They continue to innovate in some very important areas with both devices, which is going to be a must as these devices compete, not only on features, but on cost now. I’ve had both for a week now, but with OnePlus promising some big things, I’m going to go into a bit more detail with the Pro model. So let us take a look at what OnePlus is throwing at 2021, my one-week review. The most notable changes in the lineup this year is OnePlus’ price point and their new partnership with iconic photography brand Hasselblad. OnePlus phones have been marketed as the top alternatives to phones costing hundreds of dollars more, to coin an overused phrase, flagship killers. More accurately, they have been top-notch flagship alternatives, which are flagship devices in their own right. But the one area that they haven’t quite consistently been able to fully match has been flagship cameras. And that’s where this new partnership with Hasselblad comes in. I’ll cover the results and observations from those trials, including some low light and 120 frame per second video comparisons in a separate video, but let’s talk about the 9s and their differences. So of course, the question everyone is going to ask is, “Should I buy the 9 or 9 Pro?” Three things will factor into that answer. Number one, how much you’re willing to pay for a phone, number two, what you really feel you need in a phone, and number three, what deals carriers are going to be offering? Let’s get it out of the way. For the entry-level models, that’s 8 gigabytes of RAM, 128 gigabytes of storage. You’re looking at $969 USD for the 9 Pro and $729 for the 9. No expandable storage with either of them. At the end of the day, are the differences for the average user night and day? Nah. In my early testing, are any differences notable? For some folks, absolutely. So what are those noticeable differences? The biggest difference is going to be the battery. They both ship with 4,500 milliamp-hour batteries, but in my testing this week, I found that with all of the options turned on with the 9 Pro and with the 9, I saw about an hour difference in battery life. Whereas I saw about 11 and a half hours of usage with seven and a half hour screen-on time with the Pro, I was seeing 12 hours of usage with eight and a half hour screen-on time with the 9. OnePlus carried over the innovative Warp 65T charging from the 8T with both devices, but with the 9 Pro they upped the ante on the wireless charging. In this case, you’ll get 15-watt wireless charging with the 9 and 50-watt wireless charging with the 9 Pro, if you buy their 50-watt wireless desktop stand charger. And if you want to use what came with your phone for travel, you’ll need to buy a PD charging brick, one rated at 65 watts or above. With OnePlus Warp 65T, this charging dock works as advertised, charging a dead OnePlus Pro in around 45 minutes. I’ll be doing further testing with my 100-watt Omni charger from Anker and some other third-party PD chargers to see how well it holds up. Boom. That will allow you to charge devices wirelessly using your phone as the charger. Go into Quick Gestures. As you can see here, you can actually draw lines and letters. What they will do is they will allow you to add shortcuts to them. So, you can go ahead and add any shortcut to one of these hand-drawn letters. When the screen is off, you can draw that letter and trigger the corresponding gesture. Let’s assign O to the camera. You can go draw the letter O on the phone’s touchscreen, and it will launch into the camera feature. The other functionality that’s really cool is double tap to turn the screen off. You can also use the double tap to turn the screen on. One of my other favorite features is Scheduling Always On. I keep the screen display always on, but at night I schedule it for my bedtime hours. The ambient display will darken and will turn off between whatever hours the user sets. I watched through my list of videos, and there was a clear difference between the brightness of The Witcher, with the 9 Pro being brighter. That makes sense because the 9 Pro’s display is rated at 1300 nits of brightness, while the 9’s is rated at 1100. If you’re a hardcore gamer, playing Call of Duty via touchscreen and not a third-party controller, that’s another area you’ll likely see a difference at high level gaming. The touch polling or responsiveness has been cranked way up on the 9 Pro to 360 Hz with their new Hyper Touch tech. I’m not a hardcore FPS player, so I’ll be having my sons who play CoD put that claim through its paces as the feature currently works only with PUBG Mobile, Call of Duty Mobile, League of Legends, and Brawl Stars. But I can tell you that in my time playing CoD Mobile, movement response was lightning quick, almost too fast for me. And of course, the games I played, CoD and Streets of Rage 4, both look absolutely beautiful on these displays. We recommend going into the Games app and adding your games to the Games app. What that’s going to do is automatically launch any game you add to that Games app. That will make it so that when you launch that game, the settings for gaming—such as Do not disturb and Game optimization including battery life, screen brightness, and display settings—will automatically be added to your game. Actually, they’re beautiful. Like I stated before, I’ll have an in-depth comparison, but for this video, I’ll note that there were times I’d take pictures with four different cameras, then ask my wife, who would be representative of the average consumer, as she isn’t so much into tech as I am, well, not really at all, but she’s a good sport about supporting me. So I would take pics and then lay all four phones in front of her with their brightness all set to full, then ask her which picture she liked most. And though it varied from pick to pick, she regularly picked the 9 Pro and what other phone as your two favorites for their vibrance and its night mode. This is the night mode photo that she chose as her favorite, over three other top-rated smartphone cameras. On that trip I mentioned, we were sitting on the balcony of our hotel room, and I took a picture of the night sky. The 9 Pro’s camera captured the most stars and had the best contrast and best compromise of black levels to graininess of all four phones. Our naked eyes couldn’t even see that many stars in the sky, to be honest. And in this dusk shot, my wife also chose OnePlus 9 Pro’s camera and one other as her two favorites, but let’s get into some other photos. The front-facing camera captured beautiful low-light selfies, both standard and portrait mode. My Metro Stop photos on the 9 Pro were impressive. The palm fronds had great detail, as did the palms’ trunks. What was outstanding though, was the ultra-wide, which is the same on both cameras. The ultra-wide’s night mode photos were some of the best catchers I’ve seen from any smartphone’s ultra-wide cameras. For edge-to-edge clarity, low noise, and sharpness of detail, OnePlus has some of the best ultra-wide shooters in the game in its 9 series of phones, and they actually take pretty good-looking macro shots as well. One issue I did see with the difference between the two phones, beside the fact that one is a triple camera concept and the other’s four cameras, OnePlus Hasselblad color science seemed to produce images which hued blue with the 9 Pro, compared to those images taken with the 9. With the 9 Pro, that blue-leaning processing goes away in Pro photo mode. One other observation, the 9 Pro can appear aggressive with contrast, but that would be due to digital overlay HDR, or DOL-HDR, which I’ll get into in depth in my camera comparison and review. The camera module has a lot of stuff here by default. And so, let’s say you don’t want all of that. First, click the three buttons up top. You’re going to go into the Settings menu. From there you’re going to scroll down to Custom modes. From here, you can rearrange the modes. You can delete and remove modes. Like tilt-shift is one that I don’t really use. Panorama, I don’t really use that often. Slow-mo, I may play with every now and then. But the ones I’m going to use most often are going to be Portrait and Pro, so I’ll go ahead and move those up. And when you come out of that mode and come back into the camera, now you have your modes that you most frequently access right up front, easy to get to. So that’s how you can make the camera modes on OnePlus 9 phones more easily accessible. Slow motion Both the OnePlus 9 and OnePlus 9 Pro smartphones give you the ability to go in and play with the different slow motion modes. On the Pro, you actually get 4K 120-fps slo-mo, which you access from the video menu. The Slow motion menu is where you’ll find a default set of slow motion features. In the case of the OnePlus 9, the defaults are 1080p at 240 frames per second and 720p at 480 frames per second. On the OnePlus 9, you don’t get that 4K at 120 fps, but you do get 4K at 30 fps and 4K at 60 fps. So what’s the difference? Well, with 4K at 120 frames per second versus 1080p at 240 frames per second, obviously, you’re going to get a slower video with the 1080p 240 fps, but you’re going to get a higher resolution video with the 4K at 120 fps. So, it really depends on what kind of film project you’re shooting and what frame rate is going to be applicable for the type of slo-mo you need. These days, most people are still using 1080p. That 1080p at 240 frames per second, if you’re shooting something like, let’s say, dirt bikes, and you want to catch the dirt coming up off the wheel, you’re going to get really great slo-mo out of that 240 frames per second, as opposed to the 120 frames per second. Hidden Spaces is accessed a couple different ways. The first way is to go into the app drawer and then swipe left or right, and then you’ll get into Hidden Spaces. You can add apps there by clicking on the plus (+) symbol and then selecting an app. You can even password protect Hidden Spaces so nobody can access it except for you, which is kind of why it’s called Hidden Spaces. The other way you can access Hidden Spaces is by swiping. And I haven’t got the muscle memory down for this yet. I’ve found it actually a little bit difficult to access Hidden Spaces from swiping out toward the edges of the screen, which is what you’re supposed to be able to do. For me, the easiest way to access it is to go into the app drawer and just swipe right. Here’s one of my favorite shortcuts. Go into Settings, go into Utilities, and go into the Quick Launch menu. That’s where you can add shortcuts to apps. These work via the Quick Launch menu so that when you hold down and unlock your phone, you can keep holding down and launch other items. So if you like to play with and change your icons, I think you’ll find the customization levels with OxygenOS 11 are just phenomenal. You definitely want to check those out. And OnePlus also launched their new watch. So now we have phones, wireless chargers, earbuds, and watches, all working seamlessly together. They’re putting a lot of effort into providing consumers with an ecosystem of connected products, and I’m here for that. Competition is a good thing. And Apple and Samsung could definitely use some competition, if at the very least, for nothing other than keeping costs in the realm of attainable by the average consumer. I’ve been pretty impressed with some aspects of what the Hasselblad partnership has produced, and Android 11 with Oxygen 11 is a wonderful operating system duo. And of course, the media experience from the HDR plus and fluid 2.0 display on the 9 Pro to the stereo speakers with Dolby Atmos on both is one of the best in your pocket, especially with the OnePlus 9 Pro. After one week, it looks like I’ll be able to recommend both devices, but longer term usage may uncover some red flags, who knows? I think the primary thing that is going to flag hardcore OnePlus fanboys is the price point of the Pro. While it undercuts other devices in price, let’s say the iPhone 12 by about $30, the reputation for undercutting flagships by hundreds may be a tough thing to grow out of. To that end, I will say this, many phones this year cut features to bring you pandemic pricing, while OnePlus added features that are important. And it’s showing that they want to stomp with the big dogs, with their commitment to camera technology and still undercut other manufacturers’ pandemic pricing. I’m here for that kind of competition. And that’s that. I have spoken.
