The OnePlus 9 Pro. This is the first phone in a while that's piqued my interest,
and it all has to do with this little guy down here. Co-developed with Hasselblad.
Now usually I don't pay a whole lot of attention to these little joint ventures
since I usually see them as a marketing gimmick where one brand is trying to mooch
off the popularity of the other brand without much actual improvement to the consumer.
But this time seems a little different. For one, OnePlus is dropping 150 million dollars over the
next 3 years to improve their mobile cameras, and that's a big deal. And for two, Hasselblad
is just pretty cool. One of Hasselblad's more notable ventures was with NASA and the Apollo
missions. The cameras weren't digital back in those days, so NASA took a specially adapted
Hasselblad camera into space, along with a roll of film that allowed for 70 pictures. Imagine taking
only 70 pictures on the trip of a lifetime into outer space. Nowadays people take about 70 pics to
get a decent bathroom selfie. During the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, after the cameras had
taken their pictures, they hoisted them up the ladder, took out the film, and then tossed the
camera bodies back behind to the moon's surface to save weight on the return trip back to earth.
During all of the Apollo missions, a total of 12 Hasselblad camera bodies
were just tossed out and left behind on the moon's surface. Normally we frown on
littering, but I guess we can make an exception in extreme situations.
Speaking of which, let's hope this OnePlus 9 Pro survives the durability test. Let's get started.
[Intro]
Right off the bat, the most noticeable thing on this OnePlus 9 Pro is the camera bump
with it's quad cameras. And the very noticeable Hasselblad logo across the lens. Then of course,
we have the highly reflective glass backed panel. The coolest part of this phone is obviously going
to be those cameras. But like usual, let's start with the screen. And once again, OnePlus has been
nice enough to preinstall a rather nice plastic screen protector. Can't complain about that.
As I scratch through the different levels of Mohs hardness, we're able to tell what the
screen is made from. Plastic would scratch at a level 2 or 3. Glass would scratch at a 5 or 6.
And a sapphire screen would scratch at an 8 or 9. Word on the street is that another sapphire
screen phone was just released. Now I'm going to try to get my hands on one. But as we can see,
the OnePlus 9 Pro is made with Gorilla Glass, and scratches at a level 6,
with deeper grooves at a level 7. Pretty normal.
The front camera is a hole punch and sits in the top left corner of the phone.
It's got 16 megapixels and is protected by that front glass.
There is a plastic speaker grill covering the earpiece slot. This also doubles as one of the two
stereo speakers. And the phone has pretty minimal bezels going all the way around the screen.
One thing I do like about silver phones is that they are less prone to showing scratches
since the metal is also silver on the inside as well.
After seeing the ROG Phone, this antenna line makes me nervous. The power button
and mute slider are both made from metal. I think every phone should have one of these.
The top of the phone is pretty vacant. This is one of those noise cancelling mics up here.
Then we have the volume rocker running down the left side...also
made from metal. At the bottom of the OnePlus 9 Pro we have the second stereo speaker slot,
the USB-C port, and the single SIM card tray. It does have a red rubber ring around
the opening. The phone is officially ip68 this time around, but we'll have to check
out the rest of the ingress points from the inside during the teardown.
The back glass panel is super smooth this time around. No frosted glass or etching,
just a soft smudge collecting piece of glass. If you're trying to keep your fingerprints on the
down-low, there's always Robot Camo from dbrand. The nice thing about skins is that you can switch
them up whenever you want, and it's like getting a totally new phone. Robot Camo is kind of fitting
for the OnePlus 9 Pro since there are more robots than humans in space at the moment.
I'll leave a link down in the description so you can customize your own phone.
Let's talk a little bit more about this Hasselblad camera setup.
I feel like smartphones in general have been doing small quirky things to stand out lately.
But I'm hoping that OnePlus's huge investment into the mobile camera will bring some legitimate
improvement to the space. Since this is the first phone constructed during the partnership,
Hasselblad has contributed software improvements, color tuning, and sensor calibrations,
but no physical hardware just yet.
Up at the top we have a 50 megapixel ultra wide camera which does have a sensor that's 3x larger
than the iPhone 12 Pro Max's...but who's counting. Then we have the main 48 megapixel camera which
can do 12 bit raw images and 8K video. To put that into perspective, this camera can capture
68 billion colors while the screen can only display 1 billion, which is crazy. The extra
information is still utilized of course for picture editing and better quality in general,
even if it's not visible on the screen. It's just interesting to see how far cameras have come.
The main camera also works alongside a dedicated 2 megapixel monochrome camera down here.
Then we have the 3x zoom 8 megapixel telephoto camera over here, with the dual colored LED flash.
We'll talk more about the cameras when we can see them from the inside.
Before we can get to the screen, I haven't had a lot of luck recently
with the underscreen fingerprint scanners. They don't consistently read my fingerprints.
So I'll get the OnePlus 9 Pro set up and give it a nice coating of level 7 deeper grooves.
The scanning location is optical as you can see from the light that helps illuminate
my fingerprint for the underscreen camera. It's also positioned very low on the screen,
which is interesting. But it does still work every time, no complaints here.
Now for the screen. The OnePlus 9 Pro is packing a 6.7 inch,
1440p 10 bit display...meaning it's got those 1 billion colors we talked about earlier. Most cell
phone screens do not. Plus it's got the 120 Hertz refresh rate with a touch sensitivity rate of 360,
which is even faster than the ROG Phone 5 gaming phone. May he rest in peace.
But the most important thing of all, and the reason you're all here
is that the AMOLED screen can last 40 seconds under the heat from my lighter,
which is good because that was a lot of information to communicate.
It's a powerful flagship of a phone, and with that the 9 Pro does have a flagship of a price.
The last thing we have left is to check the structural integrity. Rumor has it there are
two batteries inside of this thing. And the last dual battery phone we tested didn't do so well.
When bent from the back, this OnePlus 9 Pro does have a slight curve,
but locks out and does not crack, kink, or break. Flipping it to the front,
it once again locks out and stops bending. Not too shabby. My fingers are pretty happy
there are no glass shards this time around. The OnePlus 9 Pro passes my durability test.
I'm looking forward to seeing what this Hasselblad partnership brings to the camera space.
If Hasselblad is creative enough to work with NASA, I'm looking forward to seeing
what they can do with OnePlus. And when you see that Hasselblad logo,
just remember there are 12 Hasselblad cameras just chilling on the surface of the moon,
free for the taking. All you gotta do is go get them.
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