OnePlus 9 Review: Better but not best By Christian David

OnePlus has had quite a journey over the years, originally known as the so-called flagship killer. The company now offers phones that are about as expensive as the competition, but also around us, good or sometimes even better, at least when it comes to performance and display. There has, however, always been one area in which the company lags behind the competition. The camera, the OnePlus 9 series attempts to address this, as was leaked before the fact OnePlus has partnered, with camera company hustle blood for the OnePlus 9 and OnePlus 9 pros cameras. The hope is that this will result in an actual, better camera, but these kinds of partnerships are often more about branding than anything else. I'm going to do two separate videos for the OnePlus, 9 and OnePlus 9 pro and in this video I'll focus on the standard OnePlus 9, but if you're looking for an OnePlus 9 pro review check out the link in the description at hefty 730 dollars, is the OnePlus 9 worth buying, or should you go for something else? I've been using the OnePlus 9 for a while now to find out.

If you like this video, please hit the like button and subscribe to the channel. It really helps support my work, and I would appreciate that support. The design of OnePlus phones has come a long way over the past year, at least on the standard model like the OnePlus 8t, the OnePlus 9 has a flat display with a rectangular camera bump in the top left corner of the back. The camera bump is a little large and causes the phone to be uneven on a table, but using it with a case will solve that issue. It's not a bad looking phone, it's not particularly unique these days, given the sea of rectangular camera bumps in the top left of the back and the hole punch cutouts in the display, but it looks fine, and I appreciate that many prefer a flat display instead of one with curved edges, OnePlus included a flat display on the OnePlus 8t, and it has one on the OnePlus.9 too, though, not on the OnePlus 9 pro around the edges of the phone you'll get an USB port, a volume rocker strangely placed on the left edge, a power button and a ringer switch. I really like that.

OnePlus still includes a ringer switch on its phones. It's a feature that apple has held onto as well, and it's really helpful to have in those situations where you want or need to quickly silence your phone. The phone is available in a few different colors, including water, mist, arctic sky and astral, black, I'm reviewing the black model, and it looks nice again. It's not overly unique, given how much of our tech is black, but it still looks fine. Given the pictures, I like the purplish winter mist, the best of the three it's a fair bit lighter than the OnePlus 9 pro, and while that helps when it's in the pocket, it doesn't feel quite as premium as a result, but it's still very foldable and at least for me relatively easy to reach all areas of the display.

Speaking of the display, it looks great. The OnePlus 9 has a 6.55 inch, AMOLED display with a 1080p resolution and a 120hz refresh rate. The resolution is a little lower than that on the OnePlus 9 pro, but frankly it doesn't really matter. You can't really tell a difference in most day-to-day use and the high refresh rate makes for a great display experience regardless, coupled with the excellent processing power, the phone's display is able to deliver a smooth, responsive, feel on par with that of the galaxy s21. It also gets super bright and supports HDR 10 plus I really don't mind that manufacturers have been including slightly lower resolution, displays on their phones.

Samsung did the same thing with the galaxy s21 compared to the galaxy s21 ultra, but the display on the galaxy s21 still looks awesome. That display is also where the OnePlus 9 houses, its in-display fingerprint sensor, OnePlus hasn't announced, which sensor it is, but it seemed to work perfectly fine in my testing. My main complaint with the fingerprint sensor, however, is its placement. It's a little low on the display and as a result, you have to reach a bit awkwardly to use it. I would have appreciated if OnePlus moved the sensor a little further up the display, but as mentioned it worked well, the phone has dual stereo speakers, and they sound pretty good.

They get nice and loud, and the stereo setup means that they're immersive enough for gaming and listening to music. Of course, audio, will sound better if you listen through headphones and the phone supports standards like app decks and apex HD under the hood. The OnePlus 9 is a dream. The phone comes with a Qualcomm snapdragon 888 processors, coupled with either 8 gigabytes or 12 gigabytes of ram, I'm reviewing the 12 gigabytes of ram model, and it works excellently. I never ran into any skips freezes or crashes.

The phone loaded games quickly and performed well during gaming and even heavy multitasking, was easy with this device. Frankly, you probably don't need the 12 gigabytes of ram. You can probably easily get away with the 8 gigabytes of ram generally. The OnePlus 9 is about on par with other top-end flagship phones. When it comes to performance, thanks to the 12 gigabytes of ram, it's likely it can outperform against other devices like the galaxy s21 we've seen, the iPhone beat snapdragon 888, equipped phones in benchmarks, and the result is that the iPhone will probably perform better for longer than the OnePlus 9, but at least for a few years you should expect it to be able to handle everything you can throw at it.

The battery capacity on the phone system at 4, 500 William hour, and it's easily able to get you through a full day of use and into the next day, you're, probably not going to get the multi-day use that you might get out of some other phones, but if you're good at keeping your devices charged up you'll also never really have to worry about the battery. Speaking of charging, the phone supports wireless charging, and it supports OnePlus warp charge 65t, which is able to fully charge the phone in only 30 minutes. That's pretty impressive. My battery benchmark, which involves streaming a YouTube video at full brightness for three hours, confirmed the solid results at the end of the test. The phone had 75 left, which is pretty good and matches the OnePlus 9 pro then there's the camera, and it's the main event.

OnePlus has been hyping up the camera thanks to its partnership with Hasselblad, with the idea of being that this partnership will result in OnePlus phones. Finally, having a camera on par with the latest iPhone pixel or galaxy device. The phone has a triple sensor: camera system with one 48 megapixel main camera, 150 megapixels, ultrawide camera and one 2 megapixels, monochrome camera. It's a pretty versatile setup, but it's a bit of a bummer that there's no telephoto camera on the OnePlus 9. For that you have to go for the more expensive, OnePlus 9 pro.

Ultimately, the camera on the OnePlus 9 is pretty good. Initially, it was hard to tell the difference between photos taken with the OnePlus 9 and those taken with the OnePlus 8. But a software update during the review process seems to have changed that a little photo have a decent amount of contrast and detail and are relatively colorful, but they're, still not quite as good as the likes of the galaxy s 21 and iPhone 12 and with a 730 dollar price tag, that's kind of where they need to be. In the end, the OnePlus 9 can take decent photos, but the camera still isn't very consistent and again photos aren't, as detailed as the competition OnePlus has been branding out a little more with its software of late, but so far the changes it has made haven't been bad at all. The OnePlus 9 ships with oxygen OS 11, which is built on android 11, and it's relatively stripped back.

Thankfully, the phone doesn't ship with too much bloatware except randomly for the Netflix app. There are a ton of visual differences between oxygen OS and stock android, including the red highlights, found throughout it's a good look, and it works well more important than the visual changes. Perhaps are the features on offer now compared to previous versions of oxygen OS. There aren't a ton of new features, but you'll still get things like parallel apps and the app locker I like the direction OnePlus has been taking with its software, but I hope it remains committed to a strip back experience. The OnePlus 9 is a great device, and while it's not necessarily a groundbreaking step forward for OnePlus, it is a natural progression.

It performs very well has a great software experience and more, but OnePlus insists on continuing to raise the price of its phones, and that means that they have to be able to compete with the best devices out there and ultimately, it's worth saving up the extra money for a galaxy s21. That's especially true, given the fact that the galaxy s21 isn't even that much more expensive right now, thanks again for watching this, video and again, please hit the like button and subscribe to the channel. If it was helpful to you check out the description for a link to buy the OnePlus 9, my name is Christian, and I'll. See you next time see ya.

Source : Christian David