ONEPLUS 9 PRO
£TBC, oneplus.com
OnePlus exists as a company because it aimed to build a new breed of flagship phones. The OnePlus 8 Pro was spectacular enough that it bagged our 2020 Gadget of the Year T3 Award – and now the 9 Pro (and, with it, the more affordable 9) sees the company throwing new technology and impressive partnerships at its handsets and well and truly cementing its place pushing the high end forward.
The Pro’s screen is perhaps its greatest asset, marking significant progression in the world of compact OLEDs. The panel, called ‘ Fluid Display 2.0’, uses a low-temperature polycrystalline oxide (LTPO) material. We’ve seen this elsewhere, like in Samsung’s Note 20 Ultra, but never like this. OnePlus can step the screen right down to a 1Hz refresh rate or scale it all the way up to 120Hz for functions like scrolling, cutting display power consumption by up to 50%. It offers that screen a 360Hz touch sampling rate, making this more responsive than anything else available on these shores – except, perhaps, sister brand Oppo’s Find X3 Pro...
And then there’s the camera system, codeveloped with Hasselblad, which focuses on providing unparalleled colour reproduction and calibration with a bunch of custom camera apps on-phone and superior lensing on the rear. Through all that, it can also dial itself up to record 8K at 30fps and 4K at 120fps, with special tweaks for backlit shooting and nighttime capture. In short, this is set to be another incredible handset from OnePlus, and one we’ll look more deeply at very soon.
TECH-O-METER
“The new Android flagship king? It could very well be” Josh Russell, Editor