OnePlus 8 Pro review—The best flagship of 2020, even if it is more expensive

Today, OnePlus is launching its flagship smartphones for 2020, the OnePlus 8 and OnePlus 8 Pro. OnePlus made a name for itself in the smartphone industry with great value-for-money offerings, but this year, get ready for some sticker shock. The OnePlus 8 is $699, a $100 increase over the $599 OnePlus 7T, and the OnePlus 8 Pro is $899, a whopping $230 increase over the $669 OnePlus 7 Pro. Welcome to 2020: the year of the super-expensive smartphone.

Since these phones are just being introduced today, we should talk about what’s new for this price. At first blush, the OnePlus 8 Pro is about what you would expect from a 2020 smartphone. There’s a Snapdragon 865, a 6.78-inch, 3168×1440 120Hz OLED display, 8GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, and a 4510mAh battery. There’s also a higher spec version with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage (for $100 more, so $999). The 8 Pro is much more expensive than previous years, but with the bigger price comes fixes for long-standing omissions from OnePlus’ typical phones: the 8 Pro has wireless charging—a speedy 30W wireless charging system—and an IP68 water-resistance rating. The other big OnePlus omission we’ve complained about year after year—the lack of an always-on display mode—still hasn’t been addressed here, though OnePlus says it is working on it.

The cheaper OnePlus 8 is basically the 7 Pro with updated specs—it comes without the pop-up camera and with a lower-quality rear camera system. Compared to the 8 Pro, there’s still a Snapdragon 865, there’s still 8 or 12GB of RAM (albeit with slower LPDDR4X instead of the DDR5 in the 8 Pro), and still 128 or 256GB of UFS 3.0 storage. The higher-spec tier of 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage is still $100 more, so $799. The big downgrades come in the display, which drops down to 90Hz instead of 120Hz and uses a slightly smaller 6.55-inch display plus a totally fine 1080p resolution instead of 1440p. The cameras get cheaper sensors, the battery is a smaller 4300mAh, and the big additions to the 8 Pro—wireless charging and IP68 water resistance—aren’t on the OnePlus 8, though OnePlus says the phone is still somewhat water-resistant.

In terms of specs and pricing, one way to look at OnePlus’ new lineup is that the lower-end tier—previously occupied by the OnePlus 7 and 7T—is going away. As we said, the OnePlus 8 compares favorably to the 7 Pro, and the 8 Pro is in an even higher pricing tier with wireless charging and other extras. That means it’s yet another year of OnePlus phones being more expensive, which has happened pretty much every single year the company has been in business. If you’re looking for something cheaper, hopefully the rumors of that mid-range OnePlus phone come true. There is certainly room for it.

Despite the increased price tag, however, OnePlus has once again made a phone that jumps to the top of the Android class.

Design—Pretty much just a 7 Pro

There is almost nothing new to talk about in the design department. The 8 and 8 Pro stick very closely to the previous OnePlus designs, especially the 7 Pro. You’ll get front and back glass panels, curved edges, and a metal band around the edges. There are still in-screen optical fingerprint readers, which don’t seem any bigger or faster than last year.

Besides the usual faster specs, the big addition this year is the 120Hz display on the 8 Pro. PC gamers have known this for a while, but yes, faster displays are very nice, and the 120Hz display is a nice upgrade over the 90Hz display on the OnePlus 7 Pro and 7T. Everything is buttery smooth at 120Hz, and the animations, scrolling, and screen transitions are all a joy. This is the smoothest, fastest-feeling smartphone on the market.

OnePlus 8 and OnePlus 8 Pro

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Samsung shipped a 120Hz display this year, too, but unlike on the Galaxy S20, the OnePlus 8 Pro can run at the highest refresh rate and the highest resolution—Samsung made you pick one or the other. At max resolution and max refresh rate, everything seems fine. Of course this will use more battery, but you can also lower one or the other to better survive heavy usage days, if you want.

The other big display change is that the OnePlus 8 Pro dumps the 7 Pro’s pop-up camera in favor of a regular, old hole-punch camera, and that really is a shame. The pop-up camera gave you a front camera without any screen blemishes at all, and now OnePlus has downgraded with a pockmark in the top-left corner of the phone.

I really miss the pop-up camera. If you’re one of the 37 percent of people who don’t take any selfies at all, the 7 Pro’s pop-up camera lets you forget about the front camera entirely and not sacrifice part of your screen for a feature you never use. If you’re a privacy-conscious person, the pop-up camera is like having an automatic cover for your selfie cam—you always know if your front camera is on, because it’s either popped-up or not. It also provided OnePlus with something other OEMs seem completely desperate for: a form of real differentiation. Nobody else is really doing pop-up cameras, and they are fun, cool, eye-catching, and there’s a real user benefit.

The hole punch camera makes the phone look more generic and makes the status bar taller than normal, which pushes app content down and results in less content for the app. OnePlus told me they scrapped the pop-up camera because it takes up space that could otherwise be used for battery (so the headphone jack argument), and the stats do back this up: the OnePlus 8 Pro has 510mAh more battery capacity than the 7 Pro. OnePlus acknowledged that the 120Hz display and 5G mean the phone will be more power-hungry, but the company expects the bigger battery to help the phone break even with previous devices when it comes to runtime.

While the top bezel of the 8 Pro is very slim, OnePlus still managed to cram some devices in there. Besides the earpiece, there’s also an RGB sensor on the front, which enables an environment-matching white-balance feature called “comfort tone.” This works just like Apple’s True Tone or Google’s Ambient EQ, and it will tweak the display white balance for a supposedly more comfortable experience. This is another 8-Pro-exclusive feature—there’s no sensor on the cheaper phone.

The display is still curved along the long edges, though the display curve on the OnePlus 8 Pro is deeper than on the OnePlus 8. I’ve never been a fan of this “feature” since it only serves to distort the sides of apps and videos and reflects glare along the sides in certain lighting conditions.

The back looks just like the OnePlus 7 Pro from a distance, but both versions grow the camera bump in every dimension. On the 8 Pro, the camera bump is a lot taller now, sticking out about 2mm from the 8.5mm body. It is so tall the phone looks like a tripod on a table, with the top of the phone floating high above the flat surface. The camera bump is wider as well in order to fit the beefier camera lenses. The OnePlus 8 and 8 Pro have similar megapixel counts but don’t have the same cameras, for the most part.

The back comes in a few wild colors. My 8 Pro came in the most vibrant blue color ever created by mankind, covered with a satin finish. The OnePlus 8 came in a shiny “Glow” color, which is a color-changing purple/yellow/pink gradient. These glass phones still collect a ton of fingerprints, but the satin finish on the blue version does some work to hide all the fingerprints, which is nice.

Other than the new camera setups, the hardware is indistinguishable from previous OnePlus devices. The side-mounted three-position audio switch returns, and that’s still a quick, easy way to switch between ringing notifications, vibrate, and mute.

Listing image by Ron Amadeo