The OnePlus 9 Pro Review YOU NEEDED - 2 Months In By Jared Busch

Right then, about two months in over 160 something photos: some videos, uh some gaming, countless hours of tick, took, it's a terrible app. I love it and I think I finally formed an opinion. So, let's start with the hardware, you know it's, it's a nice high-end, looking phone, but quite frankly, it's pretty much the same thing. We've seen for years now and to me, it's its gone a bit stale. Now I like the color options they've given us, but I can't understand why they've given us a glossy finish on the morning, mist color I've got here and a frosted finish on the pine green color, which looks awesome by the way. Truth of the matter is, though, most people are using a case like most of us always say so.

At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter all that much, but I think the consensus is frosted is greater than glossy. Now it's a big phone, so button placement's kind of important for right-handed people like myself. The power and alert slider are easily reachable with average size hands, but this is going to sound super nitpick because it is the volume. Rocker is a little out of my reach unless I readjust really not a big deal, but still fairly annoying on a daily basis, so bottom line, it's still a nice looking phone like it'll, still turn heads, but it just looks like so many other phones have for a long time now. The displays kind of disappointed me, but not for the reasons you might think it's those goddamn curved edges.

They just make it harder to find a good screen protector, especially tempered glass screen protectors, because they can't go right to the edge, otherwise they start separating from the display and, of course, but most importantly, false positive touches now I'll admit. OnePlus has done a perfect job this time around through software to help prevent that, but it'll never truly go away until they flatten out those screens. Granted I've had less false touches on the 9 pro than previous generations, but I'm still getting them and the fact of the matter is most people prefer flat displays on their phones anyways, but regardless of all that holy man, this is a really nice display, 120 hertz, refresh 1440p resolution and a max brightness of 1300 nits. Although third-party lab tests have shown its closer to 1100. Nevertheless, color accuracy is bonkers.

I think it gets something like 110 of the DCI p3 color gamut, which is really impressive. So it's fantastic for watching content or editing photos. If not something you do on your phone a lot of course, you still got the option to drop from 120 hertz to 60 hertz to save the battery. But to me the viewing experience between 60 and 120 hertz is like staggering, specifically when it comes to scrolling in any app like. I sincerely can't scroll for more than a few minutes when in 60 hertz, because I start to get nauseous, and that goes all the way back to before.90Hz phone displays became a thing, but as soon as I pop it into 120, I can scroll like forever and feel fine, but that does take a toll on battery life, not only because of a fast refresh rate, but also because I can consume for longer right, which is actually why I set the resolution to full HD plus, while keeping the refresh rate at 120, but I'll get into that a little more shortly. By the way before I move on from the display, the fingerprint reader location has been a silly topic of controversy.

Should they have moved it up higher, probably, is it unusable and does it hinder my ability to unlock the phone in any meaningful way? Now and it still unlocks just as fast as it has from last year. Although I haven't really noticed an increase in the consistency of accurate unlocks, like others, have claimed, I don't know man, it's fine, it's an accurate enough fingerprint reader for me not to complain about, but touching on battery life uh, even after all this time with updates and allowing the system to learn my usage habits, the 4 500 William hour capacity that you'd think would carry you comfortably through a day, just barely seems to cut it, at least for me um. This is a one-day phone not a day and a half phone, a one-day phone, but it really depends on your device settings uh, for example, with the resolution set at 1440p and the refresh rate at 120 hertz, with display brightness, usually sitting around 80 to 90 percent. I get an average of about four and a half hours of screen on time, sometimes pushing it to five. But with the resolution set to 1080p and the refresh set to 60 with auto brightness enabled I was able to get up to a little over seven hours, but, like I mentioned before, I just can't do 60 hertz.

So, as sort of middle ground, I left auto brightness on set the refresh to 120 but kept the resolution at 1080, and I pretty consistently saw five and a half to six hours of screen on time which is decent, but, like always, it completely depends on what exactly it is you're doing with your phone right. Having said that, OnePlus does provide a 65 watt warp charger in the box. This thing charges the 9 pro from 0 to 100 at a stupid, fast 30 minutes. So when I wake up and have next to no battery life left, I throw it on the charger and have a coffee and a shower, and before I'm done, it's already fully charged. It's its pretty incredible.

Now, unless you're running a super entry-level android device, I don't think daily performance has been an issue with android for several years now, especially not with high-end devices like this one. These days, it really all boils down to the UI and settings. I've always really liked OnePlus oxygen OS because of both the customization freedom OnePlus gives us, but also because there isn't an overwhelming amount of completely useless settings options to pour over like a bloody university textbook on physics, as we used to see with Samsung Galaxy phones now, if you're into mobile gaming, but aren't really interested in those dedicated gaming phones, man, the 9 pro should still be a pretty solid choice because, in addition to the 120 hertz refresh, which, by the way not a lot of game, support, you've got that snapdragon triple eight 12 gigs of ram and two lane UFS 3.1 internal storage, which is like well, it's really fast. Every game. I played loaded fast and ran flawlessly with whatever graphics settings the developers offered set to their max there is this gaming app from OnePlus that you can use to further customize your gaming experience with and includes further do not disturb settings and a few performance enhancements, but you can also set your games to pro gaming mode, which enables both advanced do not disturb, which is essentially a hard off mode, and enable an enhanced process regulator.

Mode for even better performance, or so they say, uh honestly I gained with pro gaming on and off. I couldn't tell a bloody difference. Maybe if I cared enough to benchmark with it, I could see a numerical difference, but I doubt it's tangible enough to where you'd actually need to run games with it enabled to get the experience you're. Looking for you know what I mean: look, it's got a snapdragon, 8 and 8 or 12 gigs of ram dude you'll be fine, and if you do game mode or watch a lot of content for that matter, the speakers get plenty loud and still sound great. I mean you can nitpick that, like the galaxy, s21 ultra has slightly deeper lows or the iPhone 12 Pro max can get slightly louder, but I mean they're flagship phone speakers.

The differences between them are almost negligible. The prices, however, aren't now, like I said at the beginning of the video I've taken a lot of photos over the past 12 months and there's been quite a few software updates, with almost every single one, including some sort of improvement or fixed to the cameras. So, let's start from the beginning: OnePlus announces their new 9 pro and makes this big deal about their new partnership with Hasselblad right, ok, cool, so early reviewers get it in test it out and find that there are some discrepancies with things like the autofocus, colors and white balance, specifically the differences between the main 48 megapixel camera compared to the 50 megapixel ultra-wide and 8 megapixel telephoto, okay. Well, here's the deal. The main shooter is the Sony mix 789.

This is the camera that Hasselblad had a helping hand with, although from what I could find, it was only with the color science, the pro mode UI and like nothing else, the other two cameras are Sony's, mix, 766, sensors and from what I could tell based on all the information I could gather. Hasselblad didn't have anything to do with those two cameras. So when you see color and white balance, differences between the Hasselblad camera and the other two like these two shots with the main and telephoto cameras where the grass basically changes from green to blue, it's not on Hasselblad it's on one plus for not matching the colors. The worst part is even after two months of camera updates. This still hasn't been corrected, as you can see with these pictures in my living room, where there's a lot of white and plenty of natural light.

So when we take a closer look at the color chart, while the telephoto and ultrawide share more similar colors, all three still produce different colors, but with the telephoto and ultrawide having slightly higher saturation and the main shooter having the most accurate colors out of the three now. Having said all that these are still great cameras. We still get some fringing around the edges that are easier to notice on close-ups, but I think dynamic range is good. Colors are good, highlight roll-off, is decent shadow? Roll off can be a bit sharp, but there's still plenty of detail and skin tones look great same with the 16 megapixel selfie camera. It does have a slower, f, 2.4, aperture, that the main camera does, but still I'm perfectly happy with it. I'm still seeing it struggle in the woods with fine details like tree branches and everything else you normally find in the middle of noir, but if you're creative, with your shots and not just taking your typical boring scenery photos, they can turn out looking pretty nice now, the autofocus has gotten better, but it's still hunting a lot on objects.

It shouldn't struggle with, and I found that the main shooter switches to the ultra-wide cameras macro mode automatically too quickly, as in it switches to macro mode. When I don't want or need it, which gets super annoying yeah, you can toggle it off when it happens, but there's no way to just prevent it from doing that. To begin with, by the way that ultrawide camera the best ultra-wide I've ever shot with thanks that free form lens OnePlus tacked on, I, I personally hate that fish eye effect from other ultrawide, so the free form lens is a super underrated feature. Okay, so let's say I was heavy into mobile photography, or I'm like an Instagrammer, for example. This would not be on my top five list of phones to look at I'd, probably gravitate to something like the s21 ultra something from Huawei or the iPhone 12 Pro max, but those phones do cost more and depending on the phone, a lot more.

So if I was looking for a phone with performance, user customization and a clean interface in mind, first, the 9 pro would 100 percent be on my top five list of phones to consider. So if you currently own a nine pro I'd love to know your thoughts, so we can sort of compare notes if you will and if you don't own one. Let me know what you think about my experience and opinions so far, and if this is the phone you're going to go with or not anyways. I think that's gonna! Do it for this one. I really hope you liked the video.

If you did. Maybe let me know by tapping that like button and don't forget to subscribe, so you don't miss out on any of my new videos, but thanks as always for watching, and I'll talk to you on the next one cheers.

Source : Jared Busch