Hey guys it’s Sagar and here is my longterm review of the OnePlus 9 Pro. OnePlus was a really exciting brand in thebeginning. They packed in all the latest and greatestspecs in their earlier phones, just like the other flagships. But they priced their phones much lower thanthe said flagships, making OnePlus phones amazing value for money options for the buyer. But after doing this for couple of years,they changed their strategy. Now, they still pack in all the latest specsavailable in their phones, but they also keep on increasing the prices of their phones 2times every year. And at a starting price of Rs.64,999, OnePlus9 Pro is their most expensive smartphone to date. That being said, it is still priced a bitlower than the other flagships, at least here in India, but it is no longer the best valuefor money option as OnePlus smartphones once were. I have been using this OnePlus 9 Pro as mymain phone ever since it came out, and in almost every way, it has it has been a prettygood phone, but it hasn’t lived up to the hype that OnePlus created for it. Now the design of this phone is not new orrevolutionary. With a glass sandwich design and curved displayat the front, It seems like a mash up of the OnePlus 8 Pro and the 8T, with the cameramodule pushed on to one side. But it still looks nice and premium speciallythis Stellar Black colour. That brings me to a very important point. No one, and I mean No one prefers to havea glossy glass back like on the Morning Mist colour of the 9 Pro, specially when you have2 amazing finishes on the Stellar Black and Pine Green colour. The glossy back shows fingerprints and scratchesvery easily, and it also makes the phone very slippery. So if anyone from OnePlus is watching, youguys have had amazing matte finishes to the back ever since the OnePlus 6 or 6T, and youhave refined and made it even better over the years, so from next time, please beingthe matte frosted glass back to all the colour options. Everyone will appreciate the design even more. Like all other OnePlus devices, 9 Pro is avery well build phone. The metal frame provided it a lot of rigidity,and the metal buttons are tactile and feel very robust.
This phone also gets IP68 water and dust resistancerating, so you no longer have to worry, if the phone takes a quick shower or if you accidentallydrop it in swimming pool or spill some water over it. OnePlus 9 Pro is a bit shorter and narrowerthan the 8 Pro, so it fits better in my hands. The screen is still curved at the edges, butthe curve is a bit subtle compared to the 8 Pro. This is to reduce the accidental touches. But I did run into some responsiveness issueswhile using this phone without a case. This is more of an issue while trying to reacha certain part of the screen with one hand, or while using the camera app. Because, chances are you have multiple fingerstouching the screen at the same time without you knowing about it. Other than that, it’s a wonderful display. Very easily one of the best ones out there. With 1300 nits of peak brightness It can getvery bright, and the colours look amazing. When set to QHD+ it looks extremely crisp. It’s an LTPO display, so in the smart 120Hzmode, refresh rate can drop down when the screen is showing something less demanding,and it can race up to 120Hz for more demanding stuff. While this is great but every now and thenwhen the refresh rate goes from low to high, I see a couple of dropped frames. It has got much better with updates, but Istill see it here and there. I don’t think this is a major issue, andI doubt that most people will even notice it. Overall I really like this display. The bezels are super thin, and you can veryeasily get used to the small notch on the top left. The in display fingerprint sensor is placeda bit too low, and it took me a good 3-4 days to get used to its placement. Now this is one of the good ones, it is veryfast and accurate to unlock the phone. I just wish it was placed a bit higher, likeon the OnePlus 8. While using the fingerprint sensor, you getthe first tase of the amazingly strong haptic motor inside this phone.
It is not very often that you get a good vibrationmotor on an android phone. You get a very nice haptic feedback throughoutthe user interface. For example, if you are increasing the volumeor brightness, vibrations go from light to strong with the slider, and this is a verynice touch. While we are talking about the things thatare inside this phone, lets us also check out the other specs. It is powered by the latest and greatest Snapdragon888 processor with Adreno 660 GPU. You can choose between 8 or 12 GB of LPDDR5RAM, and 128 or 256GB of UFS 3.1 2-lane storage. This phone does get 5G support, but rightnow it only has 2 5G bands, but OnePlus says they will be adding support for more bandswith future software updates. With all of this you can expect flawless performancefrom this OnePlus 9 Pro. It can fly through anything that you throughat it. Everyday social apps, streaming content, playinggames, do anything and you won’t be disappointed. Well this is the case with any OnePlus phone. They stay fast and snappy for years to come. The only issue you might run into, is thephone heating up if you use it for long time. If you play a lot of games or click imagesor videos for a long time, it gets very hot. In the beginning you got this warning veryoften when the phone got very hot, but with updates I have started seeing this warningless and less. But the phone has actually not stopped overheating. It still gets uncomfortably hot sometimes.
I called out OnePlus on Twitter and in mycamera review of this phone, for the overheating issue, and some people said that I was exaggeratingthe issue. But if you go to OnePlus Forums, there isa 39 page thread about heating related issues on the OnePlus 9 Pro, so this issue is veryreal. And it still persists even after the latestsoftware update. The overall software experience is very goodon this phone. OnePlus’s Oxygen OS is one of my favouriteAndroid Skins. I love the features and customisation optionsit gives you. It is minimal and functional at the same time. And I love that OnePlus offers software supportfor a long time. They have however slowed down or delayed theAndroid 11 update on some of the older phones like the OnePlus 7T. But this is their flagship device, and I hopewe will get better software support for the 9 Pro in the future. Speaking of software updates, I have alreadyreceived 3 or 4 of them in just the 1 month that this phone has been out. There are the most number of updates thatI have got on a new phone in such short time. While this sounds like a good thing that OnePlusis working on things and pushing out timely updates. But I strongly feel that no smartphone shouldneed these many updates to get the basics right. Most of the things that they are trying tofix with these updates should have been taken care of before the phone was launched to thepublic. OnePlus is no longer small company, and thisis not an entry level smartphone, This is their most expensive smartphone and it shouldnot be plagued with issues right out of the box. There are couple of things that really bugme.
When I was talking about the haptic feedbackwhile adjusting the volume and brightness level, did you notice how long it took thephone to make the changes to the brightness level after I had moved the slider? Have a look at it again. It just takes way too long and it is a delayedresponse. I understand gradual changes in the auto brightnesslevel when you go from bright to dark room or the other way around. But when I am manually adjusting the brightnesslevel, I want it to be responsive, just look at how long it takes for the brightness togo up or down after I have made the changes. If you call this a feature, I am sorry butyou are just wrong. Another major issue is delayed notifications. In an effort to preserve battery life, OnePlusadds intelligent battery optimisation to all the apps by default. And for some reason, this doesn’t let yourphone fetch notifications when it the screen is off or the phone is sitting idle. And when you pick up the phone or wake thescreen, all notifications will start piling up. This is frustrating. There have been so many time sensitive notificationsthat missed due to this. To get all your important notifications intime, you will have to manually go into battery settings and turn off this optimisation offfor those apps. It should be the other way around. These are a few hiccups that I came acrossin the last few days. All that being said, I still like the overallOnePlus UI and the features that it offers, and I wish all the issues and bugs are ironedout asap. In the last month or so of using the 9 Pro,I found the battery life to be very disappointing.
It barely ever gave me a screen on time ofover 5 hours. I tried switching to FHD+ resolution, butdidn’t see any major improvement in the battery life. This is again something that many people arecomplaining about, and I really hope OnePlus could do something to squeeze slightly moreusage out of the 4500mAh battery. We do get the 65 watt warp charger In thebox, which fully charges the phone in under half an hour. So the battery not lasting long enough ona single charge is not turning out to be that big of an issue, at least in the time of thispandemic, where we barely get out of our homes. And we can plug the phone into the chargerwhenever we want to. It also supports 50 watt wireless chargingwith the OnePlus wireless charger, which is even faster than wired charging on most ofthe phones. All that being said, with the latest efficientprocessor and a 4500 mAh battery, we should have got better battery life out of this phone. We should not have to dial back on some ofthe key features like QHD+ resolution and 120Hz refresh rate, just to squeeze out aday’s worth of battery on the OnePlus 9 Pro. With all the being covered, let us move onto the most hyped part of this phone, it’s cameras. I have made a dedicated 20 minute video onlyabout the cameras on this phone, so it won’t make much sense for me to repeat all thosethings again. To know about the cameras in depth,
I suggestyou definitely check that video out. I will leave a card to it on the top rightcorner of the screen, and also link it in the description section. Most people know this by now, that OnePlushas partnered with Hasselblad in the hopes of improving the cameras on their phone. This a 3 year collaboration and OnePlus isspending close to 150 Million dollars on it. While Hasselblad might have some input inthe camera hardware on future OnePlus phones, this time, most of Hasselblad’s influenceseems to be on the software side. They are said to have helped OnePlus achievenatural Colour Calibration in its images. But if you saw my camera review of this phone,we know it doesn’t capture natural colours. And yes, this is after the update which wassaid to have improved the cameras. You don’t have to take my word for it, goand watch the image samples in my dedicated camera review and decide for yourself. And while you are there, check out the comments,there are quite a few OnePlus 9 Pro owners who are not very happy with the cameras. Well frankly, other than colours, I don’thave any major issues with the cameras. I specially love the wide camera on this phone. I feel it is the best wide camera on any phonethat I have tested yet. And the fact that it doubles as a macro camerais just a cherry on the cake. The wide camera is actually showing betterlooking colours than the primary camera. The 16 megapixel selfie camera does an adequatejob if the lighting is not too harsh. Adequate is the right word to describe it. These selfies have enough details to not makethese images look bad, but there are much better selfie cameras on phones prices lowerthan this.
If there is one area that the camera has seenthe biggest improvement in, it is while shooting videos. Not just with the video resolution and framerate options, but quality wise as well. I really like the videos that the OnePlus9 pro can shoot. I am specially a fan of the 4K 120fps mode. But you should know that the phone gets veryhot if you use the cameras for long, specially while shooting videos. Now the cameras on this phone have a lot ofpotential, and sometimes they take incredible images, but what it lacks in is consistency. If OnePlus could somehow make this cameramore consistent, I won’t mind using this as my main phone. As good as the cameras on this phone are,I doubt that you will really see a difference between its and OnePlus 8 Pro’s images. So that begs the question that should youeven get the OnePlus 9 pro over the 8 Pro. Because OnePlus 8 Pro offers you 90% of whatthe 9 Pro does at a much lower price. Well if you have the OnePlus 8 Pro, you don’teven need to think about upgrading to the 9 Pro. And if you are who is confused between these2, I would say get the 8 Pro and save yourself some money. But if you are someone who wants the latestand greatest of all the specs, and with that you need the super fast wired and wirelesscharging speeds, and if you don’t mind spending the extra amount, go with the OnePlus 9 Pro. But please get the Stellar Black or Pine Greencolour, coz the glossy back of the Morning Mist just doesn’t fair well in day to dayusage. Personally I feel OnePlus has gone a steptoo far with the pricing on the OnePlus 9 Pro, but if you still want a flagship smartphonethat packs in all the latest specs, and still costs a bit less than others, it is one ofthe best options. I just hope this is the last price hike fromOnePlus, because it will be very difficult for me to recommend their phones to you guys,if the price just keeps rising. What do you guys feel about this OnePlus 9Pro? Let me know in the comments. And if you want to purchase it, I will appreciateif you get it from the affiliate links in the description section. That is it for this video guys. Please hit the like button if you enjoyedthis video, and subscribe to the channel for more quality tech videos like this. You can also check out some of the other videosfrom this channel. This has been Sagar, and I will catch youguys in the next video. Take care.