The OnePlus 8 Pro remains the brand’s most expensive phone. Find out if it’s still worth buying in our OnePlus 8 Pro review revisited.
2020 has been a year of change for OnePlus. The Shenzen company’s product portfolio has expanded to the largest it’s ever been, one of its co-founders left for pastures new, and even its beloved Oxygen OS software received a dramatic overhaul. But all this change kicked off with the OnePlus 8 Pro — the brand’s first true non-compromise flagship phone. Its predecessor, the OnePlus 7 Pro, signaled a shift towards the premium end of the smartphone market, but the OnePlus 8 Pro launched as the most powerful and feature-packed phone that OnePlus had ever made. Even with the recent launch of the OnePlus 8T, those things still hold true today. So, just over six months after its release is the Best of Android mid-2020 winner still worth buying, or has the competition caught up? Let’s find out in this OnePlus 8 Pro review revisit. The good Performance The OnePlus 8 Pro was a performance beast at launch and it’s just as powerful six months on. Technically, the phone’s Snapdragon 865 processor has been surpassed by Qualcomm’s gaming-optimized Snapdragon 865 Plus chipset. Where previously the OnePlus 8 Pro smashed benchmarks including our own Speed Test G, the recent wave of 865 Plus-powered gaming phones like the almighty Asus ROG Phone 3 have gained a small advantage in GPU tests. However, the OnePlus 8 Pro is still one of the best out there not just for peak performance, but also for sustained performance. Even as the phone heats up it barely misses a beat. This is evident in our own in-depth testing, but it’s also recognizable in day-to-day use. There’s nothing that slows the OnePlus 8 Pro down — even more so if you have the 12GB RAM version with 256GB of UFS 3.0 storage. See also: The best cases for the OnePlus 8 Pro to get The top-tier performance extends to the battery life too. Even after six months of on and off use the OnePlus 8 Pro battery impresses with just over two days on a light load (browsing on Wi-Fi, calls, messaging) and over a day’s juice under heavy stress (gaming, video streaming). It also recharges rapidly thanks to Warp Charge 30T — around 20 minutes to hit 50% from zero. It even charges wirelessly and remains the only OnePlus phone to do so. Put simply, while there are now phones out there with fractionally more powerful chips, larger batteries, and faster charging speeds, the OnePlus 8 Pro easily hangs with the best. Display Another OnePlus staple, the OnePlus 8 Pro’s display is objectively one of the best on any smartphone. For starters, it gets insanely bright with peak levels of well over 1,000 nits in direct sunlight. Thankfully, it’s not just a numbers game with the display as the color accuracy is also on point. Watching movies or playing games on the whopping 6.78-inch OnePlus 8 Pro is a joy in all its vibrant, Quad HD+ glory. AMOLED,120Hz, and QHD+ — that’s the good stuff. This is all boosted further by the 120Hz refresh rate. While now far more common than at launch, OnePlus’ implementation remains one of the few that offers full refresh rate flexibility. Want the smoothest experience at all times with the highest resolution? That’s fine, a quick trip to the Settings and you can enjoy 120Hz in QHD+, but you can also set it to dynamically shift between 60Hz and 120Hz based on the content you are viewing to save battery.
