OnePlus 8 Pro: Finally a flagship, not a flagship killer

All this time, OnePlus’ top phone has had a small list of things missing barring its full fledged entry into the premium flagship club. That’s despite the fact that it’s been the most selling premium phone in surveys. It always had the specs maxed out, but the absence of wireless charging, water resistance rating and a superlative camera setup held it back and dubbed it a ‘flagship killer’.

With nowhere else to go but up, OnePlus has now added these must-haves to its OnePlus 8 Pro and has shut the complaints up — until they can think of something else.

Of the two OnePlus phones just launched, the OnePlus 8 is the slightly smaller of the two and has some specs reduced for differentiation. The larger OnePlus 8 Pro is the power user’s choice.

The OnePlus 8 Pro keeps tight hold of its typical design. A vertical camera strip down the top middle and logos adorn the back of the phone, leaving the rest of the space to sport colour and light-play. Our unit is a very pretty minty Glacial Green.

The others are Ultramarine Blue and Onyx Black. The sides of the glass are curved, both front and back, and the phone overall looks very OnePlus.

In the box you get a transparent plastic case with the Never Settle tagline fashionably aligned along the right side. If you absolutely hate that, there will be no end of cases available including a glacial green sandstone.

For the first time, the provided case has a plastic flap over the charging port. Because that now emphasises the fact that the OnePlus 8 Pro is IP68 certified for dust and water resistance. Well, the monsoon is coming and users can walk and talk int the rain if they like.

Maxing out specs

The 6.78-inch QHD+ (1440x3168-pixel) AMOLED screen only has a tiny punch hole for the front camera on the left which is really easy to get used to and goes unnoticed most of the time.

The screen on this phone comes with a 120Hz refresh rate which works at its highest QHD+ resolution; You can drop the setting to 90Hz and FHD if you want to extend battery life or want text to be bigger rather than fine and crisp.

The display, a Samsung, looks quite lovely though I have to say Samsung displays actually look best on Samsung phones. It’s fast and sensitive to touch but luckily I didn’t notice many accidental touches from the glass being curved because the case mitigates that a little. Only once did I manage to wake someone in the US at 3am their time and bring down my popularity rating considerably. The 16MP selfie camera isn’t that dramatically improved.

There are plenty of settings to play with to tweak the already colour-accurate display to your liking. Among the new ones are a ‘Comfort tone’ where the device adjusts to the light around you and warms up or down accordingly. The other is Motion Graphics Smoothing which inserts frames into video to make it smoother — reviewers have just been turning that off.

Battery, Processor, OS

This phone has 4,510mAh battery and not only does it have 30W fast charging but it can fast charge wirelessly - with the OnePlus charger. As it is, the battery life is really pretty good, perfect for the power users who may use it for hours of gaming. Performance is expectedly stellar seeing as it comes with the Snapdragon 865 and 8GB or 12GB LPDDR5 RAM with 128RAM or 256GB storage. With the clean and light OxygenOS, it makes for speed and power that hasn’t been easy to match.

Camera setup

The one thing that will probably please OnePlus fans the most is that the disparity between the camera setup on the OnePlus 8 Pro and the top few camera champs has reduced — though by no means overtaken them by long shot. The main 48MP camera uses a Sony IMX689 sensor and f/1.78 aperture. It will shoot 12MP until you go and change that in the app whereupon it can shoot 48MP in wide angle as well as regular. A second wide angle lens is also a 48MP. Autofocus and optical image stabilisation is supported. The images you get are nice and detailed and colour-accurate. There’s an 8MP telephoto lens which uses 3x and then goes digital. The wide angle also shoots macro and does a good job of it. The OnePlus 8 Pro can shoot 4K video at 30 and 60Fps.

Overall this specs beast is best suited to those who can really use the extra power on all fronts — from UFS 3.0 storage to 120Hz screen — rather than those who just need a good phone. This is power for power users. The Oneplus 8 Pro is going on sale on the 15th of June.

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