(soft music)
- 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's a 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, decent battery life, fast charging.
So a lot of what I'm gonna end up talking about
are the things you might not have expected from OnePlus,
which on this phone is wireless charging
and IP68 water resistance.
Also, you never know what to 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 undercutting Samsung with this phone,
but it has a starting price of 899,
which means that the 8 Pro is kind of an expensive device.
If you're looking for something a little bit less expensive
but still new, take a look at Jon Porter's review
of the regular OnePlus 8, which starts at 699,
we'll link it down in the stuff down there.
Anyway, the thing about OnePlus
is there's always very, very high expectations
for these phones, and the question about the 8 Pro is,
can it meet them?
(soft music)
So real quick, I wanna talk about the stuff
that you could expect from a 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 in this thing is really great.
I already mentioned that it has IP68 water resistance.
I also love this sort of translucent matte back
on the back here.
The screen, of course, covers almost 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 custom version of Android,
and that's because the stuff that they add on top of Android
is usually just there to control the phone itself
or to control the special features that OnePlus does.
It's not there to try and get you locked in
to some other random ecosystem that you don't care about.
Samsung.
I don't actually have a second camera over there,
'cause I'm shooting from home.
Let's move on.
Now, one thing you haven't always been able to expect
out of OnePlus phones is a great screen.
But they solved that in the 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, which is honestly too big for me,
but if you like big phones,
you'll probably be happy with it.
They did a hole punch in the corner, which I actually prefer
because it doesn't have weird mechanical stuff
with the pop-up selfie camera.
The bezels are very, very tiny in the top and the bottom
and it wraps around to the left and the right.
But the big news, of course,
is that it has a 120Hz refresh rate,
if you want it, and you 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 a 120Hz, highly recommend it.
One thing OnePlus lets you do that Samsung doesn't
is use that 120Hz at its full resolution 1440 by 3168.
And you can do it,
but it will definitely hurt your battery life,
so I kinda recommend you don't.
I've been leaving this at 1080 about half the time
and I haven't noticed that big a hit
and I've definitely noticed the improved battery life.
OnePlus is also really proud of the color accuracy
on this screen, I think it looks pretty good.
They also have added some other weird features,
like there's a motion smoothing feature
for videos inside Netflix or inside Amazon Prime,
and that sounds awful because motion smoothing
is definitely awful on your television,
on the phone though it actually 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 a hit 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 the very first OnePlus phone
to support wireless charging,
so we'll put it on the charger and ba-da-da-da,
it is charging wirelessly, hurray.
It'll work with any standard Qi charging pad,
it'll also do reverse wireless charging.
But the big new thing is this charger right here,
which costs 70 bucks, by the way, it has a vent and a fan,
it is their Warp Charger and it can charge wirelessly
at 30 watts, which is incredibly fast for wireless charging.
They say it can go from zero to 50% in a half an hour
and I tested it, and it does, it charges up half way
in half an hour, which is pretty impressive.
Now this is the part where I wish I could tell you
what to expect when it comes 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 the full 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 this battery if you want to.
If you turn a bunch of stuff off,
you can get through a full day, and I have,
and if you turned it all on,
you can crush it in like four or 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 what to expect out of OnePlus.
Some years they're trash, some years they're pretty good.
But this year with the OnePlus 8 Pro,
I'm actually expecting a lot,
because again, this phone starts at 900 bucks
and I think that OnePlus mostly delivers.
There's like one situation where 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 that really falls down after that.
And then there's an ultra wide sensor,
and I actually give OnePlus a lot of credit on this one,
because they're using the sensor from last year's 7T,
which means that the ultra wide 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'm pretty happy with dynamic range,
I'm pretty happy with color,
and I'm also really, really happy with detail.
I love using this phone for macro photos too.
You can get pretty close
and get really, really fine detail there as well.
You can shoot 4K 30 video
with their super steady stabilization thing turned on.
But again if you really wanna shoot video
with a smartphone,
I think your best bet is still an iPhone 11 Pro.
Now, when it comes to night mode,
I was actually very impressed with this thing.
It held its own up against a Pixel 4, iPhone 11 Pro,
or a Galaxy S20, did not expect that out of this phone.
So, everything is great,
but there is that one place where it falls down,
and weirdly, it's in like dim lighting, not super-low light,
but like twilight kinda dark 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 them out 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 in dim lighting condition,
this phone's worst tendencies just get multiplied,
it makes my face way too bright, 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 can fix 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 grade school, we didn't get grades,
we got these weird report cards that said,
does not meet, meet, or exceeds expectations.
That's what I wanna do with the OnePlus 8 Pro,
I'm gonna give it a meet expectations, not an exceeds,
but that's because my expectations 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 OnePlus doesn't get free passes anymore
when it comes to quality or the number of features
that it offers in this zone,
and luckily the OnePlus 8 Pro has all those features,
and it has the quality.
This is a very, very good phone
that really isn't missing any premium features.
It just needs a little bit more work on the camera,
because hey, it's OnePlus, what else did you expect?
Hey, everybody, thank you so much for watching.
I mentioned it before, but I'll say it one more time,
Jon Porter reviewed the OnePlus 8.
You can click on something to watch that video,
and you should.
Click.
Okay.
(snapping fingers)