The OnePlus 9 Pro's new camera block.Ron Amadeo
Not much has changed on the front.Ron Amadeo
The back is extremely shiny.Ron Amadeo
This isn't a lighting trick—the phone is sliver at the top and a mirror at the bottom, and it smoothly transitions from one to the other.Ron Amadeo
If some of these photos look noisy, that is not my fault! The OnePlus 9 Pro is dithered in real life. A dot pattern is printed into the back to get the gradient mirror look. Zoom into the previous hand photo and you can see it pretty clearly.Ron Amadeo
A close-up of the camera block. It's very shiny.Ron Amadeo
The bottom has one of the two speakers, a USB-C port, and the SIM tray.Ron Amadeo
Did I mention OnePlus basically sent me a mirror to photograph? I'm probably in all of these pictures if you look hard enough. Hi.Ron Amadeo
The sides of the display are slightly curved.Ron Amadeo
The hole-punch camera. Pretty standard.Ron Amadeo
One surprise was how much lower the fingerprint reader was (left) compared to the OnePlus 8 Pro (right).Ron Amadeo
When not viewed straight on, the back is just silvery..Ron Amadeo
The new OnePlus flagship phones have arrived—the OnePlus 9 and OnePlus 9 Pro.
Both phones feature the Snapdragon 888, 8GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, and a 4500mAh battery. The big news is that both devices are 120Hz with a 6.55-inch, 2400×1080 OLED on the OnePlus 9 and a 6.7-inch, 3168×1440 OLED on the OnePlus 9 Pro. Both phones get OnePlus' excellent "Warp Charging," now at 65W, just like the OnePlus 8T.
As for differences, the OnePlus 9 Pro gets a bigger, higher-res display with slightly curved sides, 50W wireless Warp Charging, IP68 water resistance, mmWave support, and a better main camera alongside an extra 3x telephoto camera. The OnePlus 9 has a completely flat display, only gets 15W wireless Qi charging, and isn't water-resistant unless you buy the T-Mobile version.
But perhaps the most notable change will hit customers up front. Every year, OnePlus creeps the price of its devices higher. The OnePlus 9 Pro starts the year 2021 at $969 (up from $899 last year) while the OnePlus 9 is $729, up from $699 for the OnePlus 8.
What color is a mirror?
OnePlus 9 & OnePlus 9 Pro
Naturally, a mirror is a huge fingerprint magnet, so get ready to wipe this thing down until your thumb falls off. OnePlus' reviewer's guide tells me there is a "Stellar Black" version that "resembles the classic sandstone look and feel of the OnePlus One" and is "practically free of fingerprints." That sounds nice.
With minimal bezels and hole-punch cameras now a standard thing from year to year, differences in phone design are pretty much down to the camera bump. As far as camera bumps go, the OnePlus 9 line looks nice! Most phones go with a single, big slab of glass that covers the entire camera bump, but OnePlus now has the two big lenses stick out from the camera bump. There are three height levels on the back, then: the major back panel, the top of the camera bump, and the two big, protruding lenses. Like many camera blocks, the phone is, unfortunately, wobbly on a table. If (like me) you often put a phone on a table and start poking at it, it's going to rock around when you tap it anywhere above the halfway point.
| SPECS AT A GLANCE | ||
|---|---|---|
| OnePlus 9 | OnePlus 9 Pro | |
| SCREEN | 120 Hz, 6.55-inch 2400×1080 (402ppi) OLED | 120Hz, 6.7-inch 3168×1440 (513ppi) OLED |
| OS | Android 11 with Oxygen OS skin | |
| CPU | Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 | |
| RAM | 8GB or 12GB, LPDDR5 | |
| STORAGE | 128GB, 256GB UFS 3.1 | |
| NETWORKING | 802.11b/g/n/ac/ax, Bluetooth 5.2, GPS, NFC | |
| PORTS | USB Type-C with 65W quick charging | |
| REAR CAMERAS | 48MP Main (IMX689)
50MP Ultrawide (IMX766) 2MP Monochrome |
48MP Main (IMX789)
50MP Ultrawide (IMX766) 8MP 3X telephoto 2MP Monochrome |
| FRONT CAMERA | 16MP | 16MP |
| SIZE | 160×74.2×8.7mm | 163.2×73.6×8.7mm |
| WEIGHT | 192 g | 197 g |
| BATTERY | 4500mAh | 4500mAh |
| STARTING PRICE | $729 | $969 |
| WIRELESS CHARGING | 15W Qi | 50W Warp |
| IP68? | T-Mobile version only | Yes |
| OTHER PERKS | In-screen fingerprint sensor, alert slider | |
I guess this makes the camera block look more like an iPhone—especially the base models which already have two big, stacked lenses—but it still looks great. On my mirror version, both lenses have a bright chrome ring around them. Along with the chromed-out retro "Hasselblad" logo, it makes the whole camera assembly feel like it belongs on a 1950s car dashboard.
The rest of the phone is more or less standard. The 9 Pro has a display that is curved along the left and right sides, which is a bummer since it distorts videos along the top and bottom in landscape. This is not on the base-model OnePlus 9, which is perfectly flat, so I still don't understand why manufacturers think a distorted screen is somehow "premium."
One surprise this year was how much lower the in-screen fingerprint reader is compared to the OnePlus 8 Pro. The fingerprint reader is all the way at the bottom of the screen now. I'm going to take a guess and say that the fingerprint reader was lowered so that it could be clear of the battery compartment, but we'll have to wait for a teardown to confirm. Anyone that's used an iPhone with TouchID will be used to the ergonomics of this, but it's more comfortable to have the fingerprint reader higher up, slightly lower than the middle of the display. That's just a more natural location for your thumb to hit.
Super-speedy charging
One of the best reasons to buy a OnePlus phone is the company's proprietary "Warp Charge" technology, which, with the included-in-the-box charger, will power up your phone faster than almost any other device on the market. This year we're up to "Warp Charge 65T"—65W charging that will take your phone from 0-100 percent in just 29 minutes. OnePlus does all this without heating the phone up too much, thanks to a huge power brick that duplicates the heat-generating charging circuitry away from the phone. This way, the brick gets hot instead of the phone, which reduces some of the wear and tear on the battery.
Being able to charge this quickly is one of the biggest improvements to come to smartphones in recent years, and it can really change the way you use a smartphone. I don't worry about charging my phone every night now, since plugging it in for just a few minutes (not necessarily even the full 29 minutes) can give you a significant amount of runtime. Charging a phone becomes more like gassing up a car rather than a nightly ritual, especially if you have light usage days. With only a half-hour charge time, you can power up your phone during your morning routine. If you're doing really heavy usage, then being able to recharge quickly in the middle of a day, like during lunch, is also a huge deal.
The new wireless charger.Ron Amadeo
The cable unplugs. Hurray. This is everything in the box, though. A power brick does not come with the wireless charger.Ron Amadeo
This is a big upgrade over the old charger, which had a permanent cord on both ends. How am I supposed to fit this through my desk grommet?Ron Amadeo
The bottom has a blower fan in it for cooling. the phone.Ron Amadeo
On the bottom face of the charger is a shelf with a power light. There's a tiny gap where the shelf meets the back phone rest, and this is where the air comes out.Ron Amadeo
On the OnePlus 9 Pro, OnePlus is on the second generation of its wireless charging technology—"Warp Charge 50 Wireless"—and as the name suggests, it's now up to 50W. OnePlus says it will take the phone from 0-100 percent in just 43 minutes, which is faster than a lot of other phones charger through a wire. The non-pro OnePlus 9 has wireless charging this year, but it's only 15W Qi charging.
OnePlus' 50W wireless charging also means the company is on its second generation of wireless charger, and there have been some design improvements. The original version, which debuted with the OnePlus 8 Pro, came with the forehead-smacking limitation of a hard-wired cord on both ends, making it basically a charging nunchuck. On one end, you had a sizable power brick; on the other end was the even bigger wireless charging dock. This meant you couldn't unplug anything to route the wire through a desk grommet or do any other kind of wire management. For the new charger, the wire is removable! Victory!
Yes, the Warp Charge 50 Wireless charge has a USB-C port on the back of the charging dock, so you can unplug the wire just like any normal piece of electronics. Unfortunately, with OnePlus' newfound ability to disconnect the charging brick, it also forgot to put a charging brick in the box of the wireless charger. When you buy the wireless charger, you'll get the dock and a USB-C cable, but no power brick—you'll have to supply your own, probably the wired brick that came with the phone. So the wireless charger is a replacement charger, not an extra charger. The wireless charger is $70 and if you're not using the phone's existing power brick, an extra one is another $35.
Just like last year, the charger has a fan in it that blows the lightest whiff of air across the back of the phone for cooling. It's inaudible from a normal distance.
The software
The OnePlus 9 software (It's Android 11). Here's the lock screen and home screen.Ron Amadeo
Notifications and quick settings.Ron Amadeo
The app drawer. The only app I've added at this point is Drivesync.Ron Amadeo
Recent apps and the settings.Ron Amadeo
The customization screen.Ron Amadeo
OnePlus' build of Android 11 is fine. There are a bunch of small, inconsequential changes to things like the settings icons and recent apps screen layout. I'm not sure why OnePlus bothers, because you'll barely notice these tweaks.
The big news with the company's push of Android 11 was that OnePlus finally relented and added an always-on display. You'll have to turn it on, but it's super handy to always be able to see the time and your notifications at a glance, even when the screen is off. Other than that, there are few coming-in-Android 12 features that are here now, like the ability to pick a UI accent color and a Samsung-style list design that puts a big header and lots of whitespace at the top of the list. That option pushes the initial list content down the screen, so you can more easily reach it.
OnePlus includes a few junk apps that are, thankfully, completely uninstallable: a OnePlus Community app, a "Notes" app, OnePlus Switch (for transferring data from your old phone), Recorder, and Weather. Some junk apps aren't uninstallable though, like a second gallery app besides Google Photos, a second file manager app besides Google Files, a "Games" app, and Netflix.
There's a "OnePlus Account" now at the top of the settings that you can sign up for. It doesn't seem to do anything, though. And even after signing up for one, the phone does not explain what it is or what it does. My auto-assigned username is apparently "G1616367344983." Cool.
One area that OnePlus loses to the competition is its update policy, which frankly isn't good enough anymore. The official line is that you'll get two major Android OS upgrades and three years of "bimonthly" (once every two months) security patches. I do have to give OnePlus credit for regularly being one of the first third-parties to deliver that first major update, but after that, things go downhill. Google and Samsung both offer three years of major updates and monthly, not bimonthly, updates. Samsung even goes a step beyond Google and offers one more year of quarterly security updates after the first three years. OnePlus used to be able to use the excuse that it was cheaper than other options, but that is no longer the case.
Performance
Performance is definitely a high point of the OnePlus 9 Pro, thanks to the buttery-smooth 120Hz display and speedy SoC. OnePlus is using a dynamic refresh rate on the 9 Pro, allowing it to do 120Hz when doing a frame-rate intensive task like scrolling, or to drop all the way down to 1Hz when looking at a still image or reading. The display and GPU will be doing less work for still images, so this should save power. The base-model OnePlus 9 doesn't have a variable refresh rate.
Like every other 2021 flagship phone, the OnePlus 9 and 9 Pro have a Snapdragon 88 SoC. This features the new ARM Cortex X1 core as the main CPU core, three Cortex A78 cores for medium-duty, and four Cortex A55 cores for background processing, all built on a 5nm process. Like we covered on the Galaxy S21, it's a fine yearly upgrade from Qualcomm, and marks a return to a single-chip solution with an on-board modem.
OnePlus had the option here of adding Wi-Fi 6E, but it chose not to, which is a bummer. You can't exactly buy reasonable Wi-Fi 6E access points yet, but we've got to start somewhere.
Camera
OnePlus is making a big deal out of its new "Hasselblad" co-branding this year. I'm thrilled. The camera seems like a hardware upgrade but the overall results are a mixed bag. Sometimes, on the OnePlus 9 Pro, you'll get way better colors than a OnePlus 8 Pro, and the low light performance is definitely improved. Other times the camera will go crazy and turn the nearest bright color into a neon highlighter. I'm sure there are some more camera software tweaks to dish out as the months go by.
The wide-angle lens and main camera usually turn in nearly identical photos in terms of color and quality. Maybe the OnePlus 9 design, with its two big, identical-looking camera lenses really hits this home, but having two nearly-identical cameras really feels like a waste. If you want a wider angle, most of the time you can just take a few steps back with the main camera and achieve the same thing. I guess it's useful if you find yourself in a cramped space, or it's good for filming Go-Pro style first-person video. But for the most part, this design feels redundant. I know this isn't specific to OnePlus; it's a problem with all smartphones. I just would rather have one big, really good camera instead of two smaller, "OK" cameras.
One major downside of the OnePlus 9 Pro camera is a drop in capability for the macro mode of the camera. We were big fans of the macro mode on the OnePlus 8 Pro, allowing you to get closer to an object and photograph it with a ridiculous level of detail. There's still a macro button on the OnePlus 9 Pro, but you can't get as close or capture as much detail as you can on the older device. It's a real shame.
This is Echo, my parents' giant, fluffy German Shepard. The OnePlus 9 Pro turns in the best colors of the bunch.
The base model OnePlus 9 is a lot more saturated and it feels like the contrast is too high.
The OnePlus 8 Pro is pretty bad in comparison. Again the contrast goes crazy, and the top of the sort of washed out? It's not great.
This is a tough shot that everything struggled with: a poorly lit flower at night. The best of the bunch, believe it or not, was the OnePlus 8 Pro, the old phone.
The OnePlus 9 and 9 Pro (pictured here) both chose to blast out the color saturation and turn the flower neon. Nope!
This is the OnePlus 9 wide-angle lens. Pretty much an identical picture, quality and color wise.
The base-model OnePlus 9. Again, neon highlighter, for some reason.
The base model wide angle.
I know it never looks it, but this is a low light test. Lights off, windows shuttered, door closed. The room is pretty dark right now. The OnePlus 9 Pro does pretty well, with solid colors, and a still-furry Yoshi doll.
Still, nothing beats the Pixel 4, which turned in better colors and clearer detail.
This is what failing the test looks like. The base model OnePlus 9 turned in a dull picture with all the fur detail smudged out of the photo.
The OnePlus 8 is also a dull smudge machine.
Macro mode throwdown! Here's a best-effort attempt from each camera to get as close to this Broadcom chip as possible. In first place: the OnePlus 8 Pro. Yes, the old phone. Look at the detail here. The text is made from a series of tiny circular indents!
The Pixel 4 is cheating with digital zoom and AI-powered detail fudging. Note that you can't tell the test is made out of circle indents anymore.
Oh no. This is the best the OnePlus 9 Pro can do.
Ditto for the OnePlus 9. Sad.
Just barely beating Samsung
I feel like a slowly boiled frog with OnePlus' constant price increases. This year it particularly hurts, since Samsung lowered the prices of its flagship lineup by $200 as OnePlus went up $70. Even though the final phone is pretty good, OnePlus is offering less value than ever. The base-model, $729 OnePlus 9 is closest to the baseline Galaxy S21, which is $799. The OnePlus 9 Pro for $969 is closest to the Galaxy S21+, which is $999.
My main concern is that the OnePlus update policy is far behind the competition. In addition to the $200 price drop, this year Samsung increased its update policy to three years of major updates and four years of security updates, making OnePlus' two years of major updates and three years of not-even-monthly updates look sad. Depending on how long you plan to keep the phone, you could end up with a lower total cost of ownership with Samsung.
OnePlus does have a lot of things going for it, though. The 65W Warp Charging is absolutely a reason to buy this phone. Charing up to full in a half-hour is a huge deal, and it will change the way you use a phone. It's incredible to wake up to a low battery, plug in the phone, and have it fully charged by the time you finish your morning routine. It's criminal that some vendors are forgoing a charging brick entirely, opting to leave such a major advance on the table. It's only going to get better, too, with companies like Qualcomm pushing 100W charging solutions soon.
The software isn't quite stock Android, but it gets the job done and isn't heavy. Unlike Samsung, which packs the phone with crapware and ads, a big portion of the apps here are uninstallable, and the software tends to not get in the way. OnePlus has even added an always-on display, fixing one of the biggest problems we had with its software.
OnePlus' biggest advantage has always been the price it's charging, but this year, that's a tossup with Samsung. OnePlus offers just enough extras to put it over the top—a speedy charging system and a charger in the box; better software—but it's getting too close for comfort.
The Good
- The silky-smooth 120Hz display.
- 65W Warp Charging. Powering up a phone from 0 to full in a half-hour is incredible.
- A good software package with minimal apps and changes.
- A very attractive camera block.
The Bad
- Samsung-style pricing only gives OnePlus a ~$30 advantage.
- No Wi-Fi 6E. The 6GHz wireless revolution will have to wait.
- Distorted, curved display on the 9 Pro
- The macro camera is way worse on the OnePlus 9 Pro. The 8 Pro takes better close-up pictures.
The Ugly
- Only two years of major updates and bi-monthly security updates are not good enough for this price.
"front" - Google News
March 23, 2021 at 10:00PM
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OnePlus 9 Pro Review—Keeping the slightest lead in front of Samsung - Ars Technica
"front" - Google News
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