OnePlus 9 Pro
OnePlus offers all the premium features of its rivals for a slightly lower price – but it’s still expensive
PRICE 128GB, £691 (£829 inc VAT) from oneplus.com
While OnePlus recently “returned to its roots” with the low-cost OnePlus Nord ( see issue 313, p62), it still values the high-end. However, if you sneak a peak at our review of the OnePlus 9 on p70, you’ll see that it’s a disappointment, which means OnePlus is pinning all its flagship hopes onto the OnePlus 9 Pro.
As always, the OnePlus mantra is to stuff all the high-end bits in, but for less money than the big players. But, with prices that start at £829 and then rise even higher depending on the configuration, can its flagship truly be called a “budget” alternative anymore? That’s a rhetorical question, incidentally, and the answer is no.
Smarty pants
It looks smart, but you can say that about most upper-crust phones. There’s nothing that stands out on first glance, but closer examination reveals some positive tweaks. For example, I prefer the rounded camera rectangle on the rear to the OnePlus 8 Pro’s “traffic light” arrangement, along with the way each camera lens is trimmed in chrome. The Hasselblad branding adds a certain cachet, too.
However, where the gods of the upgrade give with one hand, they take with the other: I’m not a fan of the new glossy options, which pick up fingerprints far too readily, and only the black model is finished in matte. It’s also available in “Pine Green” with 12GB of RAM and 256GB storage, while the “Morning Mist” or “Stellar Black” models come with 8GB of RAM and 128GB storage (note the lack of a microSD slot).
There’s plenty else to like. I’ve always been a fan of OnePlus’ threeposition do-not-disturb switch, which allows you to silence the phone or switch it to vibrate-only without fiddling around with the onscreen settings. This sits on the right edge above the power button, with the volume rocker on the opposite edge.
Elsewhere, the phone’s front camera peeks out from behind a holepunch notch in the top-left corner of the screen at the front. There’s an optical fingerprint reader hiding behind the display at the bottom, too.
You don’t get a 3.5mm headphone jack, but everything else you’d expect from a flagship phone is here: IP68 dust and water-resistance, NFC for contactless payments, 65W wired charging, 50W wireless charging and reverse charging when you need to top up your true wireless headphones. Naturally, there’s also 5G support.
“It’s an AMOLED panel that runs at a refresh rate of up to 120Hz and automatically adapts to what you’re doing to save battery”
Display of force
The OnePlus 9 Pro is shorter than the 8 Pro by a couple of millimetres, thanks to a slightly smaller display. 6.7in across the diagonal compared with 6.78in isn’t a huge change, though, and the resolution remains the same at 1,440 x 3,216 for a pixel density of 525ppi.
It’s an AMOLED panel with perfect contrast that runs at a refresh rate of up to 120Hz and automatically adapts to what you’re doing to save battery. You can drop the display resolution from native to FHD+ (1,080 x 2,340) for the same reason, although I didn’t see much difference in stamina between the two modes.
It’s a fine display. Brightness reaches a high of 470cd/m² in day-to-day use, and while the grinch within me would like it go higher for super-bright days, it’s arguably more important that it peaks at 763cd/m² when playing back HDR material.
Colour accuracy is exceptional. There’s a multitude of colour modes to pick from, ranging from Natural to AMOLED Wide Gamut, but if you want colour accuracy I recommend you select sRGB from the Advanced menu; this proved the most accurate mode for web browsing and general use. Vivid delivers the broadest spectrum of colours – around 83% of the DCI-P3 colour space – when you’re watching HDR video.
Hot chip
As usual, the latest OnePlus flagship contains the best mobile silicon that Qualcomm currently has to offer: in this case, the Snapdragon 888. This is an eight-core system on a chip (SoC) that’s clocked at between 1.8GHz and 2.84GHz, and built using a 5nm manufacturing process. It’s joined by an Adreno 660 GPU, X60 5G modem and (in our review handset) 12GB of system RAM and 256GB of storage. The base model has 8GB of RAM.
As you’d expect, performance is on a par with the only other Snapdragon
888 phones we’ve seen: the Xiaomi Mi 11 ( see issue 319, p68) and Asus ROG Phone 5 ( see issue 320, p68).
However, like the Mi 11, the OnePlus 9 Pro failed to hit the high notes when it came to battery life. It’s not that a result of 17hrs 18mins in our video-rundown test is poor, simply that rivals are breaking the 20hrs mark. Still, it’s more than enough to last you a full day of heavy use.
The charging – both wired and wireless – is extremely quick, with a bundled 65W charger that charges the battery from zero to full in less than half an hour. Spend £70 on the OnePlus 50W wireless charger and it will top up the battery to full in 43 minutes. It gets hot, though, and so needs fans that audibly spin up when you pop your phone down.
OnePlus’ partnership with pro camera manufacturer Hasselblad is intriguing. It’s a three-year deal and this year the focus is on colour tuning and software, rather than anything radical on the hardware side.
Aside from the Hasselblad branding and a new shutter sound that’s designed to mimic the “iconic Hasselblad” shutter, there’s an impressive looking lineup of cameras on the rear. The main camera is a 48MP f/1.8 unit with a sensor size of 1/1.43in and a pixel size of 1.12μm. You’re also getting a 50MP f/2.2 ultrawide camera, a 3.3x 8MP f/2.4 telephoto, a 16MP f/2.4 front camera and a 2MP monochrome camera. As with most modern phones, these all output images at lower-than-native 16MP resolution by default – to get the full 48MP or 50MP of the main and ultrawide units, you’ll need to switch to the new Hasselblad Pro mode.
This is a tweaked version of the previous OnePlus Pro option. It’s a little easier to use, but there’s nothing unusual here, aside from the shutter button, which is now Hasselblad orange. There’s also a tilt-shift photo mode, but you could achieve the same sam effect with creative editing.
The important things are the images the cameras can capture, and they’re a mix of the great, the good and the middling. One thing the
Hasselblad partnership has ironed out is the colour difference between cameras – something OnePlus cameras have struggled with in the past. Now, from shot to shot, and camera to camera, colours are much more consistent.
The new 50MP ultrawide camera is particularly impressive, taking shots that are packed with detail and good levels of contrast. The camera’s “free form” lens keeps distortion to a minimum too, although this means that you can see stretching at the edges and the corners of images.
And the shots I’ve taken with the main camera have looked great for the most part: detail levels, contrast and exposure have been generally excellent. The 3.3x optical zoom gets you close enough to the action without overdoing the magnification and quality is right up there with the iPhone 12 Pro Max.
However, there are flaws. In some shots, areas of shadow have looked blue when they should have been grey, while in others, mid-tones have taken on a magenta tinge. And while portrait mode isolates the subject nicely, creating pleasing background blur, it smooths out skin texture just a little too much.
Finally, video is a match for the best. You have the option to shoot at 8K 30fps, 4K 60fps or 1080p 60fps fully stabilised – or, if you fancy, 4K at 120fps unstabilised. The footage is packed with detail and stands up well to the iPhone 12 Pro Max ( see issue 316, p73) in terms of quality.
Overall, this is the best camera setup OnePlus has so far produced – but even with Hasselblad’s help, there’s still work to do to match up with the best.
More pros than cons
What you’re getting here is a top-end phone at less than top-end prices. At £829, the OnePlus 9 Pro once again undercuts its big-name rivals to deliver flagship speed and quality without the four-figure price tag.
Nor does it lag behind for features. From the display to the fast wired and wireless charging, from the neat design to the IP68 rating and decent cameras, it delivers everything you need and would expect. While other phones are now doing a similar thing, none can compete with this package at this price.