[New post] OnePlus 10 Pro review: A true Android flagship device
Raunak Saha posted: " OnePlus has a glowing history when it comes to making Android flagship smartphones, from making affordable flagships to going all out, the brand has come to a long while to create its name in the industry. While all the facts of OnePlus being under OPP"
OnePlus has a glowing history when it comes to making Android flagship smartphones, from making affordable flagships to going all out, the brand has come to a long while to create its name in the industry. While all the facts of OnePlus being under OPPO have made a lot of fans furious and the increasing Oppofication of OnePlus is a point of concern.
Still, in 2022 they launched their absolute flagship OnePlus 10 Pro and much expectedly kept on increasing prices to offer the best-of-the-best specs for those who could afford it. The brand still retains its affordable flagships like the OnePlus 9RT but the step up in price from OnePlus 9 Pro to the 10 Pro is nearly as much as Rs.12k, but does it justifies that price hike? Let us find out.
I have been using this smartphone for over 2 weeks now as my primary device and in fact, I did enjoy the feel of using this flagship, but should you go for it too? Obviously, this judgement will be based on many factors because you will spend a lot of money buying this device, and yes, the experience matters.
Here is the complete review:
In The Box
As reviewers, we were fortunate to get the reviewer's box with a lot of cool stuff, the packaging, that feeling of having a charger makes me cry these days. Also, you get a lot of OnePlus branding stuff, overall the brand retains its value and customer satisfaction from the moment you unbox this device.
So, inside the box, you get the OnePlus 10 Pro, 80W SUPERVOOC Power Adapter, Type-C Cable, Quick Start Guide, Welcome Letter, Safety Information and Warranty Card, and Screen Protector (pre-applied), Protective Case, SIM Tray Ejector.
Specifications of the OnePlus 10 Pro
Display: 6.7 Inches; 120 Hz QHD+ Fluid AMOLED with LTPO; Resolution: 3216 x 1440; Aspect Ratio: 20:9
Display Features: Nature tone display, Video colour enhancer, Colour personalization, Colour vision enhancement, Auto brightness, Manual brightness, Screen colour temperature, Bright HDR video mode, Night Mode, Multi-brightness colour calibration, Vibrant Colour Effect Pro, Ultra high-resolution video
Camera: 48MP Main Camera with Sony IMX 789 Lens (OIS enabled), 50MP Ultra-wide angle camera & 8MP Telephoto lens; Front (Selfie) Camera: 32MP; Flash: Dual LED
Camera Features: Hasselblad Camera for Mobile, Nightscape, Ultra HDR, Smart Scene Recognition, Portrait Mode, Pro Mode, Panorama Mode, Tilt-Shift mode, Long Exposure Mode, 150° Wide-angle Mode, Dual-View Video, Movie Mode, Xpan Mode, Filters, Super Stable, Video Nightscape, Video HDR, Video Portrait, Focus Tracking, Timelapse
Operating System: Oxygen OS based on Android 12
Processor: Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1
Battery & Charging: 5000 mAh with 80W SuperVOOC
In-Display Fingerprint Sensor
Alexa Hands-Free capable: Download the Alexa app to use Alexa hands-free. Play music, make calls, hear the news, open apps, navigate, and more, all using just your voice, while on the go.
Design & Build Quality
There are two color variants: Volcanic Black and Emerald Forest, personally I like the latter but I got to review the black variant which kind of reminds me of traditional matte black OnePlus smartphones. The curved glass with metal railings all over the edges does add to its premiumness but unsurprisingly it is very light to hold.
Weighing around 200 grams, this tall smartphone's weight balance has been done amazingly well, it is a big one though but fits into your pockets even with its bigger form factor. The overall design is very minimal and clear with the OnePlus logo in the middle on the rear end and has that ethnicity of OnePlus smartphones.
Though you have this huge quad-camera bump surprisingly it's better than the previous design on the OnePlus 9 Pro and the new ceramic rear camera cover made out of 3D nano-microcrystalline looks great at the back of the device. Though looks are subjective, I like this design but might be contradictory but the durability of this camera cutout is quite good.
You won't have to fear about the durability if you use it with a cover as it's quite hard and I too experienced minor falls but the camera cutout never gets any scratch or such. Overall, in terms of build quality, you won't complain at all because of the well-balanced materials used to make it both light and sturdy but the design is subjective to your eyes.
Display
The biggest highlight of this new OnePlus 10 Pro has to be its new 6.7-inches QHD+ Fluid AMOLED display almost the same when compared to the 9 Pro but this new one comes with LTPO 2.0 which is game-changing on flagship smartphones. Why? It is because the display will automatically adapt to the usage and decrease screen refresh rate to only 1Hz to save battery.
This is great if you look to extend your battery life and the Adaptive Screen Refresh Rate along with Next-gen AI Adaptive Brightness works like a charm. Maximum of the time I kept it at auto-brightness and the display was quickly adapting to the ambience of the environment easily.
By default, the display will be set to FHD 120Hz and for me, that really did the job most of the time, however, while watching movies or web series I did increase the resolution to QHD+. This dramatically makes a difference and my god the experience was superb, everyone who watched videos on this OnePlus 10 Pro got jealous of its fantastic display.
Also, being curved it offers more pixels and an aspect ratio of 20.1:9, covering 100% of the P3 color gamut, this is of the best displays money can buy you on a smartphone. I like the fact that OnePlus has given a lot of options to fiddle with the display in your settings, you have options like Nature Tone Display, Video color enhancer, Bright HDR video mode and a lot of them actually help utilize this great AMOLED display.
The only complaint I have with this display is about its durability, there's a Corning® Gorilla® Glass protection written on the site but it's not up to the mark. I would suggest you definitely buy a screen guard, the best one possible because this display is not drop-resistant, it couldn't even resist a minor fall which almost all smartphones do these days and is not even close to the toughness of an iPhone's display.
Performance
The key highlight of any OnePlus flagship has to be its performance, brought to you by the latest Qualcomm chip, here the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. Though there have been a lot of criticisms when it comes to its efficiency and performance because of using a 4nm node from Samsung and not TSMC's.
However, you would be keen to know how it performs in daily life and to be honest it does feel snappy and gives that flagship-level experience, however, when you are doing something for a long time, you might see occasional stutters. This is mostly because of the CPU throttling issue, the peak performance is not steady and this is evident from the recent Geekbench benchmarks:
When we ran the CPU Throttling Test app, we see a further dip in performance as we ran the benchmark for up to 30 minutes and we see a drop up to 69% of the max performance but for a short period of time. You will see the OnePlus 10 Pro sustain 80% the performance most of the time which is not bad but could have been better.
Obviously, it's a shame that these new flagship chips cannot sustain the same level of performance it advertises but that is not the fault of OnePlus. A lot of Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 smartphones have struggled to tame the performance and being a flagship, the OnePlus 10 Pro holds up pretty well to keep the chip running.
Paired with LPDDR5 RAM and UFS 3.1 storage, this smartphone gives the best performance an Android flagship can offer these days. The string GPU inside of this Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 SoC does make a difference in benchmarks but the overall Antutu score could have been better if compared with the other flagships. Also, after the first benchmark, you see in the stress tests the performance drops significantly and this is an issue of the SoC.
Gaming
Buying the OnePlus 10 Pro means you demand good performance, including gaming from the device and so, we had to play various games to see if the smartphone lives up to the hype. Unsurprisingly, the OnePlus 10 Pro gives a solid gaming performance thanks to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 inside which has outstanding GPU performance, the best among Android devices.
As you know while gaming the SoC is stressed for quite some time and throttling could become a major issue you might see occasional frame drops especially if you play any games at the highest settings but the smartphone holds up pretty well even with prolonged gaming. It does get hot as temps go over 40 degrees and add to the hot Indian climate that could reach 50 degrees celsius even.
At that moment it's difficult to hold the smartphone when used bare, so, better to use any case because the side metal railing gets hot. However, the all-new HyperBoost gaming engine does help to sustain the gaming performance and optimizes whenever you start playing any game. The GPA Frame Stabilizer also works well to provide stable and smooth frame rates for up to 4 hours of intense FPS gaming and yes it does the job pretty well.
With QHD+ resolution, you can play the most demanding games like BGMI and Call of Duty Mobile easily at high settings but keep one or two settings lower to keep frame rates more consistent if you play for a sustained period of time.
Camera
When you are paying as much as Rs.72k (for this top model), you expect good camera performance from the OnePlus 10 Pro and it does live up to the expectations. There's no upgrade in the main sensor which is quite strange as you still have a primary 48MP Sony IMX789 sensor which is a big sensor, allowing more light to pass through.
This main sensor is OIS capable and comes with an aperture of ƒ/1.8, also the strange fact is that for an Ultra-wide camera, now you have a Samsung JN1 sensor instead of the OnePlus 9 Pro's Sony IMX766 sensor. The JN1 sensor has a lesser sensor size than the Sony IMX766 and I couldn't understand why OnePlus chose this path.
However, there are also a lot of improvements in terms of Camera features like the Hasselblad Camera for Mobile, 150° Mode, and Long Exposure to name a few. You can access all these new features using the camera app and the best part is that you have some of the other modes to capture shots in any environment possible.
One thing I did notice is that the camera on this OnePlus 10 Pro comes with a new second-generation Natural Color Calibration with Hasselblad did make a difference. The color reproduction on this smartphone was even better than the iPhone 12 Mini I own and the 10-bit imagery gives more vibrant and dynamic colors.
Also, the updated Hasselblad Pro Mode captures 12-bit RAW on all three rear cameras and for professionals that do really make a difference. I tried using the Pro mode and got good results, also if you can fiddle out with settings in this mode you can get stunning imagery undoubtedly with high intuitive controls, edit shots with more image information and dynamic range.
As you see the outdoor shots look great with punchier colors and sometimes it does mess around with the colors but turn off the AI mode if you would like too. However, the camera was pretty accurate and reliable all the time I used it outdoors.
Indoor photography was blissful because the accuracy, colors, and sharpness are very well-balanced on this OnePlus 10 Pro, especially since the Pro mode works like a charm. In most cases, this camera performed consistently well.
I am a very foodie person and I like to click a lot of food photos if you are one of them you will definitely fall in love with the amazing colors this camera is able to produce and bring that food essence to the real world.
Even product photography was quite good on this flagship device and I was please with the telephoto lens of the smartphone because it snaps sharp photos even if the point of reference is 10 to 15 times away from you.
The biggest highlight of this primary camera of the OnePlus 10 Pro has to be its Portrait shots or ability to capture human subjects. Consistently, whenever I snapped any picture be it mine, our team's or even parents or grandparents, the camera was able to naturally process and capture the photos retaining the originality while still making the photos bright, punchy and beautiful.
From group photos to portraits, the smartphone produced some of the best shots and was always reliant to provide you social-media worthy images. I would even prefer this OnePlus flagship device over my iPhone 12 mini which struggles sometimes with human subjects, but this one doesn't.
Even for selfies, the upgraded 32MP Sony IMX 615 sensor does a great job pulling off amazing, detailed selfies whenever needed regardless of the background or conditions.
Coming to night photography, OnePlus has bragged a lot about these cameras and yes it delivers good photos even with very low lighting conditions. Preferably if the subject has a bit of light, the camera does pretty well but struggles a bit with human subjects at night. However, the OIS enabled primary camera does help to take good shots even if you are not stable and that really helps outdoors.
I haven't had the chance to test a lot of modes which are embedded into the OnePlus 10 Pro's camera but I did use a few and it was okay-ish, nothing extra-ordinary. However, the Pro model is a real gem if anyone can use it and even the smartphone is capable to pull off 12-bit RAW photos if you want to.
Talking about videos, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 helps the smartphone to capture 4K 120 fps videos and 8K videos at 24 FPS which is more than enough. However, what's significant is the quality of these videos, I would have to say the colors produced in these videos are great but not comparable to the better autofocusing on iPhones during videos.
Be it time-lapse or slow-mo the camera was snappy enough to capture everything while having OIS is really helpful if are into travels and capturing vlogs more often.
Overall, I am really happy with the OnePlus 10 Pro's camera performance and I like the fact it's very reliant be it any environment or any scene. I have always loved the iPhones for their cameras and I switched to this one effortlessly in no time, so, you do understand for both a Pro and a basic user this camera is really good.
However, in the next variant, I would definitely love to see an upgrade in the primary and ultra-wide sensor as the camera was more or less matching that of its predecessor OnePlus 9 Pro.
OS & Software
This new OnePlus 10 Pro ships out of the box with Android 12 with OxygenOS over the top, while I do get the hate from many fans that this OxygenOS is nowhere near to what it was previously, however, it's still better than having ColorOS.
The wide functionalities of the OxygenOS and its level of customization are much better than other Android skins and feel good to use every day. I hope OnePlus retains OxygenOS and stops mixing it with ColorOS in the days to come.
Buttons/Ports & Connectivity
For buttons, you have the volume +/- on the left-hand side while the power switch and alert slider are on the right-hand side. You do have a speaker cutout at the bottom and a USB Type-C port to charge the smartphone.
In terms of connectivity, I had no issues at all with the Wi-Fi or the Bluetooth because OnePlus has used every latest tech to make it functional. The Wi-Fi speeds were up to the mark and having support up to Wi-Fi 6 will help in the future as it goes widely adopted in India.
While 5G is still not rolled out in the country, be assured that when it comes this flagship OnePlus 10 Pro supports all bands of 5G and speed won't be an issue because of the faster 5G MIMO support. I tested the smartphone with my primary Jio sim and never faced any call drops or issues or even complaints by the opposite party about the network reception.
Audio, Earpiece & Microphone
For a flagship device like this OnePlus 10 Pro, the quality of the audio is crucial because a lot of people like me like to hear non-stop music from the speaker of the smartphone. Having a proper stereo speaker at both ends of the device helps to provide you with accurate stereo effects, helpful especially if you are watching anything.
With support for both Dolby Atmos and Noise cancellation, the sound experience is pretty good while the earpiece, as well as microphone quality, again are great. I never faced any issues with hearing from the earpiece which was quite loud be it during normal calls or WhatsApp/Telegram calls. On the other hand, the microphone was accurate always be in any environment, and never did it disappointed me to talk to anyone during calls.
Battery life & Charging
This flagship smartphone packs a 5000mAh battery which is enough for any user to get an entire day of battery life. As it has two cells combined together, the charging speeds are quite good and there is less heat generated even if you use the 80W SUPERVOOC charger that comes inside the box.
Thanks to the fast charger you can charge the smartphone in around 20 minutes and that's really cool, something you expect if you spend the money on a flagship. Coming to the battery life of this OnePlus 10 Pro I am definitely impressed with the efficiency of the smartphone as on the busiest of the days I could cover all day easily with a single charge, which is very fast.
In this regard, I really like how the LTPO 2.0 works because even with a 120Hz refresh rate you get a day's of battery life easily even though you have a powerful Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 inside. Thanks to its wireless charging tech it supports 50W AIRVOOC fast charging but you need that separate charger, still good to have the tech inside.
Being a monster in terms of battery life, sometimes I did use the smartphone as a power bank for my earbuds or even my other phones and it worked well. Overall, in terms of both battery life and charging, I am very satisfied with this OnePlus 10 Pro.
Verdict
The reason for buying this OnePlus 10 Pro has to be for its overall offering, from design to display or from cameras to battery life/charging, OnePlus has made this new flagship for 2022 but this is a pricier upgrade over the OnePlus 9 Pro. However, the upgrades it brings to the table aren't justified to make it Rs.10k higher in price than its predecessor.
I know this high pricing has reduced the hype that which OnePlus flagships have in the market especially after this whole Oppo marrying the OnePlus saga, but the phone as a total is worth buying if you have the money to spend. Don't get me wrong but with all flagship specs and Android smartphone features like IP68, and wireless charging, it is worth purchasing undoubtedly.
However, the competition in the Indian smartphone market does really question whether it's the best value for money offer? Indeed not but if you feel hooked with that OnePlus branding and want its best offering, the OnePlus 10 Pro is absolutely worth it but I would like the brand to make the next flagship even better but not by increasing the price.
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