OnePlus 7 Pro phone launch: massive screen and pop-up camera
Having made a name for itself for cutprice top-spec phones, OnePlus now has its sights set on the Samsung Galaxy S10+ and Huawei P30 Pro with its new OnePlus 7 Pro.
Costing from £649 the new premium OnePlus still undercuts the competition by about £250, but isn’t quite as value-oriented as previous offerings.
Instead the OnePlus 7 Pro is the firm’s biggest yet with a giant, notchfree 6.67in QHD+ AMOLED display, which fills the entire front of the device, curving at the edges with some of the slimmest bezels seen on any phone. The selfie camera has even moved to the top of the phone, popping out when required.
The screen also supports HDR+ and is one of the first on the market with a refresh rate of 90Hz, something usually reserved for ugly gaming phones, which the firm says improves smoothness in scrolling and games. A budget phone this is not.
The theme of speed is clear, with an impressive list of specifications. The OnePlus 7 Pro has the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 processor, which is claimed to be 45% higher performing than last year’s Snapdragon 845. Like other high-end phones the OnePlus also features a liquid cooling system, plus the latest version of the firm’s Warp Charge technology for some of the fastest cabled charging available.
The OnePlus 7 Pro also comes with 6GB, 8GB or 12GB of RAM – three times that fitted to Google’s Pixel 3 – and a system that caches the apps you use most into that enormous amount of RAM so they load faster.
The OnePlus 7 Pro is the first on the market to use the new UFS3.0 standard for storage, which means the 128GB or 256GB of storage built into the phone is theoretically more than twice as fast as that used in any other phone. OnePlus thinks users will be to tell the difference even in the most mundane day-to-day activities.
Even the firm’s optical fingerprint scanner, which is embedded underneath the lower section of the screen, has been improved to be both faster and more accurate than that used in the OnePlus 6T last year.
The 16-megapixel selfie camera electrically pops up from the top of the phone when required - a mechanism OnePlus says it tested more than 300,000 times – the equivalent of 150 times a day for five-and-and-a-half years.
New for the 7 Pro is the company’s first triple camera system on the back, including a 48-megapixel main camera, 16-megapixel ultra-wide angle and eight-megapixel 3x telephoto camera. OnePlus hopes that this new camera setup will be able to right one of weaknesses of its previous phone and challenge the best in an increasingly competitive market.
The OnePlus 7 Pro will come in a choice of three colours costing £649 for 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, £699 for 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage or £799 for 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.
Alongside the 7 Pro, OnePlus also launched a revamped version of last year’s 6T called the OnePlus 7, which will be available in June starting at £499 with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage.
The cheaper phone looks practically identical to last year’s model but has the same Snapdragon 855 processor, RAM and UFS3.0 storage as the 7 Pro. It also has the same 48-megapixel main camera too, but paired only with a secondary depth camera for portrait mode effects.
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