One Plus 9 Pro Review 5G Series Phone
One Plus 9 Pro Review; This is the one plus 9 pro we have also reviewed one plus 9, not a pro but this time around it’s the pro model so here it is they are going full frontal flag shipment at this point with one plus.
This phone has a snapdragon 888 CPU the latest and greatest with 5G it has a 6.7-inch OLED display and it’s a new itpo display which is a more sophisticated variable refresh display much like we have seen on say the galaxy s21 ultra so 120-hertz max refresh on this and a new Hasselblad camera partnership which they made a big deal about Hassel blad branding back here
Is it more than just branding we are going to find out now but before we dive into those cameras there is more to a phone than well the cameras these days much as that might seem not the case given what manufacturers
And some reviewers focused on first the price of 969 dollars for the lower end configuration with eight gigs of ram and 128 gigs of storage and a thousand sixty-nine dollars for the configurations that we received from one plus which is 12 gigs of ram and 256 GB gigs storage allotment uh there’s no micro SD card slot so that’s it you can’t expand the storage
So that’s what I mean by full-frontal flagship in terms of pricing too and some people and I admit me to kind of miss when they were that upper mid rangy kind of upstart flagship killer thing going on there
But that said you know what Samsung needs some competition in the android space because moto well they dropped off the high end other than foldable phones years ago now and LG has a pretty small market segment
So we need somebody to keep Samsung on their toes and to maybe offer a different kind of experience than Samsung offers so that’s why this is worth the luck when you are just thinking well why shouldn’t I beside some people who don’t like Samsung software or whatever you know it’s up to you carrier compatibility another important point right you know
So it’s sold as has been the case with one plus phones as at mobile phones you can get it that way if you want for both the nine and the nine pro you can also buy it unlocked and unlocked is a nice proposition there and it will work on Verizon’s low band 5G admittedly they have just started rolling that out they have been focusing on that super-fast but super small footprint millimetre-wave 5G
This is only certified for the lower of 5G so you know you might not care much now about 5G, it’s become sort of a joke and people are like oh my 5G speed was lower than my 4G speed but for a phone, this expensive and forward-looking as 5G improves
And we start to see c band in use and some real gains and better coverage and all that sort of stuff you know you want to have it so at this is a sad story has not certified it to work and they haven’t said a word about their intent to do so they are you know one of the big three networks that do count for something it will work on att’s 4G network so that’s ok but carriers have to approve a phone before they allow it on their 5G network that’s what’s going on with that
So those things are out of the way the rest of the phone it’s your typical flagship specs you have got glass on the back you have got glass on the front it’s gorilla glass 5 now thankfully
So a little bit more hopefully drop and shatter resistance we hope as in terms of bulkiness you know one plus used to be some of the biggest heaviest phones on the market this is 197 grams and it is a lighter and smaller carry than the Samsung galaxy s21 ultra which is good god the biggest heaviest phone certainly that Samsung makes you have got NFC on board
You have got WI-FI you have got Bluetooth 5.2 you have an in-display fingerprint scanner that works well in my tests and a 2d facial recognition facial scanner too so you’ve got two different methods of biometrics to get into the phone it’s running Android 11 with the usual oxygen OS customization which is to say very little and a very light touch and the stuff that they do I typically like
So if you don’t like the software overload that Samsung does with multiple versions of the photo viewer application and multiple messaging apps and all that sort of thing you don’t have to worry about they are pretty much just this great straight google stuff, google messages with RCS google photos
You get the idea there so that stuff is all nice no surprise there’s no headphone jackman nobody does that anymore right just about you do have a USB c port on the bottom you can use USB c headphones or Bluetooth headphones if you want, we have stereo speakers built-in here and they are pretty good there’s Dolby Atmos support for the headphone jack as well
The display let’s talk about that a little bit more 120-hertz OLED display is very nice looking fairly well-calibrated but they have this vibrant mode in case you kind of miss the battle days of OLED when they are overly colourful and garish so you can make it do that
If you want to do that they have this ultra-fast touch response feature which works only in like four games right now pubg being one of them if you are a serious mobile gamer maybe you are going to get excited by that the display also gets very bright in outdoor auto-brightness mode the only thing that gets in the way of that a little bit is a boy it doesn’t have some glare
But part of that is the factory-installed screen protector the sides are curve glass but not as much as the previous generation which I appreciate because less accidental edge presses and it’s the technique they use mostly to try to make the phone look thinner and to make it feel better in hand it has the brightest always on display I have ever seen as well and you can choose from a couple of different kinds of always-on displays in terms of performance that’s the thing about oxygen OS and one plus phones they just feel super-fast
I mean you got the same processor and you know if you play games you can see the same frame rates and the benchmarks are fairly similar to another phone with the same processor and all that sort of thing but it’s what they do with the software that just makes it feel so boom
Also Read: Best Selling One Plus 9 Review
So, you don’t see people saying oh man my one plus slowed down after a couple of months which people typically say about other brands of phones and some of it may just be psychological the longer you use the phone the more you notice that there may be little delays in doing this and that so not an issue here fast. The battery on this is 4500 milliamp which is par for the course for a phone this size and in this price range
But what isn’t par for the course is warp charging as always so now we’re up to 65 watts charging for the wired charger and yes, the charger is still in the box that so very fast charging that’s the same one you would see as the upper-end option with a lot of Ultrabook laptops these days to give you an idea
So, you want to charge it from zero to full in a little over a half an hour yes you can do that but even if more crazy is their new latest warp wireless charger the 50t so that charges at 50 watts a wireless charger and
You know 15 watts is currently for qi wireless charging about as fast as it gets so that is crazy and no the phone does not catch fire and burn and yada yada and if you do want to buy that wireless charger that’s around 70 bucks or so and comes with the USB c cable
But you will have to use the charger that came with your phone the 16.5-watt charger to do that so for those of you who are a fan of wireless charging I’m sure you will be thrilled it also works with qi wireless charging too
If you have existing q wireless chargers it’ll just charge at the usual slower 15-watt rate or whatever it’s rated for and you can use third party or other phone brands’ USB c chargers too you just won’t charge at crazy warp charge speeds likewise you can use the warp charger with other phones
And it will just charge at whatever maximum speed those other phones support other and yes it also supports reverse wireless charging too so it can charge other cheap devices like a smartwatch or something like that and one plus will be coming out with a smartwatch speaking of looking forward to reviewing that as well all right so we have got all of that out of the way it’s a nice enough looking phone nothing unique about it not one of their riskier designs like the McLaren design phone that they had oh that one was pretty
But it’s a pleasant looking foam cladding gorilla glass we still have the alert silencer slider switch that I like a lot I think a lot of you probably do too
So, what about the cameras they made a big deal about this whole Hasselblad thing the shoot for the moon ya yada so one plus never had bad cameras they just didn’t have class-leading cameras so this is their attempt to get there and cameras are the big marketing differentiator these days between phones
Because a lot of us don’t even buy standalone point of shoot cameras anymore you just go with what your phone has so if you are into your camera on your phone keep watching this part they are getting there let’s put it that way so you know they did a Collab with Hasselblad and I would say that Hasselblad had some say an input it looks like you know sometimes it just throws a logo on there pay a company some money and you’re done
But they say this is part of a three-year thing going on and mostly it’s about the colour space I’m probably not the only one that’s going to tell you that which means you know Samsung goes for the overtop colours kind of with a bit of a bluish colour cast which is great if you’re doing landscapes maybe not so great when you’re shooting people
But here the colours are more natural and more neutral almost pixel-like or almost iPhones tend to be a little bit warm on the warmer end of natural so maybe more pixel-like but sometimes still a little on the blue even some colours are a little understated compared to reality but not too often white balance is pretty well handled on it
So those are the good things about it and you have a manual mode inspired by Hasselblad and you have shutter speeds that remind me of a Hasselblad camera which is a very expensive family of cameras that probably most of you will never use like six thousand dollars or whatever but not the fastest shooting cameras in the world
So I have missed photos of our very active cat for example so if you have kids if you have pets and you want to do that kind of action photography thing keep in mind just keep mashing on the shutter button and you might catch the shot that you want to catch all right enough of that 48-megapixel main sensor by the way not much difference between the one plus 9 pro and the one plus 9 for cameras which you’re not getting is a telephoto lens, particularly on the not pro one plus 9.
So 48 megapixel Sony main sensor on this and it’s a fast enough lens and it takes very pleasing pictures so a lot of people who I would call the normal out there would take pictures of this and say well this is delightful stuff and you wouldn’t be wrong
But us reviewers and those of you who are camera aficionados will keep and looking and pixel peeping and all that and I wouldn’t say they beat the Samsung galaxy s21 ultra yet or even the iPhone 12 pro max but just being up there is a step in the right direction and it’s the early stages of their partnership the wide camera on this or the ultrawide I should say
Because the main camera is already pretty wide at the 23-millimetre field of view the ultra-wide which is a 14-millimetre field of view is very good and it’s a pretty large sensor it’s also Sony they put a big focus on this pun intended and it takes very good pictures and they have some control of barrel distortion you know wide angles tend to look kind of fisheye and weird it’s well done and the pictures I would say are certainly at least as good as the iPhone 12 pro max when it comes to the ultra-wide-angle the telephoto is where it stumbles a bit
Because that’s an 8-megapixel sensor so and it’s not is any impressive zoom ratio if you’re a telephoto person and I confess that I am I’d like to do portraits I like to capture wildlife and the cat without getting up in the cat’s face which will assure that he’s going to stop doing whatever q thing he was doing this is 3.3 x optical zoom so yes and if you digital zoom it’s typical it’s going to degrade especially you are only working with an 8-megapixel sensor
So if you want that awesome 10x zoom that you get with the Samsung galaxy s21 ultra no iPhone 12 pro not max level still not quite there in terms of image quality but in good light, it’s pretty good in low light it gets pretty noisy fast night shots on this are quite pleasing and better than real life
They have better night vision than we do certainly it’s well done so that’s the one plus 9 pro particularly of appeal probably to t mobile customers in the united states since the carrier offers it directly and you’ve got complete carriers to support for this
But not too bad a pick for Verizon either and for those who are not Samsung people and you’re looking for flagship-level specs and pretty good cameras even if they are not the best we have ever seen they are pretty darn good then you have got it here versus the Samsung s21 ultra well that would be a whole other smackdown wouldn’t it but one thing that I like about this is it is easier and lighter carry a bit less bulky and heavier phone but you do lose that on the S pen as well.