The OnePlus 6 Review: Among The Best Of 2018
by Andrei Frumusanu on July 27, 2018 8:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Mobile
- Smartphones
- OnePlus
- OnePlus 6
Battery Life
The OnePlus 6 contains a 3300mAh / 12.7Wh battery. In general there’s nothing pointing out to expect bad battery life out of the OnePlus 6 as both the SoC and screen should be quite efficient. The most comparable phone would the Galaxy S9+ in the results, as both have the same SoC and both employ AMOLED screens of similar sizes, with the OP6 having a 6% smaller battery capacity.
In the web browsing test the OP6 ends up pretty much exactly where we projected it, at slightly above 10 hours of runtime the phone lands on the better side of battery life results for this generation. Only Huawei’s phones with larger batteries and phones with more efficient screens end up higher. Overall a very respectable result for the OnePlus 6.
In the PCMark test, the OnePlus 6 ends up below the S9+ - here the OnePlus 6 essentially achieving the highest scores of any Android device bar the MIX 2S also have to be accounted in the result. It’s interesting to see the OP6 beating the MIX 2S in the web browsing test yet losing to it in PCMark – the discrepancy could come due to different dynamic brightness behaviours between the phones and we can’t maintain a steady backlight level throughout the totality of the scenarios, something that’s of particular concern in the LG G7 which we’ll be reviewing in the very near future.
Overall battery life of the OnePlus 6 is excellent – of course there’s devices beating it, and most of the time this can be attributed to their higher battery capacities. Active heavy usage of the phone will naturally result in more battery drainage, but that’s also because the device is able to sustain also very high performance in a variety of use-cases.
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Icehawk - Saturday, July 28, 2018 - link
Ahhhhh. That’s why phones aren’t USB3, ok I always wondered why not but never actually researched why.jcc5169 - Friday, July 27, 2018 - link
Is One-Plus even available in the US market?PeachNCream - Friday, July 27, 2018 - link
That's a nice phone! I'd prefer the addition of a microSD slot by maybe adding the capability to one of the SIM slots (I've seen a few dual SIM phones offer up that option) since removable storage is nice to have if you're moving from one phone to another. In this case, there's the potential to lose quite a bit of data if the OP6 dies suddenly. The price increase for storage capacity is VERY reasonable as well. It's way outside of my price range for something I carry with me on a daily basis though. There's just too many day-to-day bumps and knocks around along with the risk of loss or theft that have me convinced that it's not worth the price of entry to get something above the bottom feeders like the $5.29 new Huawei I just picked up last week. Phones, in my mind, are disposable devices so low-cost is the way to go.eastcoast_pete - Friday, July 27, 2018 - link
Nice review, Andrei! Question: I may have overlooked it, but this phone is NOT water- or dust proof, at least as far as I can tell, correct? That is a major minus point for a flagship phone in my book, as it "breaks" the deal/compromise of sealed battery, but IP67 or 68 water and dust proofing. Hey, even Apple came around to that view eventually. Here, we get the worst of both worlds, no user-replaceable battery, no SD card slot, and no water and dust proofing.Different question @ Andrei: are all benchmark tests for phones conducted at about the same room temperature? I assume they are, but, if they are not, that would add a major variable. Heat dissipation is just so much easier when in a room at, let's say, 20 C, versus one at 30 C (and we are having hot summers this year). And, circling back to my comment about water proofing, I imagine it's harder for a fully sealed phone (like the majority of current flagship phones, i.e. S9, S9+, V30/35, Experia Z etc.) to dissipate heat than it is for phones that aren't fully sealed up. Any comments? Thanks!
Andrei Frumusanu - Friday, July 27, 2018 - link
It's not IP certified but as you may have read in some teardowns it does have many of the protections that are usually found in IP68 phones. I guess it could survive accidental water situations.The sustained are done in constant-ish (21+- 2°C) temperature, yes. I don't think IP proofing has any effect on thermals, the ingress points are irrelevant to temperature. Most phone's thermals are determined by the mid-frame build and how it's able to dissipate heat over its whole footprint to the screen and back.
128bit - Friday, July 27, 2018 - link
Never like chinese phones there phones looks good, but there quality overall not that good same like there cars and by the way this phone overheating.Dr. Swag - Friday, July 27, 2018 - link
Great article, but could you take care to proofread a bit better? There's tons of grammar mistakes (mostly missed commas) all over the place.Dr. Swag - Friday, July 27, 2018 - link
For the benchmarks, did you test for benchmark cheating at all?tsk2k - Friday, July 27, 2018 - link
Yes! Thank you so much Andrei and Anandtech, this is the only proper way to review a mobile phone.The web tests and frame drop testing is amazing, finally a way to quantify what I've been saying for years.
shoreview - Friday, July 27, 2018 - link
Too bad that they refuse to put Verizon Band 13 LTE in there. It's pointless crippling of the phone. Like the missing ex-Nextel CDMA band that Sprint uses.Any insight on why this is? Did Verizon and Sprint actively intervene to keep OnePlus off their networks? In any case I've been on Android from the start but the support situation and security update situation are leading me to look more and more at iPhone. Which won't come easy; the USB lockdown on iOS and certain aspects of the OS are annoying to say the least. But this was one of my last hopes for replacing my Verizon-supplied Note 4 with another Android and it has been dashed. Getting a non-carrier-branded Samsung is a non-starter until they start taking long-term security support seriously; even Google Pixel is short of Apple standards by a year or two.