OnePlus 9 Pro review - a smartphone that gives you peace of mind

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

A well thought-out interface paired with a powerful hardware platform instills confidence that the device will not let you down. And he did not disappoint!

OnePlus entered the market almost eight years ago. It offered smart phones that could compete with gadgets from big brands, but stand out for their special features - all at a comparable or even lower cost. If earlier OnePlus released one device per generation, now the line has expanded and there are already three smartphones with index 9. We tested the oldest model - 9 Pro with 12 GB of RAM and 256 GB of internal memory.

Table of contents

• Specifications
• Design and ergonomics
• Display
• Iron
• Operating system
• Sound and vibration
• Cameras
• Autonomy
• Outcomes

Specifications

Operating system	Android 11, shell OxygenOS 11.2
Screen	Fluid AMOLED, 6.7 inches, 3,216 x 1,440 pixels, 526 PPI, 120 Hz
CPU	Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 5G (5nm)
Memory	8/12 GB operational; 128/256 GB built-in
Cameras	Main: main - 48 Mp, f / 1, 8 with a sensor 1/1, 43 ″, 1, 12 microns, PDAF and laser focusing; ultra-wide-angle - 50 MP, f / 2, 2 with a sensor 1/1, 56 ″, 119; telephoto - 8 megapixels, f / 2, 4 with optical zoom; monochrome sensor - 2 megapixels. Front: 16 MP, f / 2, 4.
SIM cards	2 × nanoSIM
Connectors	USB Type ‑ C
Communication standards	2G, 3G, LTE, 5G
Wireless interfaces	Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.2
Battery	4 500 mAh, charging - 65 W
Dimensions (edit)	163, 2 × 73, 6 × 8, 7 mm
The weight	197 g
Additionally	NFC, optical fingerprint reader, stereo speakers

Design and ergonomics

The OnePlus 9 Pro is a large, weighty smartphone, but it doesn't look overly massive. Rounded edges, a slightly curved display smoothly turning into the sides, rough glass of the case - due to such nuances, the dimensions are almost not felt during use. The device lies very pleasantly in the hand, does not slip out.

We got the pine green version, a muted mossy pine shade. There are also black and silver options.

The smartphone is assembled perfectly: without gaps and backlashes, nothing rattles. It feels very solid and looks great in green with a matte back panel.

The camera block is located on a fairly large step, but the cameras themselves are rather big. There was also a place for the Hasselblad logo. The step is glass, like the entire back cover. Due to the fact that the finish is matte and muted in itself, dust is not visible at all, as well as prints.

The buttons are the main difference between OnePlus and most Android smartphones. On the right side, in addition to the power key, there is a dial for notification modes. With it, you can turn off the sound, select vibration or beep with one movement of the lever. A couple of times during the test, we accidentally hit this lever, but not often.

The dual volume rocker is on the left side.

Below are the SIM card tray, microphone, USB Type-C connector and speaker. The smartphone is protected from water and dust according to the IP68 standard, so the card holder is supplemented with a small red rubber seal.

At the top, the OnePlus 9 Pro has just one microphone hole. The earpiece speaker, built into the gap between the screen and the aluminum strip that surrounds the smartphone, is also used to play music and video in stereo.

The bezels of the screen are very small, even those on the bottom. The side edges are bent quite a bit - this does not affect the readability of the information in any way. Both the front and the back are protected by Gorilla Glass 5. The eye for the selfie camera is moved to the left edge.

Screen

The top smartphone has a really cool screen - Fluid AMOLED with a diagonal of 6, 7 inches and a resolution of 3,216 × 1,440 pixels. As a result, the density of dots per inch reached 526 PPI.

In the settings, you can select the screen resolution: either QHD +, which will make the smartphone sit down faster, or less energy-consuming FHD + (2,340 × 1,080 pixels). We tried both modes and did not notice a particularly strong effect on the discharge rate - the difference is literally an hour, maximum two. There is also an automatic mode that switches the resolution depending on the usage scenarios.

The screen supports a frequency of 120 Hz, but it does not work on it all the time: in the settings, you can set either a smart mode, which automatically selects a suitable hertzovka, or standard, at 60 Hz.

The available color settings are Vivid, Natural, and Advanced. We used the first one: it is a little more intense, but without the "twisted-eyed" quality. But "Extended", firstly, has additional settings (you can choose one of three palettes - AMOLED, sRGB or P3, adjust the color temperature and gamma), and secondly, in general, it goes somewhere in the red area, a little distorting colors.

Also, the smartphone can select the color rendering mode itself, enable dynamic optimization of the display of bright colors, add anti-aliasing to the animation, and, on the contrary, increase the resolution and sharpness in the video.

There are many settings related to the comfort of use: you can activate night mode, reading mode, choose a convenient font size, and also adjust the Always on Display function (the menu item is called "Black and white screen"). For gaming, there is a Hyper Touch function that adjusts the sensor's response rate to a maximum of 360 Hz.

Among many modern smartphones, the OnePlus 9 Pro is perhaps the most adequate and accurately responsive to the level of light, automatic brightness adjustment. Neither in the scorching sun, nor in a dark room did I want to tweak this parameter on my own - the intensity of the shades very smoothly, neatly and clearly changed depending on the conditions.

Color rendition, smoothness, sharpness - all these characteristics are at their best. It is unrealistic to see individual pixels.

Iron

The OnePlus 9 Pro is built on the top Snapdragon 888 platform and our version is supplemented with 12 GB of RAM and 256 GB of user memory. There is no slot for microSD. There is also a simpler version - 8/128 GB.

The problems with the smartphone are typical for all devices based on Snapdragon 888: great heat comes with great force. The upper left corner is most noticeable (even under light load) - after literally 10 minutes of scrolling through the Instagram feed, it already becomes noticeably hot.

But the performance of the OnePlus 9 Pro is phenomenal. It seems impossible to make it slow down. Yes, due to the temperature there is some throttling, but it is not always noticeable.

Operating system

The smartphone runs on Android 11 and is supplemented with a proprietary OxygenOS shell. And it's an incredibly fast interface. The dynamic selection of the frequency with resolution, the very nature of the animation, and all kinds of settings also affect, but using the OnePlus 9 Pro is very pleasant. During testing, he did not fly out of any application, he loaded everything on time, he did not get confused.

The fingerprint sensor is triggered if not lightning fast, but still quite fast. Yes, some of the items in the settings, for example, are not fitted to the shell and look like a typical Android menu, but this minor imperfection does not spoil the impression of use at all.

But the automatically activated game mode (Game Space) - spoils. For some reason, the smartphone decided that the Deezer streaming service application was a game and absolutely needed to be optimized. Moreover, if you disable this mode and then lock the smartphone, it will restart after unlocking. The only solution is to simply remove Deezer from the Game Space autorun list. But how the application got there, in principle, is unclear.

At the same time, in real games, this mode behaves in an exemplary manner and all its settings really help to optimize the process to one degree or another. True, the localization into Russian is a little incomplete, but this is fixable in updates.

Sound and vibration

The OnePlus 9 Pro does not have a headphone jack. But, as befits a modern flagship, this gadget has stereo speakers: one is located at the bottom, at the end, and the spoken one on the front panel takes on the role of the second.

The sound is balanced, loud enough, there is no skewness in the channels. But, like most smartphones, the speaker at the end is very easy to close with your hand.

Vibration is disgustingly weak. The bell is barely felt in the pocket of light pants, and on the wooden table, which was noticeably rattling from the vibration motor of the Asus Zenfone 8, the smartphone did not seem to make any sound at all. It's easy to miss a call. It helped us to put the OnePlus 9 Pro screen up - so the bell is at least visually noticeable. Well, or you can turn on the sound with one touch of the lever on the sidewall.

Cameras

There are four modules on the glass step: the main 48 MP with stabilization, PDAF and laser autofocus; ultra wide-angle 50 MP; 8 megapixel telephoto with 3, 3 × zoom and 2 megapixel black and white sensor. On the side, they are complemented by a flash, a microphone and a depth sensor.

The development was assisted by the well-known company Hasselblad, which has been producing cameras for over a century. In the case of the OnePlus 9 Pro, Hasselblad engineers helped with color grading, professional mode setting and more.

And the transfer of shades turned out to be excellent. The colors combine good saturation with naturalness, do not twist the contrast and acidity. The white balance behaves well even at dusk, maybe only slipping a little into the blue. The telephoto lens does not give the sharpest picture, but it provides a good approximation.

Shooting with the main lens in daylight. Photo: Alina Rand / Lifehacker

Shooting with the main lens in daylight. Photo: Alina Rand / Lifehacker

Shooting with the main lens under artificial lighting. Photo: Alina Rand / Lifehacker

Shooting with the main lens at sunset. Photo: Alina Rand / Lifehacker

Shooting with the main lens at night. Photo: Alina Rand / Lifehacker

Shooting with the main lens at night. Photo: Alina Rand / Lifehacker

Shooting with the main lens at night with 30x zoom from the same point as in the previous photo. Photo: Alina Rand / Lifehacker

Shooting with a telephoto lens in cloudy weather. Photo: Alina Rand / Lifehacker

In some places, the post-processing of the image seems too sharp, which is why the shadows sometimes crumble into artifacts, but this happens in rare situations.

The ultra wide-angle camera is equipped with a special lens with distortion correction at the edges. The fact that the wide-angle is built on the basis of a high-resolution module is very interesting: the photos are really not inferior in quality to the main sensor.

Shooting with the main lens in cloudy weather. Photo: Alina Rand / Lifehacker

Shooting with a wide-angle lens in cloudy weather. Photo: Alina Rand / Lifehacker

Shooting with a wide-angle lens in cloudy weather. Photo: Alina Rand / Lifehacker

Shooting with the main lens in cloudy weather. Photo: Alina Rand / Lifehacker

At the top of the camera interface, there are icons for automatic modes. "Flower", which is logical, includes "Super Macro" when the smartphone senses that the subject is close. By default, the mode works from a distance of 3-4 centimeters. And the photos come out quite clear, with a nice blur of the background and the right amount of detail.

Shooting with the main lens in sunlight. Photo: Alina Rand / Lifehacker

Shooting with the main lens in Super Macro mode in sunlight. Photo: Alina Rand / Lifehacker

Shooting with the main lens in Super Macro mode in sunlight. Photo: Alina Rand / Lifehacker

Portrait mode, on the contrary, adds too much blur where it is not needed: both people and food turned out to be cut out and inserted into a separate blurred image.

Night shots require a little wait and twist the brightness a lot, adding extra blue and exposure. However, the clarity is not affected.

Shooting with the main lens at night. Photo: Alina Rand / Lifehacker

Shooting with the main lens in night mode at night. Photo: Alina Rand / Lifehacker

Shooting with the main lens at night. Photo: Alina Rand / Lifehacker

Shooting with the main lens in night mode at night. Photo: Alina Rand / Lifehacker

Also, the "Shift - Tilt" mode has been moved to a separate item - the same Tilt - shift, which gives the photographs a "toy" look. It is fun to experiment with for a while, but hardly anyone will use it regularly.

Video suffers from the same oversharpness as many photographs. The stabilization is good, high quality, but the videos themselves look too artificial. It supports shooting in 8K at 30 frames, and in 4K at 60 frames in addition to the more familiar options.

The selfie camera is very light dependent and, like portrait mode, sometimes produces too much blur.

Autonomy

A 4 500 mAh battery is more than enough for a day. Our smartphone lived for about 30–35 hours on a single charge with 3, 5–4 hours of screen operation. The set includes a 65W power supply. With it, from 0 to 100%, the gadget can be charged in 45 minutes. To maximize battery life, OnePlus has split it into two modules.

In general, the indicators are quite standard for a smartphone of this size with powerful hardware.

Outcomes

The direction in which the company is developing is pleasing: OnePlus 9 Pro turned out to be a very pleasant smartphone. A smart, uncluttered interface, a high-resolution screen and pleasant color reproduction that does not go into excessive saturation, a powerful hardware platform - due to this, using the device is simply convenient. The case is completely non-slippery, fits well in the hand and does not get dirty. Except that sometimes you have to reach for the volume buttons.

Cameras tuned with Hasselblad are the most obvious improvement over previous OnePlus smartphones. The OnePlus 9 Pro modules have more vibrant colors even in less than ideal lighting conditions, although sometimes it is a bit too sharp. A separate high-resolution wide-angle (which is not often found) works well.

At RUR 67,990, the OnePlus 9 Pro can compete with more expensive flagships like the Samsung Galaxy S21, but it offers a quieter interface and much less fingerprint collection. But his vibration, of course, leaves much to be desired.