OnePlus 8 Pro Review: Set Your Expectations Really High

It is quite rare for a phone to be significantly more expensive than the one it succeeds yet still be great value. That is once all things are considered, including the competition. One of those rare phones is the OnePlus 8 Pro. You would perhaps raise an eyebrow or maybe hurl a few curses for saying a phone that is priced Rs 54,999 onwards is great value—considering the fact that the predecessor, the OnePlus 7T Pro was priced at Rs 53,999 (8GB + 256GB) and Rs 58,999 (12GB + 256GB for the McLaren Edition). I get that. But I raise you the competition check in return. In a way, OnePlus’ only real competition in the pricier tiers of the Android smartphone space is with Samsung. That pits the OnePlus 8 Pro in a battle against the Samsung Galaxy S20+ (prices around Rs 77,990 onwards) and the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra (around Rs 97,990)—both fantastic phones in their own right, but if you notice, considerably more expensive even after factoring in the deals and offers, than the OnePlus 8 Pro. That being said, this is the battle between two of the most loyal sets of users as well. Give or take a few things on the spec sheet, it is just too close to call.

This is what you get if you are looking for the OnePlus 8 Pro. There are two variants to choose from. Shelling out Rs 54,999 gets you the 8GB RAM + 128GB storage option in the Onyx Black and Glacial Green colour options. The higher spec variant priced at Rs 59,999 gets you 12GB RAM and 256GB storage, and is available in the Onyx Black, Glacial Green as well as the gorgeous Ultramarine Blue colour options. Glacial Green and Ultramarine Blue are two new colours to the line-up.

DESIGN: DASH OF COLOUR ISN’T THE ONLY THING

First things first, the OnePlus 8 Pro is taller than the OnePlus 7T Pro, but at the same time, is less wide and slimmer as well. Critically, it has also shaved off some weight—now 199 grams compared with 206 grams. Still, you will probably only like this if you genuinely prefer large screen phones, but for those who do, shaving off this weight is priceless. It also gets the IP68 dust and water resistance ratings, the first time ever a OnePlus phone has one of those. It is all a part of the growing up process. This year, OnePlus has truly set about differentiating between the OnePlus 8 Pro and the OnePlus 8, as far as the features go. What I have is the Glacial Green for review, and it has a very nice matte finish which reflects lights off it in rather interesting ways. If it starts looking blue at some stage, do not rush to get your eyes checked! Yet, for all intents and purposes, you know it is a OnePlus phone from a mile away. You hold it up, and it feels like a well-built yet very modern OnePlus phone.

PERFORMANCE: IT DOESN’T NEED TO GET MUCH FASTER THAN THIS

It is perhaps an expected upgrade that the OnePlus 8 Pro is powered by the very latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 processor and with it the Qualcomm X55 5G modem. In a way, the performance is up to 25% faster than the OnePlus 7T Pro’s Qualcomm Snapdragon 855+ chip. The chip isn’t the only performance boost. Things are really getting serious under-the-hood. The LPDDR5 RAM is 30% faster than LPDDR4X RAM modules. The UFS 3.0 storage gets Turbo Write, which significantly boosts the data read and write speeds—as much as 125% faster than just UFS 3.0 storage modules. That means everything is faster, snappier and responsive, even when you may be opening a file which is pretty big in size or a resource intensive app. What we see in the real world as far as performance goes is exactly as per promise—everything is delightfully silky smooth while multi-tasking or opening and closing apps.

DISPLAY: SILKY SMOOTH AND VERY LARGE

The display is what will keep you hooked. For starters, the OnePlus 8 Pro gets an even larger display than the OnePlus 7T Pro. Yes, the 6.67-inch display makes way for a 6.78-inch display. Visually it won’t probably make much difference, but in terms of the screen space, every extra bit does matter. OnePlus has given this screen every bit of goodness it could. This is a Fluid AMOLED display with Corning Gorilla 5 doing the additional bit to make it more robust. This can do the full 120Hz super smooth refresh rate magic at the 3,168 x 1,440 QHD+ resolution. A point to note, Samsung enabled the 120Hz on the Galaxy S20 Ultra at a slightly lower resolution. Set this at 120Hz, and everything just flows across, vertically or horizontally, better than at 60Hz that you may have used all this while. In fact, apps such as Netflix also support 120Hz for videos—the Motion Graphics Smoothing setting that is available in OxygenOS.

CAMERA: POINT, SHOOT AND MARVEL

Till last year, OnePlus phones always struggled initially with the photography performance, and while subsequent software updates did iron out some bugs, things still weren’t at the sort of level that you would expect. That is set to change, as it should, considering the prices the OnePlus 8 Pro commands.

For starters, the optical hardware. You get a 48-megapixel wide camera, a 48-megapixel ultrawide camera, an 8-megapixel telephoto camera and a 5-megapixel depth camera. All combined, this quad-camera setup is right up there in terms of the potential, as you would expect from a flagship Android phone. Open the camera app, and by default, it is set to capture images at 12-megapixel. That should be great for most users, pulling in data from all sensors, and yet keeping image sizes well in check for sharing or posting on social media. This is also where you get 3x hybrid zoom and up to 30x digital zoom. Switch to the 48-megapixel image size mode, and this is what I prefer, and you will not get the zoom options, but the image size is much larger allowing you to crop as you like.

You might notice the 3x hybrid zoom, which means it doesn’t do optical zoom like the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra. But persist it a bit, and the results are surprisingly pleasant.