OnePlus 8 Pro review—The best flagship of 2020, even if it is more expensive
The OnePlus 8 Pro. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]
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, 3168i-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.
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