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
Video Recording
Video recording on the OnePlus 7 Pro is a bit more disappointing that what you’d expect the phone to be capable of. The core issue first and foremost is the fact that currently video recording is only possible on the main camera sensor. There are some ways to switch over to the wide-angle, however this is not supported by default in camera applications.
EIS is engaged for the 1080p30 and 4K30 recording modes only, and there’s some issues with the implementation. First of all in the 1080p video above we see that it takes 2 seconds for the EIS to actually engage at the beginning of the video which is something I hadn’t seen in a phone before. Secondly, in the 4K30 video also towards the beginning when walking underneath the tree canopy we can see some severe stabilisation jitter / artefacts. These are in fact also present in the original video files and are not a side-effect of YouTube compression, meaning it’s a side-effect of the EIS implementation.
The 60fps capture modes don’t use EIS. The 4K60 footage in particular quite outstanding even though it’s quite shaky. The issue with this mode is that OnePlus went completely overkill in terms of the encoding bitrate. At a whopping 160Mbps the H.264 stream takes up 1.6GB of storage space for 84 seconds of footage, and OnePlus doesn’t offer H.265 to reduce the storage requirements.
Overall, I was very disappointed with the video recording ability of the OP7Pro as there’s evident major flaws in its implementation. I wish that at least OnePlus would enable the other camera modules, as in effect they’re useless in video recording. Let’s not go into the fact there’s a lack of any kind of higher dynamic range recording, let it be HDR to SDR file capture or even outright native HDR recording.
Speaker Evaluation
The OnePlus 7 Pro is the company’s first phone (along with the regular OP7) that features stereo speaker playback. Speaker audio quality is something OnePlus has suffered for a few generations, at best landing at something average and adequate, but not sufficient to compete with the higher-end devices from the competition.
The new OP7Pro features both a redesigned main speaker as well as introducing a eapiece speaker capable of stereo playback.
First of all, let’s investigate the device’s loudness:
The OnePlus 7 Pro does get quite loud, but what’s more important here is that the phone's frontal directionality has improved significantly compared to the OnePlus 6/6T. This was something that the predecessors suffered from especially, and just putting your thumb/palm on the speaker grill would almost completely mute the phone.
Another improvement in this regard is that OnePlus has moved the main speaker grill from the left side to the right side of the phone. In landscape mode the company noticed that the vast majority of users turn the phone 90° counter-clockwise. This new change thus helps against muffing the speaker grill in your right palm.
Whilst the new earpiece serves as a stereo speaker, the problem is that the main speaker is still overwhelmingly louder and there’s still very much a bias towards the right side when listening to audio in landscape.
The main reason for this is that the earpiece speaker has a much more limited frequency range than the main speaker, and thus sounds significantly quieter than stereo speaker setups from the competition.
In terms of the frequency range between the 7Pro, 6T and the S10+, OnePlus has definitely made some large improvements and the 7Pro sounds leagues better than its predecessor. It’s not quite as good as what Samsung is able to offer, particularly there’s a disadvantage in the bass, lower mid-range as well as the higher trebles frequencies, so the phone definitely doesn’t sound as full or clear. Still, it’s a good speaker setup, even though not quite top of the line.
No headphone jack, no 3.5mm dongle, no headphones?
I’ve dreaded the removal of the 3.5mm headphone jack on the 6T, especially since OnePlus did nothing with the freed up internal space in that design (Seeming this also applies to the regular OnePlus 7). With the 7Pro, the issue I have is that OnePlus doesn’t even offer a dongle anymore after one half-generation, nor does the company give you any bundled headphones at all.
I understand that the company is heavily promoting its own audio accessories, but we’re not in the same situation as Apple which included the 3.5mm adapter for several years before finally dropping it from the package. It’s quite the anti-consumer move.
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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