The OnePlus 9 Pro is a pretty fast phone, but benchmarks disagree. It’s time to think about just how useful tools like Geekbench are when every phone is speedy.
All smartphones are pretty fast nowadays. A long as you get a phone that costs over $300, you should expect to have little to no issue with speed. The very best smartphones, from iPhones to Android, offer fast and powerful chips that do far more than we need in our day-to-day lives. No more is this more apparent than a recent scandal around OnePlus and the OnePlus 9 series. OnePlus recently came under fire for appearing to slow down performance when a user used some of the most popular Android apps on their newest flagship phones. When using an app like Chrome, Microsoft Office, or WhatsApp, performance would drop relative to performance for benchmarking apps. This behavior was spotted in a performance review of the OnePlus 9 Pro and substantiated by Geekbench who opted to remove the phone from their Android Benchmark charts. With the OnePlus 9 and 9 Pro having a powerful Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 chip, this appears to be incongruous on the face of it. Why bother shipping a powerful chip in your phone, if you’re going to artificially throttle it. Well, turns out there’s a good reason. OnePlus defended itself in a statement, saying that the change was made to preserve the battery life of OnePlus devices by optimizing the most popular apps in the Play Store against the Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 processor. “Our top priority is always delivering a great user experience with our products, based in part on acting quickly on important user feedback.
