As we hurtle towards the launch of the next generation of OnePlus smartphones, now is a good time as any to look back at the phone that's about to be replaced. The OnePlus 7T Pro and its nearly identical predecessor, the OnePlus 7 Pro, were perhaps the biggest and most ambitious releases in the company's history and set a high watermark against which other smartphones were judged in 2019.
With the OnePlus 7 Pro, the company pushed its Never Settle philosophy further than ever before, with a laundry list of features. Whether it was a high refresh rate display, a pop-up camera, triple cameras at the back, stereo speakers, fast wired charging, or a curved display, the phone had practically every item on the checklist. Add to the usual flagship-grade specs and quality software, the OnePlus 7 Pro became the phone to beat. https://amzn.to/39lgB98
The OnePlus 7T Pro launched later the same year changed very little about this winning formula. With a new color, faster processor and faster charging really being the only noteworthy changes, the 7T Pro reminds one of the OnePlus 3T, which too featured mild upgrades over an already excellent device.
After having used both the 7 Pro and 7T Pro extensively as our daily smartphone since launch, we now have a firm understanding of these devices and also suggestions on what we'd like to see in the next generation of OnePlus flagships. While this article is primarily about the newer 7T Pro, most of what is being said here also applies to the older 7 Pro due to their vast similarities.
Display
The One Plus 7T Pro has a 6.67-inch AMOLED display, with a resolution of 3120x1440, 19.5:9 aspect ratio, and 90 Hz refresh rate and is one of the best displays on any smartphone on the market today. It has excellent color calibration when using one of the calibrated profiles, the resolution is as high as anyone will ever need, and the 90 Hz refresh rate perfectly complements the powerful hardware. You also aren't required to run the display at 1080p to get the full refresh rate of the panel, which is always a good thing in our books.
What makes the screen even nicer is that it has barely any bezels to speak of and there's no visible front camera. The camera is hidden using a pop-up mechanism, a trend we had started to like but has seemingly met an untimely demise in favor of the far more unsightly hole punch design.
There are two things about the display that bothers us. The less bothersome one is the fact that the phone has a curved display, which warps some of the content around the edges and doesn't make it look good, even if the phone itself looks nicer. We know Android manufacturers love their curved displays, so it's not a trend that's going to go away completely any time soon, but we hope the next generation of OnePlus devices at least have a smaller radius to the curve.
The more bothersome thing is just how easy it is to hit the edges of the screen and trigger something unintentionally. We found ourselves constantly hitting something on the side of the screen while stretching our thumb to reach something on the other end. Even the top and bottom sides aren't immune to this. Holding the phone by the top edge causes the screen to frequently interact with your fingers at the top, and the bottom edge is triggered by the pinkie finger you use to prop the phone up in your hand.
Software
One of the things given with OnePlus phones is a good software experience. Since its release, Oxygen OS has been the backbone of every OnePlus smartphone and has quickly become the favorite Android skin for a lot of people, some of us included. Users have always loved the combination of close to stock Android appearance and the tasteful implementation of extra features on top and, to its credit, OnePlus has managed to stick to the formula well, never careening closer to one side or the other.
To that effect, the software on the OnePlus 7T Pro is very good, both in terms of design and functionality. While not entirely bug-free, we never experienced any major issue with the OS in our many months of use and the minor issues would resolve on their own over time.
We did have some issues though that persisted, and these were mostly by design. The first is the lack above of any palm rejection to ignore accidental touches. The other is the sheer size of the navigation bar at the bottom. At the default DPI setting, it's just way too tall, taller than on most other phones, which makes it very close to the bottom of the on-screen keyboard. This does make typing a nightmare as you're constantly hitting the home button while typing, which, as you can imagine, isn't fun the first time it happens and by the third time in the same sentence you're close to either pulling your hair out or throwing the phone out the window.
A solution to this would be to simply use the navigation gestures. While that does solve the problem, not everyone prefers to use gestures. The gestures are also not ergonomic to use on such a large phone.
All things considered, we have mostly been happy with the software experience on the OnePlus 7T Pro. We aren't too thrilled about some things, and it's also possible getting updates will be more difficult going forward, but apart from that there's very little to complain about here.
Performance
One of the key differences between the OnePlus 7 Pro and the OnePlus 7T Pro is that the latter comes with the newer Snapdragon 855 Plus chipset. Like the phone itself, the 855 Plus is a modest upgrade over the standard 855, with minor bumps to the clock speed on the CPU and the GPU. The phone also comes with 8GB of LPDDR4X memory (12GB on the McLaren Edition) and 256 GB of fast UFS 3.0 storage. There's no 6/128GB variant this time around.
You can't have specs like those on a phone and not have great performance. The OnePlus 7T Pro is, by all means, a great performing phone with fast response times and fluid animations. What really brings the best out of the hardware is the 90Hz display, which puts all that raw horsepower to great use and really makes a big difference in usability and perceived performance. It's one thing to just see big numbers on a benchmark score but having a high refresh rate display really lets you experience that performance in a more meaningful way.
It's unfortunate, then, that you don't experience this performance in most of the games. Most games still run at 30fps, since that's what they were designed for. Those that run at high frame rates usually run at 60fps, but that's pretty much it. There are supposedly some games that run at 90fps on this device, but in our experience, we didn't see any of them run beyond 60fps on our device.
That's not to say that games don't run well on the OnePlus 7T Pro. The phone is way more powerful than it needs to be for the current crop of Android games, and you could be gaming on this for another three years before facing any major performance bottlenecks. Hopefully, by then more games would have added support for high refresh rate displays.
The OnePlus 7T Pro also features a newer version of the fingerprint sensor used on the original OnePlus 7 Pro. The original sensor was quite poor when it came to accuracy, speed or reliability. Fortunately, the sensor on the OnePlus 7T Pro is significantly better. There were still occasions where it didn't read the print correctly, but these were far fewer than the nearly unusable sensor on the OnePlus 7 Pro and overall worked quite well. It's unfortunate that optical fingerprint sensors are still not as good as the best capacitive sensors from a few years ago, but we do seem to be getting there.
Camera
The OnePlus 7T Pro ships with the now familiar triple camera system on the back, including the ideal combination of a wide, ultra-wi,de and telephoto lens. There are no unnecessary macro lenses here, as OnePlus just incorporated that feature into the ultra-wide-angle lens, which works just as well and possibly even better than most dedicated macro lenses we've seen.
The only thing about the images that needs to be worked on is colors. The colors in most situations are acceptable but are a bit of an acquired taste. We usually prefer if the camera just captures the colors as they are but the OnePlus camera images definitely have a particular look to them, which you start noticing once you stare at enough of these pictures. It adds a warm touch to all the images and is especially partial to orange and green hues. Reds, on the other hand, can be hit or miss at times and occasionally are just rendered as deep pink. The irony that the company logo is the exact color the camera struggles with isn't lost on us.
The telephoto lens also takes some good quality images. The 3x optical zoom can occasionally be a bit too tight, especially for portrait shots but if you are looking to isolate your subject then the perspective offered by this lens is really great and makes for some truly interesting shots.
In low light, the OnePlus 7T Pro does reasonably well. The main 48MP sensor, with its large size and pixel binning, does produce some clean looking images, even without enabling night mode. The images are also often exposed correctly and largely look as they should.
It's only in really low light situations do you need to enable the night mode, called Night scape. Night scape isn't really the best night mode around and the images you get out of it aren't usually the cleanest or the most natural looking among competing devices. But, if you're in really low lighting conditions and must take a picture for some reason, you can get a usable image out of it, which is often what you're looking for.
Overall, the cameras on the OnePlus 7T Pro are very good and you can get some really good pictures out of them. OnePlus has really come a long way from its early days and they have made some significant strides in the past year alone when it comes to the camera quality. They still have some ways to go before they can compete with the absolute best on the market, and they are almost 90% there. Unfortunately, the final 10% is also the hardest part and why people pay top dollar for that iPhone or Pixel.
Battery life
The OnePlus 7T Pro has a 4085 mAh battery, which is inconsequentially larger than the 4000 mAh battery on the OnePlus 7 Pro. The phone ships with the same 30W charger as the OnePlus 7 Pro, but supports the new Warp Charge 30T standard for faster charging.
Despite the relatively large size on paper, the battery life on the OnePlus 7T Pro is fairly underwhelming. It's not terrible, so you're not exactly having anxiety about when this phone is going to die on you during the course of the day. However, you expect a phone this big and heavy to also have a bigger battery and that's one area where the OnePlus 7T Pro disappoints. The battery life is adequate at best but you definitely need to charge the phone by the end of the day.
Conclusion
It's not often we pick a device and simply choose to run with it as our daily driver for several months. This job affords us some privileges, and one of them is being spoilt for choice when it comes to picking a phone to use as your primary from the several on offer. So then why did some of us choose the OnePlus 7T Pro, and the OnePlus 7 Pro before it?
Initially, it wasn't an easy decision. We have to admit we weren't fans of the massive size and weight of the device, and the camera quality wasn't the greatest at launch. However, we loved the design and performance of the phone, and while we never quite got used to the size or weight, over time, it felt like a fair tradeoff. OnePlus also did what OnePlus often does and released several updates after launch that improved the performance, especially for the camera.
There's a lot more we could say about this phone but to avoid the risk of repeating ourselves, we'd stop here. What we'll say in the end is that despite its flaws, it is still one of the best phones on the market, especially when you consider the price. It really makes us look forward to what OnePlus has in store for us this year, as these usually end up being the products we use and recommend the most. If you are on the lookout for a new phone, you'd be wise to wait. But if you want one right now, the OnePlus 7T Pro and the cheaper OnePlus 7T are still some of the best options on the market today.
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