My favorite phone right now is the Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus, but you can almost buy three
next-tier phones for the price of two flagships, and with how slowly
Android handset makers provide operating system updates, including gigantic companies like Samsung,
this, uh, "cost of staying current" metric becomes an important one to consider. So, is the S9 Plus
really $300 better than the OnePlus 6?
Let's figure that out, shall we? Brought to you by P.I.A.
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I already covered the specs of the OnePlus 6 in my recent sponsored hands-on video.
So, rather than listing a bunch of part numbers, I'm gonna just make this
PC analogy. When it comes to performance, OnePlus compromises nothing.
Generation after generation, they've crammed the latest enthusiast grade CPU, RAM, graphics
card, and storage device into an enclosure, then saved a few bucks by going for a mainstream level motherboard,
a good - if not exceptional - display, and then some less flashy peripherals.
So my demo unit here is an 8-gig RAM,
128-gig storage affair.
And I could easily use all the same words as any top-tier phone to describe the experience of using it.
Snappy!
Fluid!
Lightning fast!
But every phone is fast when it's new, and you're all tired of hearing that stuff, so I'm not going to do that.
Instead, I'm going to talk about software, because that's where OnePlus seems to be trying to set themselves apart.
It wasn't a perfect roll out, but the OnePlus 3 and the 3T were among the first
older Android phones to get Android 8.0 Oreo in November of 2017.
That's four months before the Galaxy S8 and six months before the S7,
another 2016 phone. This kind of investment in software is what keeps older phones secure and
running smoothly, and it's something that I want to encourage them to keep up,
especially because I really like their Oxygen OS variant of Android. It manages to not screw up the light
stock Android experience,
while adding features and
customization toggles that improve ease of use rather than adding
frustration. And the display notch, believe it or not, is a great example of this. It's there on the phone,
but you have to actually go out of your way to make it do anything stupid
like take a bite out of a full screen video in landscape mode.
You have to not only enable the notch in the first place, but you also have to specifically allow that app
uh, like YouTube to use that space.
And OnePlus also says that they'll be adding an option post-launch to switch the top pixels of their AMOLED display off completely
so you will never have to look at it at all. Another big software feature, this time, is gesture based navigation.
Now, I wasn't a huge fan of
Apple's removal of the home button on the iPhone 10 and I still prefer buttons, be they physical or software, that I can click or
push on, but I'm also all about user choice.
Especially when it comes to things that there's just no good reason to lock down
like the ability to switch the back and recents buttons,
GOOGLE. >:c
So, you swipe up the middle for home,
then you swipe and hold for recents,
and when you're inside an app, you just swipe up on the left side or the right side for back.
It works really well and in spite of my worries that back would interfere with
scrolling on long webpages, the detection for where the swipe needs to start in order to register
the gesture is good enough that after 10 minutes, I never accidentally triggered it again.
My only real complaint is that I would like to see a configurable delay on the recents gesture, and
while we're at it, maybe edge-to-edge coverage for the included screen protector.
The ridge here is a little too sharp for comfort. But I can't say the same for the camera!
We're long past megapixel counts meaning anything,
so I spent some time in our studio and on the streets of London to gather some test images.
Now, I'm no photography buff like Brandon
so, I'm sure my composition is Amateur Hour,
but there's a lot of information that we can glean here. Compared to the Galaxy S9,
almost anything else pales when it comes to low-light performance, and
Samsung was the only one to handle this extremely challenging high-contrast shot correctly.
So you see how the inner part of the petals have some orange to them?
Not one of the other phones I tested - including the OnePlus 6 - managed to pick this up, though to OnePlus' credit,
they avoid the awful over-sharpening artifacts that destroyed pretty much everything the Mate 10 Pro spat out.
This brick right here looks like a painting if you zoom in enough!
And subjectively, the 6 does as good a job as any other device that I tested of
capturing the scene in front of me as my eyes saw it with true-ish to life colors and
not a ton of noise in the image. Now, I'm not into
faux-keh post-processing
background blurring techniques, but it does have that if you're into it, and thanks to the nice, wide f/1.7 aperture
and larger main sensor, I found myself getting a touch more REAL background blur in my shots
compared to other smartphones; though, in fairness to the S9, in this one, it is sharper across the board.
We've reached the point with OnePlus where the camera launches so fast,
snaps so quickly,
and looks so good, that as someone who finds stuff like a fraction-of-a-second 960 fps
slow-motion mode pretty impractical, I don't feel like I'm giving anything up here. Even the selfie camera seems
adequately suitable, with a background blur update coming shortly after launch.
Which brings us to the part where we are giving something up.
There is a reason that Samsung moves more than twice as many phones as their closest Android competitor and
many times more than scrappy upstart OnePlus.
With a little bit of tweaking you can get pretty
screen-off notifications, like Ambient Mode, and you can get quick access to the time,
But that is NOT as good as an always-on display.
The OnePlus 6's water resistance is...
"unofficial", rather than IP-rated. The 6 lacks wireless charging
altogether, an awesome feature these days. OnePlus' face unlock is shockingly fast and works in a wide variety of conditions.
Check this out. Boom.
But, it isn't as secure as iris scanning. You give up gimmicky extra camera modes like the S9's cool
panorama selfie. The 6's earphone speaker isn't amplified for stereo sound in landscape mode,
which is a HUUUGE bummer for me,
and, while dual SIM is good, a
secondary convo slot for a second SIM, or a
MicroSD card is much better. The OnePlus 6 has NO expandable storage.
So yeah, that is a pretty significant list.
But, none of these things have a
devastating effect on day-to-day use for me
like the removal of the headphone jack on recent generation iPhones, and the Pixel 2 XL, so
OnePlus gets mad kudos, both for keeping the headphone jack and for making a great value, high performance device
once again.
Now, I'm gonna switch back to the S9 Plus.
But that's only because I already have one. If it was my money today, the OnePlus 6,
With a dbrand skin, of course (;D), because even the matte version is pretty darn slippery,
looks like a better bang for the buck.
There we go. That's a little better.
Now I can actually, like, hold onto this thing! dbrand skins are available in a wiiide
variety of different colors and finishes, and feature unrivaled precision.
They measure many times to insure a factory fit for your product, and not only do they look great,
but they protect against
incidental damage, and they make it easier to hold on to your phone in the first place. Their customer service robots are easy to work with
and wonderful, and their products are affordable and ship worldwide.
Check out dbrand at the link in the video description!
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