OnePlus 7 Pro review:

Lots of companies make big phones, but in the US only two companies have sold the best big phones: Apple and Samsung. If you want a phone with a huge, near perfect screen, top-end performance, and great build quality, those were your choices. Sure, the Pixel XL line is pretty good and Huawei makes great big phones, but the former hasn’t sold well and the latter isn’t sold in the US.

Now, OnePlus is throwing its hat into the ring with a phone that purports to be just as good and high-quality as a Galaxy S10 Plus or iPhone XS Max, but it costs hundreds less. That’s the pitch for the OnePlus 7 Pro, which is launching on T-Mobile for $699 and will also be available unlocked in three different configurations ranging from $669 to $749.

With the 7 Pro, OnePlus is declaring that it’s no longer just a middle-weight boxer. It wants to challenge Apple and Samsung in the heavyweight class. It has created a phone that — on paper, at least — has certainly earned a chance to take on the champions. 

THE SCREEN IS THE STAR OF THE SHOW

The OnePlus 7 Pro is also a large phone; it’s just a little bigger and heavier than Samsung’s Galaxy Note 9. It has a screen that’s about 6.5 inches diagonally (depending on how you count the curved edges) in a fairly tall 19.5:9 aspect ratio. If you’re used to big phones, none of this will put you off. If you’re not used to big phones, you might be tempted to give this one a try anyway because the screen is so nice.

The thing that you’ll likely show off to your friends is the motorized pop-up selfie camera. It’s a neat trick and a relative rarity in the US, but the whole point of it is to allow OnePlus to stretch the display edge to edge without any notches or camera cutouts. The bezels are tiny all the way around, and on the left and right edges, the screen curves into the body just like on a Samsung Galaxy phone.

I hate to use the word “immersive” because it’s been over-marketed into meaninglessness, but that’s the word for the screen. It is so large and so expansive you hardly notice there’s a phone behind it when you look at it. (Though you will feel it, as the OnePlus 7 Pro is heavy.)

Still, big screens are nothing special anymore. What really matters at this tier of phones is the quality of the screen. OnePlus nailed it on several important fronts.

First, the screen hits the basics: It’s high resolution, gets really bright, and has vibrant colors. It’s an OLED screen, of course, just like you should expect on a high-end phone. OnePlus offers a few different color calibration presets, or there are sliders to customize color profiles like sRGB or P3 even further. If you want a more neutral look for better color accuracy, you can do that, but I left it at the default “Vivid” setting most of the time and was quite pleased with it.

OnePlus has gone a little further than that, though, by giving this screen a higher refresh rate: 90Hz instead of 60Hz. It makes everything from scrolling to animations look much smoother. As on the iPad Pro, a faster refresh rate is the sort of thing you don’t really think you’ll care about until you use it and somehow everything else feels a little stuttery. It means you can read as you scroll, and touch responses feel much more in tune with your finger’s placement.

The 7 Pro will dynamically change either the refresh rate or the resolution on the fly, depending on whether the app you’re using might be better off with something slower or lower resolution (e.g. watching a 1080p video). It’s not the first phone to offer a high refresh rate screen, but the others so far have been esoteric gaming phones with other significant compromises.

IT HAS THE FASTEST IN-SCREEN FINGERPRINT SENSOR I’VE TRIED

OnePlus went with an optical sensor as opposed to Samsung’s ultrasonic one. That means that the screen has to light up a bright green circle to read your thumb and it might not work well if your fingers are wet or dirty. But those potential drawbacks are minor compared to the upsides. The 7 Pro has a larger sensor so you don’t have to be especially careful about where you set your thumb. It’s also super fast, nearly as fast as a more traditional fingerprint sensor on the back of other Android phones.

Within a day, I was blindly and unthinkingly slapping my thumb down on the right spot to unlock the 7 Pro. I am still working on hitting the right spot on my Galaxy S10, months after I bought it. I think the fingerprint scanner is good enough that you can just use it without trying to find another solution, but if you do really want to unlock the 7 Pro with your face, you can. The front camera will pop up and read your image in less than a second before unlocking the phone and hiding away again. But just know that like the Galaxy S10’s face unlock feature, this method is far less secure and can be easily spoofed.

OnePlus 7 Pro camera specs

Main Camera

• Sony IMX586
• 48 megapixels (normally outputs 12-megapixel images)
• 1.6 μm (4 in 1) pixels, OIS, EIS, f/1.6

Telephoto

• 8 megapixels
• 1.0 μm pixels, OIS, f/2.4
• 3x optical zoom

Wide Angle

• 16 megapixels
• f/2.2
• 117-degree field of view

Selfie camera

• Sony IMX471
• 16 megapixels
• 1.0 μm pixels, EIS, f/2.0
• Video: 1080p at 30 fps

Video capability

• 4K at 30 / 60 fps, 1080p at 30 / 60 fps
• Super Slow Motion: 1080p at 240 fps, 720p at 480 fps
• Time-lapse

Other features

• Multi Autofocus (PDAF+LAF+CAF)
• Modes: Portrait, UltraShot, Night Mode, Pro Mode, AI Scene Detection, Panorama, HDR, Studio Lighting, RAW Image. 

Like every phone manufacturer, OnePlus has to make aesthetic decisions in addition to the technical ones. The 7 Pro’s images tend to be a little less contrasty and a lot warmer than what you’ll get on the Pixel 3. It’s closer to what the Galaxy S10 or the iPhone XS do in that regard, but I prefer the Pixel’s more photographic images.

The 7 Pro does struggle a little more in tricky situations — like when your subject is heavily backlit. And when you really get in and pixel peep, you’ll find something to complain about on a technical level, but that’s true of any smartphone. Zoom back out and overall the 7 Pro’s images all look like they could belong in the top tier of smartphone cameras.

OnePlus 7 Pro specs

• 6.67-inch screen, 6.46 usable area
• 3120 x 1440 pixels, 516 ppi, 19.5:9 aspect ratio
• “Fluid AMOLED” 90Hz refresh rate
• Snapdragon 855
• 6GB, 8GB, or 12GB RAM
• 128GB or 256GB UFS 3.0 storage
• 4,000mAh battery
• ”Warp charge” fast charging; no wireless charging
• No IP rating for water or dust resistance
• In-display optical fingerprint sensor
• 2 x 2 MIMO Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.0
• 162.6 x 75.9 x 8.8 mm
• 206 grams
• Android 9 Pie with OxygenOS

PERFORMANCE IS GREAT, AS ARE THE ONEPLUS SOFTWARE CUSTOMIZATIONS

I love that OnePlus is hanging on to its signature physical ringer switch, which has three stages: ring, vibrate, and silent. You can customize all of those settings, but the defaults worked really well for me. (The switch is also really satisfying to fiddle with.)

I also really like OnePlus’ custom version of Android, OxygenOS. It’s based on Android 9 Pie, and it’s filled with nice little touches without being overbearing and gives you a ton of customization options. OnePlus also has a good history of updating its devices quickly after Google releases new Android versions, something that can’t be said for many of its Android competitors.

You can set up gestures to get around (you swipe up to go home, swipe up on either side to go back). You can turn on a “Zen mode” that locks you out of your phone for 20 minutes so you can look at a damn tree or something. There are simple theming options. There’s a game mode that’s less annoying than Samsung’s. I also used Reading Mode more than I thought I would; it automatically turns the screen monochrome in apps that you select to mimic an e-reader. There’s also a screen recorder, something that Google itself seems incapable of building directly into Android.

There’s another thing I just wish everybody would do: the “minus one” screen to the left of the home screen lets you put Android widgets in a vertically scrolling list, just like the iPhone does with its widgets. It’s so much more useful than the Google or Bixby feed of news that other Android phones foist on you.

The 7 Pro is a spec monster. And with Android phones, I usually get a little nervous when I see spec monsters. It’s often a sign that the fit and finish are going to be an afterthought. But in a week or so of using the 7 Pro, I didn’t feel like any corners were really cut. The screen is incredible, the cameras are respectable, and the software is clean and fast.

ONEPLUS MADE COMPROMISES, JUST LIKE EVERYBODY ELSE, BUT THEY’RE THE RIGHT ONES

OnePlus is an interesting phone maker because it makes different choices for those compromises. With the OnePlus 7 Pro, it compromised on something it hadn’t before: price — $699 is more than its phones used to cost, but it means it has a more legitimate claim to compete with the likes of the Galaxy S10 Plus, Pixel 3 XL, and even the iPhone XS Max.

It might be more than previous OnePlus phones, but it’s still a lot less than comparable big-screened phones: a Galaxy S10 Plus is $300 more and comes with half the storage, for example. If the OnePlus 7 Pro has a haymaker in this fight, it is the price.

Some of those competitors will have must-have features for many customers — the Pixel’s camera and iOS on the iPhone come to mind. But if you don’t have a compelling need for a feature on one of those other big phones, I can’t think of a compelling reason to not buy this one.