. Its obnoxious to do that in the cafeteria, so I make sure to keep the volume low. My phone has given me about 4 hours of SOT now but it's about to die, so I go to the library to charge it up.

Once you're in the library you might as well study, so another round of Zen Mode follows. After that, I open the phone and start opening a ton of apps just because my workload is scattered across all of them. Whatsapp to catch up with a friend, some PDFs that I downloaded from the college academic portal, the EBook that I need to transfer to my laptop is getting uploaded to Google Drive, Slack for my technical groups, the community app to see replies on my review, going through my emails, and the perennial Instagram. Oh, and there's Spotify in the background. I seldom realise it but the phone has never lagged or given me an App Not Responding since I got it. Maybe, just maybe, I should start carrying my laptop around more.

It's evening now, so i just go to the beach. I'm in Goa, I'm never too far from one xD . As I watch the sunset, I record a timelapse of the sunset. The beach is a picturesque place, and I have a good camera on my hand. There's 4K@60FPS, but I'd use the 1080p@60FPS instead. Even though I have 256 GB of storage, what I do not have is a 4K display. I play it back and the clarity of the recorded audio amazes me more than the video. I have come to expect good video out of OnePlus devices but its exhilarating to get this quality with such small microphones.

I come back to my room later, and do what any sane person does - Netflix There's HDR on the device, but it shows up only when the content supports it. Fortunately for me, I'm watching Daredevil and HDR does wonders to that show! Stereo speakers are a great replacement for earphones when I'm alone, but then my roommate comes into the room so I need to use the earphones. I miss the good old headphone jack a lot or not at all depending on how much battery is left on my wireless earphones.

Before going back to sleep, I look at my chats and other apps for any updates. I play around with the phone, killing time before going back to sleep. I've got Subway Surfers on the phone, so I open it up. The Fnatic Mode notification comes up. A brief 5 minute run has somehow turned into half an hour wasted, and when I close the app I see all the notifications that I had missed.

 

dnagpaldg, Jun 6, 2019 :

FINAL WORDS

Every phone since the $299 OnePlus One has increased in selling price, distancing some people from the company. R&D does that to a company’s bottom line. But the company needs to innovate and develop new features to differentiate itself from competitors. Keeping the price down while being original is not easy to do consistently.

The OnePlus 7 series represents a shift in OnePlus’ marketing strategy: It is an attempt to see if the company can increase R&D and innovate a OnePlus 7 Pro for a more premium market, while keeping its price sensitive ethos with the capable but no-frills OnePlus 7. The phone I have reviewed does not cut corners to bring its price down. It is quintessentially OnePlus – not afraid to innovate, and still manages to be the most affordable in its league.

The OnePlus 7 Pro represents a watershed moment for the company, perhaps even surpassing the launch of the OnePlus One. Just like the OnePlus One proved to everyone that a flagship phone need not have a flagship price, the 7 Pro sets out to show that innovation does not mean burning a hole in your pocket. Yeah, the OnePlus 7 Pro is expensive, but it’s price maxes out at $100 less than its competitors. Yes, some companies do sell phones cheaper than this, but (1) have you seen the ads and bloatware and (2) they’re well-specced but seldom premium.

Considering the package that you get; it is hard not to recommend the phone. Most of the differentiators for a smartphone are now things that are not advertised much, but things that you feel when you use it:

1. You do not notice a 90 Hz screen until you start scrolling through a line of text and realise you can read everything whilst scrolling only because of the higher refresh rate.

2. You feel the phone has really fast R/W speeds when you load up that high definition content from your internal storage – that’s the UFS 3.0 more than the processor and RAM.

3. You use the phone after coming from something you bought many years ago, and the network seems faster on WiFi – that’s the new modem with higher upload and download speeds.

4. You’re playing music on your phone and you suddenly hear the left channel and right channel separately. You remember there’s stereo speakers.

5. You’ve been playing PUBG for 3 hours straight, and stop using the game. You realise the phone is warm, but nothing close to the burn-your-hand feeling you once used to get. There’s a cooling system in place.

6. The OnePlus 8 launches and it has cool features that you like. Do you want them? Look how OnePlus brought Nightscape for the 6, and Zen Mode and Fnatic as well. Look how the OnePlus 3/3T just got stable Pie.

7. You’re using the phone for 2 years now and the new version of Android just launched. OnePlus still supports this device while others have long stopped supporting their phones or their updates slow down the device. Seems like a silly move to not do something like that, but you like the integrity of the company.

Meanwhile, there is a OnePlus 7 as well, and you’d ask: what about it?

The OnePlus 7 is a refreshed OnePlus 6T, no words minced there. It is cheap, and it refreshes some of the more important (and affordable) components of the earlier device. That is not a bad thing – the design of the 6T was well received, and so were the other features on it. It has 20W Dash Charging (not Warp 30), but the battery is also smaller. But then, both phones target different kinds of people.

If you’re a student (or anyone on a budget) who wants a flagship that lasts him long, one that he can mod freely, one that has crazy fast charging and a great camera, and one that feels premium but is affordable, go for the OnePlus 7. It is the same marketing pitch as the OnePlus One. It has everything that built up the brand, and most importantly, it keeps the costs in check.

If you’re someone who wants to be at the bleeding edge of smartphone technology, or someone upgrading to the OnePlus 7 series and have the budget, or basically anyone who is going to use this phone for a long time, or just a Samsung/Apple person till they started charging more than Rs. 100,000 or $1,000, then go for the OnePlus 7 Pro, you won’t lose out on anything but the boot logo. This phone screams top-of-the-line everywhere, and it brings in things you do not expect to see elsewhere. Moreover, it has a community that gets it insane aftermarket support, the company does not believe in planned obsolescence, and instead keeps on improving it builds new devices.

What more can you want?

 

meatandy, May 20, 2019 :

Sorry , But I thought OnePlus stop sending out phones for development .


Looking forward to more of your review.

 

AnonymousWP, May 20, 2019 :

Nope, they continued it again. It was a temporary stop.

 

toastytoast1234, May 20, 2019 :

Did you just call Pete Lau a SIM ejector tool?

(sorry, just an (almost) Oxford Comma joke, only @theshinybeast will care).

 

theshinybeast, May 20, 2019 :

dnagpaldg, May 20, 2019 :

A good grammar joke makes a review fun!

 

meatandy, May 20, 2019 :

That's good news thanks for clarifying.

 

Spelt, May 21, 2019 :

Smart of them to continue it.

 

Spelt, May 21, 2019 :

That Warp charger has to be the biggest charging brick I have ever seen for a phone.

 

shadab147, May 21, 2019 :

oneplus 7 pro is worst mobile in this price.. rear and front cameras are very poor even this kind of camera we have in redmi note 7 pro.

 

IanbUK, May 21, 2019 :

When did you get your 7 Pro?

 

digitfreak2, May 21, 2019 :

I have oneplus 7 pro, camera is certainly not something I will brag about. There is also sound delay over Bluetooth headphones, which I think they can fix with software update. (Before you say it is expected to happen on Bluetooth headset, let me provide you with the information that I have oneplus 6T, and there is negligible sound delay on the same headphone).

Apart from that, it is definitely not a bad phone. Everything feels premium and sturdy, which justifies the cost.

 

dnagpaldg, May 21, 2019 :

You're probably on the pre-release firmware. I did not face issues with my bluetooth earphones though, so maybe updating would help. Otherwise, reset the headphones and then try.

 

digitfreak2, May 21, 2019 :

I think I am on the latest stable firmware.

Also, you won't notice it during normal playback, but if you play any game it is noticeable.

 

Raju Haveri, May 21, 2019 :

is this 5g phone or not

 

dnagpaldg, May 21, 2019 :

Try resetting the earphones once. The method depends, so you need to look it up.

Other than that, if your earphones are SBC (or just not APTx Low Latency), then some latency can be expected in games. Games play sounds when an activity is triggered, so it might take some processing time and be exacerbated by these protocols. Still, it is weird to see that videos and audio playback is still supported.