The OnePlus 7 Pro Review: Outstanding Performance & Screen, Adequate Everything Else
by Andrei Frumusanu on June 19, 2019 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Mobile
- Smartphones
- OnePlus
- OnePlus 7 Pro
Battery Life
The OnePlus 7 Pro comes with a 4000mAh battery with a standard nominal chemistry voltage of 3.85V which results in a capacity of 15.4Wh. It’s to be noted that this is the typical capacity of the battery while the rated capacity is 3880mAh / 14.93Wh.
We’ve seen from competing smartphones that what’s almost always more important than the actual battery capacity is the power efficiency of the components. We do expect the OP7Pro to have a higher power drain than competing smartphones due to the 90Hz screen, but the question is as to exactly how much more drain we’ll be seeing.
The battery testing results were done in the native 1440p resolution of the screen.
As mentioned before on the Display page, I had measured the device’s base power consumption with some conflicting numbers depending on methodology. One set pointed out the OP7Pro had quite large power drain, while the other set pointed out it’s almost as good as the Galaxy S10’s. The actual battery longevity results should shed more light onto this:
As I had anticipated, the OnePlus 7 Pro’s battery results veer more towards the higher power drain figures. In our web browsing test the OnePlus 7 Pro achieves good results, although it’s not able to keep up with the competition this year nor with the OnePlus 6T from last year.
Here it seems the phone does indeed have quite high base power consumption figures around the 550mW mark and the 100mW difference between 60Hz and 90Hz modes seems to be correct.
In PCMark, the 7Pro comes with good to great results depending on whether we’re using the 60 or 90Hz modes. I only had limited time with the device so I couldn’t also do the 1080p resolution battery life tests, and frankly I believe they’re not very relevant to the majority of users as there’s not much reason to use that mode.
In PCMark the 60Hz to 90Hz battery delta is slightly more pronounced than what we saw in the web browsing test, and this might be simply because the device is doing more computational work.
Overall, the OnePlus 7 Pro’s battery life is good, although it’s clearly not the best out there.
For me personally I use my phones a lot more in the evening and tend to use dark mode in the OS and apps. Under such scenarios the effect of a phone’s base power consumption will be more amplified as it represents a larger % share of the total consumed energy – and in this case the OP7Pro will give a noticeably worse result than say Samsung’s current generation.
Still, this is seemingly the first high-refresh-rate phone on the market that has completely useable battery life without any major handicap, all thanks to OnePlus’s optimal hardware implementation of the 90Hz refresh rate. In general if you’re buying the phone, you’re buying it for the 90Hz mode, and it makes very little sense to pay attention to either the 1080p or even 60Hz modes that the phone gives you.
A Word About 30W Charging
The OnePlus 7 Pro comes with a 30W charger. Here OnePlus is opting for a high current charging standard that goes up to 6A at 5V. The benefit of using a lower voltage and high current standard is that the phone’s PMIC will have a higher conversion efficiency when transforming the voltage down to the 4.4-4.5V cell battery charging voltage, reducing phone heating.
I am still extremely sceptical about these high power charging standards as they will more quickly degrade your battery capacity over time. At 30W / 5A for a 4000mAh battery, this means a peak charging rate of 1.25C which is well above the commonly agreed peak rated limit of 1C. Personally I would not trust to use such a charger in other than urgent circumstances, and generally I’m a bit worried at the battery longevity aspect of things with the current industry’s trend of racing to ever higher charging rates as a means of product differentiation.
Besides that, it’s also relatively disappointing that the OP7Pro doesn’t support wireless charging, even though the phone is relatively thick and does have a glass back. OnePlus said that this is something they’ll be looking into for future products.
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DillholeMcRib - Wednesday, June 19, 2019 - link
Can I flash this damn thing and run WIndows ARM on it?Jez1 - Wednesday, June 19, 2019 - link
I had this around a week and they were great things about it, but many things I didn't like so returned it.The screen was great and apps installed at an amazing pace, the UI was lovely but to many negatives. The camera was so erratic and one minute would take a nice photo, then the next would have washed out colors and lacked detail and sharpness when slightly zoomed in. A lot of the time my old S7 took more reliable photos and my wife's 6T was also better. I know this could get better with fixes, but was too poor out of the box.
The sides of the screen also got massive reflections outside and the inbuilt screen protector was rubbish. In a week of light use, it was covered in indention's from my nail and also stated getting air bubbles. So you couldn't even appreciate the lovely screen and there wasn't any 3rd party ones available.
The final thing which is subjective is the weight, it felt so heavy one-handed.
I then got a s10+ and and couldn't be happier with in comparison. I got a big discount for my old bashed up S7, so only paid £40 more. I hope OnePlus can get it together for their next phone as love their approach and really didn't want to get another Samsung
Quantumz0d - Wednesday, June 19, 2019 - link
With this phone OnePlus went full marketing mumbojumbo.They spent a lot of cash on that only and while sidetracking all the negatives this phone has. 90Hz is a gimmick, so many people don't want that. Instead they want a phone which is marked at $700 these -
- A 3.5mm headphone jack, (How come the 6T dropped the jack saying no space for the finger print scanner while they crammed a motorized camera into the chassis, It's plain BS as always with Apple or any company, Note had S-Pen, LG has Display fused OLED crystal sound with proper ToF camera with an ESS DAC equipped phone)
- No SD card slot, No don't say cloud or 256GB, I have a ton of data on my PC FHD high bitrate movies, 4K UHD recording directly to SD card pictures to SD card, High quality recording of Audio through Stereo and high bitrate likes of LG, Emulators, FLAC/DSD files etc and top of all, a fully reliable offline cheap storage which just works and offers expansion as per user choice from 128GB to 1TB.
- No IP rating, No the damn shilled tests from Dave2D or MHBHD aren't going to cut it, the IEC conventions are internationally agreed standards not some bs offscreen tests saying it increases price and all rubbish kool-aid.
- Trash camera
- No QI wireless charging, glass back and peanuts charging, they don't wnat to give because they want to milk with all these features barring the jack for another refresh or new unit.
- No price cuts, OP phones never get a price cut, today you can buy an SD835 (By no means a problem) phones like S8+ for 500USD which has everything more than this gimmick phone, LG phones see price cuts, got my V30S for far less price under 500USD which outperforms in all features, Yes even the BL unlock, coming to that, S9 and Note 9 are cheaper at $600USD which again rape this phone to oblivion esp Exynos models which have BL unlock. And the latest S10 is already seeing discounts, and once Black Friday hits the G8 and all phones will drop price.
Next is Zenfone6 that phone is making waves apart from the mediocre LCD display (No pentile, so FHD is fine but the brightness is not enough) and it has 3.5mm jack, Stereo speakers, a big arse 5000MaH battery without this over charging current rate.
Huge thanks to Andrei a lot for this piece on this stupid overdrive current charging done by Oneplus, fools at many blogs and youtube shills refuse to believe me that over high currrent charging is insane simply due to the cathode-anode reactions and faster degradation, esp this is why we need Qi not battery raping marketing BS. These oneplus garbage phones always overcharge and do this rubbish, look at QC with Samsung/LG/Sony any company apart from this and Huawei have that, Apple even sandbags the battery death by reducing the CPU perf. This BS is not seen my 99% of the people and they end up with junk on top of the non user replaceable batteries.
So all in all this is an overpriced "toy" not a proper pocket PC / Powerful computer in your hand.
Quantumz0d - Wednesday, June 19, 2019 - link
Edit - Zenfone 6 specs include - it also got UFS storage unlike Pixel 3a with eMMC trash, an SD855 a great camera than this junk well, at-least from the users, an SD slot, Bootloader unlock and highest SKU is less than 600USD (8GB/256GB)zodiacfml - Thursday, June 20, 2019 - link
I agree especially on the LCD display. I have a lot of praise for OLED until I got it for the first time in the S8+. It is easily not as sharp as my Nexus 5. Every time I open the Nexus 5, I'm taken away how sharp and clean the display is versus the AMOLED S8. I have late 30's eyes. I'd rather take an LCD display for my next phone as long it is reasonably priced vs premium OLED phones.I disagree with your fast charging criticism though. I'm no battery enthusiast, if rapid charging kills batteries, then we should not see them in electric vehicles such as Tesla cars.
My Nexus 5 doesn't have rapid charging tech but my second battery is, again, bulging with less capacity. It does heat a lot though with Data turned and/or during gaming. Certainly, it is heat is the detrimental effect and heat is only the effect of fast charging
Andrei Frumusanu - Thursday, June 20, 2019 - link
> if rapid charging kills batteries, then we should not see them in electric vehicles such as Tesla cars.Tesla batteries are also gigantic (In comparison to a regular wall outlet power) and designed to handle that.
We've had a smartphone vendor who promoted one of these super-high charging rate confirm some pretty atrocious long-term capacity degradation, while something like Samsung's degradation curve was like 20% higher in terms of retained capacity after the same amount of cycles.
zodiacfml - Thursday, June 20, 2019 - link
I refer to Tesla's Superchargers where a Model 3 can charge to 80 percent in 30 minutes. A Supercharger charges its battery cells as fast as quick charging smartphones.OP can afford a faster charging rate than Qualcomm's QC because there is no voltage conversion happening in OP's phone, thus less heat. The only drawback only works with OP's charger and thick cable.
rabidpeach - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link
sorry it's been years but hopefully the future readership realizes that TESLA herself encourages you to NOT supercharge the car constantly as that would increase the degradation as well as well-reported constant fleet usage of supercharge style system has shown degradation.Xyler94 - Thursday, June 20, 2019 - link
I will always prefer my AMOLED displays in phones. OLEDs have the advantage of having much higher contrast than LCD, because individual pixels can be turned fully off, creating true black. There's no LCD that can do that. LED LCDs come close, but only because you can turn off zones of the LED backlight.Also, colour calibration makes an image look better than the display tech. If the Nexus 5 had better calibration, then it would definitely be a better display. I know Samsung TVs always have too much blue (I've calibrated a few of them), it's possible their phone displays have a bit too much blue too.
zodiacfml - Thursday, June 20, 2019 - link
That's what I thought which led me to buy the Samsung. I realized, the infinite contrast has little value to me except watching movies in darkness.The sharpness of the LCD over the pen-tile AMOLED is noticeable with text, sharper edges with LCDs. Images from my DSLRs or conventional cameras are also sharper on the N5.
White background in AMOLED never convinced me, feels rough or dirty. I checked today, looked at my Samsung around 4 inches away, I can notice multicolored very tiny noise-like pixels.
The Nexus 5 has one of the best calibrated displays during its time. I'm just saying LCDs superior to AMOLEDs in image sharpness alone