The OnePlus 8 Pro was the best and most well-rounded smartphone the Chinese manufacturer produced (up until its launch in 2020), combining simply mind-blowing speed and performance with the best display ever shipped on a smartphone, as well as a suite of flagship features that were notably absent from previous devices.
This OnePlus 8 Pro review has been updated with additional findings and opinions throughout time. When it debuted in 2020, we were blown away, and it went on to win both Best Phone and Gadget of the Year at the T3 Awards 2020. Because it has been replaced by the much more remarkable OnePlus 9 Pro and OnePlus 10 Pro, it has become obsolete. Yet, this does not make an older handset any less admirable; in fact, this may be the best moment to get it because it is significantly less expensive than it was previously.
Consider the Huawei Mate 40 Pro and Xiaomi Mi 10T Pro as direct rivals to the OnePlus 8 Pro, as both provide impressive specifications at a reasonable cost. And that’s not even including OnePlus’s two midrange smartphones, the OnePlus 8T and the OnePlus Nord. In addition, they have just announced the OnePlus Nord CE 5G, an impressively affordable phone. This manufacturer is covering every inch of the market; they are not fooling around.
1. Design
And, speaking of luxury, we must begin this OnePlus 8 Pro review by discussing the phone’s display, which is the greatest display I have ever seen on a smartphone.
How unique is it? How does a 120Hz refresh rate and 3168 x 1440 QHD+ resolution sound? In addition, this 120Hz QHD+ display is HDR10+ certified. Yeah, we’re talking about a godlike display that surpasses everything currently available on the market.
In fact, unless Huawei or Samsung pull something truly extraordinary out of their hats with their Note 20 and Mate 40 lineups later this year, I cannot see this display being surpassed until 2020.
Several phones have provided 120Hz, QHD+, and HDR10+, but none have provided all simultaneously until now. Even the magnificent Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra could only offer a 120Hz refresh rate with an FHD resolution, so if you wanted to operate its screen at the fastest possible speed, you had to sacrifice visual quality.
The OnePlus 8 Pro’s 6.78-inch Fluid AMOLED display (which is also capable of a maximum brightness of 1,300 nits!) eliminates the need for this tradeoff. Moreover, as we shall discover later in the review, the phone provides this no-compromise experience without any battery concerns.
2. Performance
OnePlus has never disappointed in terms of core hardware, which is how the brand earned its status as a cult favorite that creates devices that can compete with flagship models.
The OnePlus 8 Pro is equipped with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 system-on-a-chip, 12GB of LPDDR5 Memory, an Adreno 650 graphics processing unit, and 256GB of UFS3.0 internal storage space.
The RAM alone is 30% faster than before, and when combined with the best Android SoC in the business (a 25% performance boost over the previous chipset), a fast mobile GPU, and that massive hunk of UFS3.0 flash storage, which also offers significantly improved read and write speeds, the OnePlus 8 Pro is astonishingly fast.
Indeed, when these components are combined with the aforementioned 120Hz, QHD+, HDR10+ display, the description “buttery smooth” is inadequate to describe how quick, sleek, and fluid every application feels.
From easy UI navigation to playing games, browsing the internet, watching films, and capturing and browsing photos and videos, the OnePlus 8 Pro is the quickest and smoothest phone I’ve ever used.
As expected, benchmark results are likewise rather impressive. The OnePlus 7T, which I praised in a review last year, earned a Single-Core Score of 788 and a Multi-Core Score of 2,865 in GeekBench 5’s CPU tests, as well as a 2,675 OpelCL Score and a 2,333 Vulkan Score.
3. Camera
Hardware and performance have always been OnePlus’s strong points, however camera systems have always been an area where it has lagged behind competitors. For this reason, I’ve spent an increasing lot of time assessing OnePlus phones’ camera credentials over the past few years.
OnePlus has a rear camera array with a 48MP primary camera (Sony IMX 689), 48MP wide-angle camera (Sony IMX 586), 8MP telephoto, and 5MP picture chromatic color filter. The zoom features a very basic 3x optical zoom and 30x digital zoom.
In terms of these two 48MP cameras, as can be seen in the image gallery below, the results are quite impressive. Picture clarity and color reproduction are both excellent, while image noise is modest; focus time is also very quick.
Macro photography was also enjoyable, with the OnePlus 8 Pro catching close-up details precisely. In my opinion, there are a few top-tier competitors that outperform this camera system in terms of vibrancy and low-light performance, but generally I believe the results this camera system produces are rather impressive.
In terms of zoom, however, the OnePlus 8 Pro performs similarly to other top smartphones, such as the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra and Huawei P30 Pro. Browse through the two image galleries below to get a feel for the zoom capabilities of the OnePlus 8 Pro.
VERDICT
Hence, this concludes the review of the OnePlus 8 Pro. OnePlus has stated numerous times over the years that what distinguishes the company from others is that it truly listens to its fan base and evolves its phones based on their feedback.
The OnePlus 8 Pro feels to me like the strongest illustration of this process to date, and one in which issues that I’ve had with the manufacturer for years have been thoroughly addressed. It improves upon its predecessor by addressing numerous earlier flaws. This momentum carried over to the OnePlus 9 and 10 series as well.
