Huge, bold, notch-free screen; as powerful as any Android; classy design
Camera is beaten by rivals in specialist areas; loses OnePlus’s signature affordability
OnePlus is five years old. It has always had a great story. But you could argue the higher price OnePlus 7 Pro doesn’t fit in it.
OnePlus began as a viral sensation. Your cousin posted about their OnePlus One on Facebook in 2014, but you couldn’t buy one. OnePlus was an insiders’ club. After you could buy a OnePlus phone from a network, they were still hundreds of pounds less than the institution-size rivals. That was story enough for the OnePlus 3.
The OnePlus 7 Pro can’t rely on these old story beats. OnePlus phones are no longer exclusive, and this one isn’t even “affordable”, let alone cheap. But there’s a place for the OnePlus 7 Pro in 2019, when the HTC, LG and Sony phone divisions seem sad and shrunken versions of their former selves. It has a tasteful reserve these rivals now lack.
OnePlus has also announced the OnePlus 7, a more conservative update of the OnePlus 6T, and the OnePlus Bullets Wireless 2. These are wireless earphones with steel-lined earpieces and a triple driver array.
Design (part 1)
The OnePlus 7 Pro is a typical “pro” phone. There’s nothing particularly professional about it. It’s for anyone who can afford to pay £750 for a handset.
Three core elements separate this from the standard OnePlus 7: design, the cameras and display tech. But they are strong enough to make the Pro seem a different mobile.
The design has a little of the bold flavour of today’s folding phones. A selfie camera sits in a small motorised tombstone that pops up when needed, and sinks back down afterwards. You’re flooded with all the worst eventualities. What happens if it gets bent or snapped off? Won’t the motor burn out at some point? Isn’t this a terrible idea? Use the Face Unlock feature and the OnePlus 7 Pro’s front camera attempts to pop out every time the power button is pressed. That’s a lot.
It can, and will, happen in your pocket. The sight of a little one-eyed robot whenever you pick the phone up is strange. But OnePlus seems to have avoided obvious practical hurdles the Samsung Galaxy Fold clattered right into.
Block the camera and you can hear its whirring motor has some form of burnout prevention. It applies some pressure, but not much. There’s a silicone lining at its base to maintain the OnePlus 7 Pro’s “everyday” water resistance. It is fine with rain, not submersion.
The phone’s accelerometer and gyroscope can also tell when you drop the phone, which makes the camera retreat back into the frame. There’s a tiny amount of wobble to the actual camera housing, but not much.
Will some OnePlus 7 Pro owners manage to damage the pop-up camera, and do so fairly quickly? Undoubtedly. You can probably picture the headlines right now. The cautious among you may want to avoid using Face Unlock at all before they arrive.
However, OnePlus has done an unmistakably good job here. The camera appears in around half a second and face recognition is so quick you could almost believe it happens while the lens moves.
There may be a security sacrifice involved. You can obscure half your face and Face Unlock still works. But the real-world experience is far better than you might imagine. It should be clunky, but is not. Assuming it does not cause a (many) multi-million pound recall in a few months, it’s a success.
Screen
A motorised camera is the OnePlus 7 Pro’s one potential gimmick. But it is not there for its own sake. It frees the screen from notches and punch holes, so an anamorphic aspect ratio movie can fill the display without curvy holes in the image, and only minor cropping.
The 7 Pro’s higher price also lets OnePlus use a sort of greatest hits of today’s best components. It has a Samsung OLED screen, of 3120 x 1440 pixel resolution and a 90Hz refresh rate you don’t see even in the Galaxy S10 Plus.
However, for video and games, only the traditional OLED benefits really matter. The OnePlus 7 Pro screen is very large at 6.67in, offers excellent (and highly customisable) colour and ultra-high contrast. It supports HDR10+, too, although that extra “+” is likely only a result of using a Samsung panel and does not mean a great deal when Netflix uses standard HDR10 at present. And, well, it’s a phone, not a 65-inch TV.
The OnePlus 7 Pro is just about the best video-watching phone available at the price. And the experience is all the better for its solid stereo speakers. Do some alternatives have slightly better outdoors visibility? Yes. And at times you may wish it didn’t have curved sides, which pool reflections like a gutter collecting rain water.
Design (part 2)
A curved front has become just as important a signifier of a “top-end” phone, though. It makes the OnePlus 7 Pro look more expensive than the OnePlus 7, and lets a big handset like this avoid feeling uncomfortably huge.
It is big, mind, several millimetres wider than the already large wsear. The OnePlus 7 Pro has the industry-standard combination of Gorilla Glass on the front and back, aluminium for its sides. And other hardware elements are steeped in OnePlus character. Our OnePlus 7 Pro has a matte rear with a tasteful colour gradient, one far less overtly attention grabbing than those of Honor and Huawei handsets.
There’s a silent mode switch on its side, and no squeezable parts or pressure-sensitive screen features. The OnePlus 7 Pro is far more tasteful and reserved than any phone with a motorised camera has any right to be.
The in-screen fingerprint scanner has been improved, too. It’s far quicker, and more reliable, than the Samsung Galaxy S10’s, and uses a larger scanning area than the OnePlus 6T.
In actual use it’s not as quick as the Huawei P30 Pro’s or a traditional pad scanner, as you need to tap the screen first before it starts looking for your finger. But the sensor itself is fast.
Performance
No-one will be surprised by OnePlus’s choice of core hardware. Every lead OnePlus phone has used the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. The OnePlus 7 and OnePlus 7 Pro do, too.
It’s the Snapdragon 855, a CPU with eight Kryo 485 cores clocked at various speeds and an Adreno 640 GPU. This is better than the Kirin 980 used in the Huawei P30 Pro, better than the Exynos 9820 of the UK Samsung Galaxy S10.
This is the best you can get in Android. There are even highlights almost no-one will notice, too. Its UFS 3.0 internal memory reads at an SSD-grade 1190MB/s. The RAM (12GB version) juggles data at 28000MB/s. There are no cut corners here. Curiously, the 90Hz screen is the one part that can make the OnePlus 7 Pro feel faster than similarly powerful peers. You would assume it is there for movies and gaming. It isn’t.
Just as the 48fps version of The Hobbit looked eerily sped-up in cinemas, scrolling through menus with the 90Hz screen feature switched on looks snappier than in other phones. This isn’t “real” speed, it’s “UX” speed. But perception matters.
Raw performance is predictably excellent, with roughly 25 per cent more CPU power than the OnePlus 6T. You probably don’t need it, but it’s there.
Camera
The OnePlus 7 Pro marks the first time OnePlus has actively tried to keep up with the cameras of the most expensive phones. It has a three cameras on its back, a 48-megapixel wide, 16-megapixel ultra-wide and an “8-megapixel” 3x zoom.
This camera array offers everything you might ask of a top-end phone. It’s fast. The three lenses offer plenty of creative opportunities. Its zoom is stabilised. Night image quality is great, and the dedicated Nightscape mode is barely slower than standard shooting.
Dynamic range optimisation is excellent, colour looks natural and there’s a pro mode, although most have little reason to use it. However, the OnePlus did not grasp for superlatives like every other lead phone-maker. Samsung’s Galaxy S10 Plus has an amazing stabilised video mode with gimbal-like results. The OnePlus doesn’t even get close to the ultra(-ultra)—low-light performance of the Huawei P30 Pro.
Apple’s iPhone on-screen image preview is much better than the OnePlus 7 Pro’s, and the top Sony Xperias have radically slower slo-mo. Here you can shoot 240p at Full HD or 480p at “HD”, not 960fps.
OnePlus also uses some trickery to get its zoom. According to a hardware info scraper, there isn’t actually an 8-megapixel camera in the OnePlus 7 Pro, but a relatively low-end 13-megapixel one instead. The phone uses a combination of the main 48-megapixel camera and the dedicated zoom to take 3x photos. At times (but not every time) you can take a 3x photo with either camera blocked.
You could argue many people won’t notice this little act of deceit, or the missing extras often hidden fairly deep in rival phones. How often do you need the P30 Pro speciality, to shoot a room only lit by the dim LED screen of an alarm clock? And many Galaxy S10 owners don’t know the hyper-stabilised mode even exists.
There are a couple of slight disappointments the DSLR and CSC crowd should consider, though. The OnePlus 7 Pro lets you shoot RAW files using the Pro mode, but they are only 12-megapixel images. This tells us that while the Sony IMX586 sensor technically has 48 megapixels to its name, it’s designed primarily (and perhaps only) to capture lower-res photos.
You can take 48-megapixel JPEGs, but down at pixel level they are so painterly we would not be surprised to discover they are actually AI upscaled versions of the 12-megapixel photos.
The OnePlus 7 Pro has a great camera, but it is only groundbreaking in context of OnePlus phones, not phones in general. Similarly, the selfie camera is excellent but not quite as skilled at dealing with low-light conditions as the Google Pixel 3.
Battery life
This phone sits comfortably next to £850-£1,000 phones without “beating” them, or even attempting to do so in most areas. It applies to battery life, too.
The OnePlus 7 Pro has a 4,000mAh battery. It charges very quickly without getting hot, thanks to both “liquid cooling” and high-current (rather than high-voltage) charging. It outlasts the UK Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus comfortably. That phone is a little too easy to drain in a day, but the Huawei P30 Pro lasts longer still.
The 90Hz-screen feature does not seem a huge drain on the battery. An hour of YouTube streaming takes seven percent off the charge level in both 60Hz and 90Hz modes, although it may use adaptive techniques to switch to 60Hz automatically when no high-speed motion is detected.
Wireless charging is the one missing battery feature you may expect at the price. OnePlus likely decided not enough demand existed in its fanbase community to justify the cost.
Verdict
The OnePlus 7 Pro is a top-end phone with a slightly different approach. Aside from no longer being cheap or even affordable, it is not an overstuffed sandwich of features designed to make “the rest” seem behind the times.
This is not the first impression it leaves. A motorised front camera seems a symptom of the desperate need to innovate, but is less of a gimmick than it appears. And, all in all, the OnePlus 7 Pro is refreshingly largely free of the tech equivalent of Masterchef’s carrot foams and cow’s eyeball mousses.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
