ONEPLUS 9 PRO - One Month Later 📱 (Problems & Best Features After Daily Use) By Mike O'Brien

So it's been about one month since the OnePlus 9 pro came out and in the first month there was a lot of talk about this phone, a lot of excitement about the Hasselblad partnership, the big specs, the overall impressive package, but I've actually been using this phone every day for the past month and as my daily driver there was a lot of stuff. I noticed that wasn't reflected by specs, so I want to step away from the spec sheets and talk more about what this phone is actually like to use on a day-to-day basis, because ultimately, specs might help you buy a phone, but once you buy it, it's not going to be the specs that determine how good that phone is for you. It's going to be the little nuances, the things that you notice when you use this phone every single day. So in this video I want to talk about some pros and cons that I noticed that I didn't expect when I first got this phone, and you know ultimately help you decide whether this is a phone for you. So I want to break this video down into three main categories, the first being the physical aspects, the second one being the camera, which is fascinating, and we'll get there when we get there. But the third thing is actually the software which, because the main purpose of this video is to talk about the little nuances and what I like and don't like about this phone on a day-to-day basis by far the software is the most important thing we'll talk about.

But of course the physical aspects are also very interesting and looking at this phone you'll see, it looks a lot like a galaxy s20 plus s20 ultra s21, like the galaxy s, lineup looks a lot like this phone and being that I came from the s21 to this one. I really expected it to feel very similar and in many ways it did it's a little more slippery, but for the most part, the dimensions the shape the curves are all very similar, which is a good thing. I like the design of that phone, but there are actually some differences that I found were big improvements, one of them being, of course, the switch on the right side. OnePlus does this, and it's something I really like to see: you can switch from silent to ringer to vibrate with a physical switch on the right side, something we've been seeing on iPhones forever, and I just I don't know why android phones don't adopt that more. I really like having it on here.

So that's a big positive. Another big positive is actually the layout of these buttons. I've said this for a while with Samsung phones. I don't like it when all the buttons are on one side and I think, having the volume rocker on the left side and the power button on the right side just makes the most sense. It's easy to use with one hand easy to take screenshots to me.

That's what makes the most sense the aesthetic of this phone. As far as I'm concerned, I think it looks pretty good it's kind of frosted on the top and more mirrored on the bottom. So you might get a few fingerprints on the bottom, but in general I think it's a really nice looking phone, some other things that I did notice on the front of the screen. They kind of had a mixed bag of opinions on the fingerprint sensor. So for one it's very fast, it's very accurate, and I had no problem signing in but other than that there were some things that I weren't especially fond of.

So for one, the fingerprint sensor is all the way at the bottom of the screen, which means that, yes, I got used to moving my thumb down there, but at the same time it just feels like you really have to flex your thumb farther than it would naturally go, and it would just be more comfortable if that was maybe an inch higher on the screen, so maybe an improvement for next year, but again, something that is pretty easy to overlook some other things where, because it is an optical fingerprint sensor, it's not ultrasonic, which means that you do need some kind of light behind the screen in order to sign in. And that means that when you're looking at this at night- so maybe 1 am, if you wake up or 2, am whatever you wake up, and you look at your phone, even if your phone screen is dimmed all the way down. You're going going to have a really bright light behind that fingerprint sensor, which I found to be kind of annoying and a little blinding, especially when it's really dark out. The third thing that I really didn't like about this is that when your screen is totally off like this, so like literally all black, nothing on the screen- and you just put your finger where the fingerprint sensor is on a lot of the ultrasonic phones and a lot of other phones out there- it would just sign in automatically, but this one it doesn't. Instead, it wakes the screen, and then you have to touch it again to actually sign in so one extra step that I thought was a little annoying.

Typically, when you pick your phone up, the screen turns on anyway, so it's normally not a problem, but in some situations I just found it a little. Frustrating back to some positives with this phone: the haptic feedback, so the vibrating motor on their does a perfect job. It's a really nice clean, vibrating motor, it's not the strongest out there, but it seems to be really well controlled and by no means sloppy. So that was a positive I like how that felt, and overall the build quality of this phone just seems really solid. So, physically speaking, I really don't have any complaints.

Besides the fingerprint sensor- and I really liked using this, of course, some other things that are maybe more internal the battery life on this I thought was fantastic, I'm getting about a day and a half out of this, but of course it depends on how you're, using it I've generally been maxing out the screen resolution, the refresh rate- and I have NFC on all the time but granted I don't. I try not to use my phone too much during the day. I'm usually editing videos and doing other stuff now for some people who really push this harder and are going to burn the battery faster. The good news is the other side of OnePlus. Like really one of the big reasons that they started to become popular is because they're focusing on making things fast, charging is one of them, so you can charge with 65 watt warp charging with a wire or 50 watt wireless charging, which is already faster than most phones, can handle anyway, and so I mean I feel like I'm never running low on battery okay and then one last thing I want to mention.

Am I really like the curve of the display on here? I know some curved screens. They look really nice in the front which this one does, but sometimes they have a problem where your palm has like some little rejection issues in the corner, and it starts changing, keyboards and stuff like that, this one that is definitely not the case. It works perfectly fine. I've never had any kind of palm rejection issues, and I think the curve of the screen is really a perfect balance. So that brings us into the next category, which is the cameras, and so the big thing is the Hasselblad partnership.

They mentioned that a million times in the release everyone's talking about it and, for the most part, it's supposed to bring better colors to the phone so better, colors and honestly, I think the colors do look pretty good on this phone compared to a lot of other ones out there I would say this is definitely a little more real and natural, so not very saturated, like we see on Samsung phones, not very flat and warm as we see on iPhones, and so honestly, I'm definitely a fan of the colors with this. But of course there are some other drawbacks, and we'll mention that in the sample photos, but let's start off by getting into a video test all right. So this is the test of the camera, I'm just walking really. Normally you can see it's really incredibly stable. The audio quality, in my opinion, is also perfect on here, yeah, so from the looks of that, video it seems like Hasselblad might have forgotten to look at the video.

As you can see, the white balance was really a struggle. It shifts between warmer and cooler tones all the time and especially when you zoom out to the ultrawide lens. This is shooting 4k 30, but it also goes all the way up to 4k 120. So as far as specs go, this is definitely a very impressive video. Looking up you'll see that we have a pretty good dynamic range, the sky looks pretty natural, and we can zoom out from the standard lens to the ultrawide lens here and the colors look a little different.

I think everything looks a little yellower, but if we zoom back in it doesn't give you like the smoothest transition between lenses, you'll see right here, it kind of skips around right there, and you can see the color difference, but if we just go to the standard lens uh, one disappointing factor I found with this is that when you zoom in, I believe it's not using the telephoto lens. So as we zoom in it caps us out at 10x zoom, and you can see it doesn't really look that great, so zooming in telephoto. Video is not really going to be something you'll experience with this phone and if we quickly jump down you'll see that things get in focus really quickly and now. This is what the front-facing camera looks and sounds like. I've never really been a big fan of having the camera in the corner of the screen.

Uh, because I feel like I have to I don't know, just looks weird when I'm looking at the camera. One downside is that this is only shooting 1080p. For some reason, I don't know why they didn't upgrade that it's 20 21. Need to have 4k on all the cameras, but regardless they don't on this one. Otherwise, the color and sharpness look pretty decent for a 1080p selfie camera.

If you guys leave a comment- and let me know you think of this- and all the cameras for video and audio quality, so needless to say, OnePlus clearly missed when it came to video capabilities, but I think there's still shots made up for it. The primary rear lens the color looks perfect the bark the leaves everything in this picture were very true to life. It looked perfect, and you can see this one with the water again great sharpness, great detail overall, really solid color that looked exactly as I saw it in real life. Again, you can go into even this shot here, and you're still seeing a lot of great stuff there. The ultrawide lens still is a little warmer for some reason, even with the still shot, so you'll see as we zoom in it's a lot cooler right here.

But again I think this shot looks perfect. The primary rear lens was impressive. The 3.3 x telephoto lens was passable, but not great zooming into 10x, very, very grainy, but you can still tell what it is and then, of course, 30x zoom looks almost like a fake. It looks like a Bob Ross painting or something I don't know uh, but looking at the macro lens, which is actually the ultrawide, I was happy that they doubled that in there uh, because it has autofocused a good sensor, good color, and it doesn't take up an extra lens spot on the back of the phone looking at the front-facing camera. This was okay.

A little dull with the color not a lot going on there and a lot of clarity bubbles all the surrounding way with the portrait mode, the rear camera the skin tones. Look better. It still over sharpened things in the background, as I mentioned before, like those branches, but I wasn't a big fan of the portrait mode, it kind of just uniformly blurred everything behind me and made it look like a green screen. Other than that, though, I was definitely impressed with the primary rear shooter. I thought the color and everything looked good, and it was a decent still shot camera.

So, to summarize, the cameras overall they're, pretty good, the things that I didn't like the 1080p limit on the front-facing camera, the over-sharpening of the background for images uh, the just uniform blur on portrait mode and then the last one is kind of that the digital zoom doesn't really do that much for me, so it wasn't quite as good as a lot of other phones at this price, but that's pretty much the limit of what I didn't like. What I did like was the natural color. The overall aesthetic of most photos, especially with the main and the ultrawide lens overall, they did a good job and, of course, using that ultrawide lens as a macro lens kind of little double thing right there. So you don't need that extra macro lens on the back. I don't really use it anyway, but I was happy to see that at least they're using a high quality sensor and just kind of doing a two-for-one there.

That's something I really like to see more and more phones do so. The camera is like I've seen some mixed reviews. Some people say it's a big setback for this phone. Some people say it's a huge improvement. Honestly, I think it's somewhere down the middle, like the cameras, are definitely passable, they're able to compete in some situations with the best.

But overall I wouldn't rank this. My number one phone for the best photos or videos. But honestly, I don't think that's really a big deal, because the physical aspects and the software aspects really make up for that, and so that leads into the software aspects of this video. So the software on this phone. This is running android, the latest android, and it has uh their version of android on there, which is called oxygen OS and so oxygen OS from OnePlus is kind of supposed to be a lighter operating system.

They still have a lot of things, a lot of features in there that I really like to see, but it's still very close to just pure android. So it's going to have a very quick experience honestly and so from my testing. With this, I found that there were some things I really liked for one. When you connect a pair of earbuds or headphones or anything Bluetooth, it will automatically detect what codec it's capable of using. So if it's apex, you can just automatically use that versus other phones.

When you have to go into like developer options and stuff like that, you just know that you're going to get good audio quality as soon as you connect to this phone. That's a big positive! Another thing I liked it's called zen mode on here: it's a cool way to kind of disconnect from your phone. So if you find that you're using your phone too much, and you need to focus for 60 minutes two hours- maybe even 10 minutes whatever you want- you can go into zen mode. It doesn't let you get out of this, so you literally just lock your phone. It shows you a timer, and it counts down until the end of your focus or zen mode, your zen time, and so I think, that's a cool feature that I'm not going to be distracted by my phone.

So I mean. Does everyone be ever going to use that? Probably not, but it's something I've been using almost every day. Of course, you have plenty of other features on here related to android, so Google Assistant is very accessible. Google Pay, as long as you're signed in you just tap anything and pay like a lot of that stuff. That's with android works very well, and I found that the experience on here is just very, very quick, very simple, little seamless, animations that make it feel very fast and very smooth and, like I said before, it's a perfect combination of the simplicity.

We see with an iPhone and the features that we're seeing on Samsung phones, so Samsung phones sometimes feel a little bulky just because they have so many features in there and then iPhone, sometimes to me at least feel a little bare, because you really can't customize that much. It's missing a lot of features that I'm seeing on android phones, and I think this one is really the happy medium there. So, for example, if you don't like the widgets cluttering up your screen, you can swipe down from the middle of the home screen, and it goes into this other little category. This other little interface there that has a bunch of different little widgets. You can have a step counter there.

Your recent apps, I put my calendar there uh remember your parking space like all kinds of things that it's just a really convenient interface to have. So as far as software goes the more I use this, the more I like using this, and I've used OnePlus phones in the past, but really every time I come back to oxygen OS. I just really like using it. So guys. That's pretty much! My summary of what it's been like to use the OnePlus 9 pro after a little while now and so honestly, to summarize the physical build of it is fantastic.

I love having the switch on the side uh, the cameras are, are good, but not the best. It's really the only thing holding this phone back from being a clear best phone in the industry right now, but the software really makes up for that a lot. I find that it's really smooth very fast and easy to use, and so I chose to use this phone as my daily driver, because, right now I think it's the best android phone on the market, but you guys can leave a comment below. Let me know what you think of this phone or any other phones that you think might be able to compete with this one, and maybe I'll make a comparison. If you guys enjoyed this video as always consider liking and subscribing I'm mike o'brain, thanks for watching, and I'll see you next time, you.

Source : Mike O'Brien