The OnePlus nine Pro (starting at $969.ninety nine) delivers a streamlined flagship encounter to T-Cell and Verizon subscribers, last but not least catching up to its opponents. The phone alone is gentle in the hand, and the person expertise is weightless as nicely. The cameras consider knockout pictures in pretty significantly all conditions and the built-in quickly charging is the greatest we have viewed. The Galaxy S21 Extremely scores a little bit improved in our battery and wi-fi radio tests, performs with Samsung’s outstanding S Pen stylus, and its camera provides killer optical zoom, so it just edges out the 9 Professional to be our Editors’ Alternative between flagship smartphones. Even now, the OnePlus nine Professional is fantastic. If you want a major-notch, loaded cellphone that tends to make your coronary heart sing, you’re now spoiled for alternative.
The OnePlus Guarantee Is Last but not least Understood
OnePlus was at the time a corporation that made a solitary great cellular phone at a time. Now it has a entire line of phones at T-Mobile (and suppliers these as Google Fi, Metro, and Mint Cell that use T-Mobile’s networks): the $969.ninety nine OnePlus 9 Professional, the $729.ninety nine OnePlus nine, the $299.99 OnePlus Nord N10, and the $179.ninety nine OnePlus Nord N100. They all share the OnePlus philosophy, which implies speedy, tasteful software package and a streamlined actual physical structure.
Cameras have generally been the a single position OnePlus tended to slide powering Samsung and Apple, so OnePlus built a offer with Hasselblad for color tuning and bought a new sensor from Sony. As a result, the 9 Pro’s rear digicam stack stands out from the levels of competition. It may perhaps not have unbelievable optical zoom like the Samsung Galaxy S21 Extremely, but it delivers quite a few much more possibilities for inventive expression. In addition to the regular large and extremely-extensive lenses you may find on most phones, OnePlus included an XPan method that creates illustrations or photos in a 65:24 format.
The OnePlus nine delivers related general overall performance to the 9 Pro but measures down a bit on display screen, digicam, and radio excellent, and it won’t combine tremendous-rapidly wi-fi charging. If you you should not thoughts these downgrades, you can conserve $240 and get an even lesser and lighter cell phone. See our evaluation of the OnePlus 9 for all the particulars.
Gentle, Sleek Structure
The 9 Pro’s base product has 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. The 12GB/256GB design charges an more $one hundred. There is no memory card slot. The cellular phone is correctly sized, measuring 6.42 by two.89 by .34 inches (HWD) and weighing six.nine ounces. That’s a minimal broader than the 2.eight inches we use as the cutoff width measurement for little telephones, but it’s noticeably smaller sized and lighter than the Galaxy S21 Ultra, and narrower than the OnePlus eight Professional. Of the three, the 9 Pro is the best to use with a one hand.
Three views of the OnePlus 9 Professional, demonstrating the inexperienced and silver case solutions.
The OnePlus 9 Professional arrives in eco-friendly or silver.
The structure, pretty in tune with OnePlus’ “burdenless layout” philosophy, is trim and elegant. The phone’s overall body is rounded, with the conventional OnePlus mute switch on the remaining facet and the Hasselblad-branded camera module on the again. The digicam doesn’t stick out nearly as substantially as latest Samsung digital camera bumps do (because it isn’t going to have a huge periscopic zoom lens in it). The front-experiencing digicam is a gap-punch on the upper left corner, just like on the eight Pro.
The cell phone has an IP68 ranking for water and dust resistance, and will come in two colors. If you’re not likely to set your mobile phone in a case, we like the matte pine inexperienced improved than the mirrored silver morning mist glass back again, which appeals to greasy fingerprints. Our review device arrived with a black carbon-fiber circumstance that designed that concern moot. (There’s a third, black cellular phone, but OnePlus tells us it will never be bought in the US.)
The back again of the OnePlus nine Pro in silver
The mirrored back again of the silver circumstance is a fingerprint magnet.
Not like the Galaxy S21 Ultra and modern iPhones, your OnePlus cell phone arrives with a cable and a 65W charger. Luxurious! You will find a explanation: OnePlus employs proprietary USB-C chargers. Although the cell phone will charge from any USB-C resource, it’ll only reach its maximum charging speeds with the involved adapter.
You will find no headphone jack or USB-C-to-three.5mm adapter in the box. That said, the 9 Professional athletics aptX, aptX High definition, LHDC, and Sony’s LDAC Bluetooth codecs for exceptional wireless audio. If you opt for OnePlus’ Buds Pro earphones, you’ll get custom made faucet functions together with 24-bit/96kHz audio at up to 900kbits/s. If you happen to be seeking at other wireless earbuds, look for a pair with LDAC considering that it is really more extensively offered and delivers the maximum-resolution audio shipped over Bluetooth.
As for the onboard speakers, the audio top quality is fantastic. Twin stereo speakers deliver audio with a peak volume of 98dB and a astonishing bit of mid-bass. For voice phone calls, which have a highest volume of 81dB, the cellphone supports the finest voice codec currently available, Hd voice with EVS.
A Shiny, But Battery-Saving Exhibit
The vivid and crisp six.seven-inch, 525ppi, three,216-by-one,440-pixel screen can be dialed again to 1080p in the phone’s settings if you want to conserve battery lifestyle. The show employs a comparatively new technological know-how identified as low-temperature polycrystalline oxide (LTPO) that reduces power use and provides cell phone producers far more management more than refresh rates. It really is the very same technology that powers Apple’s Apple iphone thirteen Pro products as well as the Samsung Galaxy S21 series.
The LTPO exhibit of the OnePlus 9 Pro, displaying an image of clouds
The LTPO display can help conserve energy.
This is a leading-of-the-line OLED display with a bonus: It truly is pretty noticeable in immediate sunlight. A display screen protector is preinstalled we failed to take away it from our check device. In accordance to DisplayMate Labs checks, the nine Pro’s display established to Car Brightness manner beats the 8 Professional, the Galaxy S20 series, and the latest iPhones in ambient light, but not the Galaxy Notice 20 Ultra. The nine Pro also increases the utmost color gamut in its vivid display screen method, which helps it preserve color saturation in outside lighting.
Higher brightness mode benefits
Other than in brightness and colour, the nine Pro’s screen just isn’t simply distinguishable from other latest major-of-the-line OLED panels. The serious news is electricity optimization, as the LTPO panel dynamically—and imperceptibly—changes its refresh level from 120Hz all the way down to 1Hz to help save electricity. Verify out our in-depth unique for a lot more on the exhibit.
Coloration change results
Amazing Velocity and Ease of Use
OnePlus telephones are normally speedy, and the OnePlus nine Professional is no exception. It really is driven by a best-of-the-line Qualcomm Snapdragon 888. It scored a little bit better than the Galaxy S21 Ultra on Geekbench, with solitary-core scores all around 1125 and multi-core scores all over 3700. Which is a 24% maximize on solitary-main outcomes and a twelve% improve on multi-core results about the OnePlus 8 Pro. None of these phones can surpass the Iphone 12, even though, which scored 1596 SC and 4049 MC with its Apple A14 processor.
The Snapdragon 888 offers a raise in graphics efficiency, far too. On the GFXBench Car Chase offscreen benchmark, the nine Pro scored all over 70fps, with 37fps onscreen in WQHD method and 58fps onscreen in High definition method. That’s a key soar up from the 8 Professional, which scored 51fps offscreen and both 26 or 45fps onscreen dependent on screen resolution.
See How We Exam Telephones
These benchmarks never just take into account OnePlus’ application, which incorporates a bunch of overall performance enhancements. In our working experience with OnePlus telephones, they sense like the speediest Android phones, even faster than Google Pixels (especially given that Google begun applying midrange chipsets in its flagships with the launch of the Pixel 5).
The telephone runs Android 11 with OnePlus’ OxygenOS enhancements, and OnePlus says it will get updates as much as Android thirteen along with bi-regular protection updates for a few years. For a flagship, that’s a very little disappointing, specially considering that Samsung offers at the very least 3 several years of software updates on its finances A collection models.
The nine Professional in a charging cradle exhibiting a video game.
High-conclude games participate in properly on the 9 Pro.
OxygenOS has generally had a bunch of nice touches, such as the capacity to set up two copies of social-media apps for different accounts, a placing to improve screen colour dependent on ambient gentle, and a Zen method that briefly disables the phone’s most distracting features. With this version, OnePlus provides RAM compression that it says boosts the range of applications that can keep on being in memory with saved point out. Our exam device experienced no problem holding seven applications in memory, even with the big RAM-hog Genshin Affect at the again of the line.
To exam cooling, which OnePlus claims it is improved around prior types, we ran a processor-pumping app termed CPU Throttling Check on the nine Professional, the Galaxy S21, and the 8 Pro for fifteen minutes. At the 10-minute point, the eight Pro’s effectiveness took a sharp dive to about eighty% of peak. Each of the newer phones ended up nevertheless protecting nearer to 90% performance at that time. Immediately after thirteen minutes of pumping the processor, the Galaxy S21’s overall performance easily declined to a minor around eighty% of peak, when the 9 Professional remained in the ninety% variety. Lastly, the 9 Pro’s performance declined noticeably at just about just fifteen minutes as the phone attempted to cool by itself down. All through the test as a total, the 9 Pro and Galaxy S21 executed at 87–88% of max general performance, even though the eight Professional was down at seventy eight%.
Gaming functionality is amped up with a 360Hz contact reaction charge, but only in 4 apps: PUBG Cellular, Get in touch with of Obligation, League of Legends, and Brawl Stars. OnePlus states it will operate on incorporating 360Hz touch aid to extra games. That would certainly enable this aspect rise from a curiosity to a differentiator. The Samsung Galaxy S20 telephones offer you a 240Hz touch sampling price Samsung does not give a spec on the Galaxy S21, but we feel it truly is the very same.
Ultra-Tremendous-Mega-Speedy Charging
The pair of batteries in the nine Professional full four,500mAh. That is brief of the Galaxy S21 Ultra’s 5,000mAh, but OnePlus has a vary of software program tips up its sleeve to preserve the cell phone charged—so lots of that we’re not even guaranteed all of them arrived into use all through our tests.
On our regular battery check, running a YouTube movie more than Wi-Fi at entire monitor brightness, the phone lasted for 8 hrs, fifty minutes in WQHD resolution and 9 several hours, 40 minutes in High definition. Screen brightness issues a good deal to battery lifestyle: Take the brightness down to seventy five% and these quantities soar to twelve hrs, forty minutes on WQHD and 13 hours on Hd. Which is a lot shorter than the Galaxy S21 Extremely (11 hours 20 minutes) and the Galaxy S20 FE (twelve hrs 30 minutes), but you should really have no problems having through a working day of moderate use.
But you can find a lot more to this battery than satisfies the eye. To start with, the exhibit slows down to 1Hz when you are searching at static content, this sort of as an email you are mulling above or a web site of an e-e book. That can be a large energy saver. OnePlus also has a status for shedding significantly less ability to qualifications processes than Samsung does. If you use seventy five% display screen brightness most of the time, you’ll possibly get extra than a working day of battery existence from a single demand.
OnePlus nine Professional with USB-C Port in aim
The Warp Charge 65T charger can absolutely recharge the 9 Professional in about thirty minutes.
The nine Pro also has by much the quickest charging speeds of any cellular phone we’ve at any time examined. It comes with a Warp Charge 65T USB-C charger, which costs the 9 Pro from % to twenty% in 6 minutes and to 100% in just 36 minutes. Which is 2 times as speedy as any latest Samsung cell phone costs. If you use a third-get together charger, the cellphone will charge at up to 18 watts, with correspondingly extended demand moments.
The authentic breakthrough is in OnePlus’ new Warp Charge 50 wireless charger, a $sixty nine.99 accent cradle that plugs into your current Warp Cost 65 adapter to present 50-watt wi-fi charging for the nine Professional, or 15-watt Qi charging for any other device. In screening with the Warp Cost 50, the nine Professional went to 29% in eleven minutes and a hundred% in 46 minutes. Other phones, which includes the 9, take concerning ninety minutes and two hrs to wirelessly cost absolutely.
This all suits with OnePlus’ tactic to cell phone power: It may perhaps not have the biggest batteries in city, but it can refill them the speediest.
All the 5G Trimmings, for T-Cell and Verizon
Like other Snapdragon 888 telephones, the 9 Pro takes advantage of a Qualcomm X60 modem, which operates with all of the functions T-Cell and Verizon intend to use in the future few years, such as new airwaves and aggregation strategies. It has Bluetooth 5.2 and Wi-Fi six as perfectly, but not Wi-Fi 6E (compared with the Galaxy S21 Extremely).
T-Mobile is the only carrier promoting the 9 Pro, but if you get an unlocked product from OnePlus or a retailer, it will also operate on Verizon. If you consider to use it on AT&T, OnePlus says it will only link to 4G.
OnePlus nine (remaining) and OnePlus nine Pro (suitable).
OnePlus nine (left) and OnePlus 9 Pro (appropriate)
The OnePlus 9 Professional has all of the new technologies becoming integrated into T-Cellular and Verizon’s networks, like CBRS, C-band, and millimeter wave.
This is a solitary-SIM cellphone, with no eSIM possibility. With a T-Cell SIM in, the mobile phone enabled Wi-Fi calling, “intelligent 5G” (which turns 5G on and off to conserve battery), and twin-channel network acceleration (which employs Wi-Fi and 5G at the exact time if necessary). With an AT&T SIM in, as envisioned, the cell phone utilised only 4G and lacked Wi-Fi contacting.
The huge spec variation between the 9 and the nine Pro is that the nine Pro has mmWave. T-Cellular currently only makes use of mmWave in seven metropolitan areas, and is most probable to roll it out in tremendous-crowded locations: sporting activities stadiums, live performance halls, convention facilities, and the like. It can be a may possibly-be-pleasant, not a must-have. It’s is a lot more appealing on Verizon, which has mmWave in the centers of more than 70 towns now.
We tested the nine and the nine Professional from the Samsung Galaxy S21 with 86 rounds of assessments employing Ookla Speedtest software package in New York Town, in a range of community circumstances. (Editors’ Note: Ookla is owned by Ziff Davis, PCMag’s publisher.) About seventeen tests, the Galaxy S21 turned in the very best functionality, the 9 Pro got a strengthen from mmWave to appear in second, and the 9 dropped to 3rd. Across a selection of non-mmWave checks with combined signal high quality, the Galaxy S21 came in initial spot yet again. In a standalone T-Cellular mid-band “extremely capacity” spot, on the other hand, the 3 phones done practically identically.
If you’re exterior a important city, you’re possibly most anxious about weak-sign efficiency. In our exams, the Galaxy S21 showed the strongest 4G RSRP sign 29 occasions the nine Pro was strongest 26 moments, and the 9 was strongest 22 occasions. So the Galaxy S21 wins after once again, even though not by much. In excess of 6 rounds of tests in a weak-sign location, the Galaxy S21 confirmed more robust signal only a few of the instances, but the 9 Professional had two signal dropouts. The Galaxy S21’s edge is slight but apparent.
Blinding You With (Color) Science
Imaging collaborations usually are not new for smartphone makers. Huawei has partnered with Leica for a long time the Zeiss name is plastered on the again of smartphones from Nokia, Sony, and Vivo. Hasselblad’s only preceding US partnership was with Motorola on its clunky but capable Legitimate Zoom Moto Mod, but the 9 series brings Hasselblad back to the smartphone marketplace in triumphant fashion. The nine Pro is able of having remarkable pictures with just about every lens.
The 48MP most important lens has an f/one.eight aperture, optical image stabilization (OIS), and electronic image stabilization (EIS). There’s also a 50MP ultra-broad lens with an f/2.2 aperture, and a 8MP telephoto lens with an f/two.four aperture, as effectively as a 2MP monochrome sensor. You will find all the standard flagship bells and whistles on the nine Professional: twin LED flash, multi-autofocus with omnidirectional Section Detection AF (PDAF), Laser AF (LAF), and Distinction AF (CAF). A massive 50-megapixel extremely-vast lens normally takes attractive minimal-mild photos. There’s also 8K online video at 30fps and 4K at up to 120fps, and super-sluggish movement at up to 480fps in 720p.
Back again of OnePlus nine Pro with camera in focus
A big fifty-megapixel extremely-broad lens usually takes wonderful low-mild shots.
For the most section, the digicam app is intuitive and uncomplicated to use. The shutter button is a Hasselblad-branded orange, and it tends to make a unique Hasselblad shutter audio. Our only criticism is that we identified Tilt Shift mode a bit clunky and difficult to use.
Photograph of rooftop with eco foliage
The OnePlus nine Pro’s fall update enhanced very low-mild functionality.
Some of the 9 Pro’s most sizeable digital camera attributes are in the program. Hasselblad labored intently with OnePlus to update its coloration science and establish extra functions for pro smartphone shooters. In auto and Professional modes, shades are heat, with reds and blues receiving a wholesome saturation increase when yellows and greens to be a minimal undersaturated. Because OnePlus and Hasselblad set a big emphasis on the 9 series’ colour science, we as opposed the nine Pro to a number of other flagships and uncovered it stood up really very well to the opposition.
Apple critically enhanced its colour science with iOS 14 and the Iphone twelve. Where the nine Pro tends to saturate reds and blues, Apple focuses much more on boosting luminance, so the Iphone 12’s photos have a tendency to glimpse a little much more genuine to life than the nine Pro’s.
Area pictures from the nine Professional and the Galaxy S21 Extremely facet by side and you can right away acknowledge the variation amongst the two cameras. OnePlus normally takes a lighter hand with boosting saturation and other computational changes Samsung is a lot more intense. In one of our test shots, a dreary March sky captured on the Galaxy S21 Extremely instantly grew to become blue. The 9 Pro was much more accurate in its in general representation of the scene.
Side-by-aspect pics of a creating underneath a cloudy sky in the photograph on the remaining, the sky appears blue
The image hues from the nine Pro (ideal) are additional exact than the kinds delivered by the Galaxy S21 Extremely (remaining).
In Professional mode, you can adjust ISO, aim publicity time, white balance, and a variety of other options. There is also the solution to shoot in twelve-bit Raw structure, which features 64 times the color knowledge of the ten-little bit Uncooked on other flagships.
The extremely-wide 50MP lens is a Sony IMX 766 sensor that’s significantly bigger than the just one in the Apple iphone 12 Professional Max. In our tests the lens did a marvelous occupation in both bright and low light-weight. Images are crisp with fantastic depth of area and solid track record detail.
Facet-by-side extremely-broad-angle pictures of a building
Extremely-broad-angle pictures are a key edge for the 9 Pro (ideal), which creates significantly less edge distortion than the Galaxy S21 Ultra (still left).
Our pictures taken with the key lens ended up outstanding as perfectly. In fantastic mild, the nine Professional holds its own against other flagships, with realistic depth of subject and hardly any reduction of fantastic depth.
In the slide of 2021, OnePlus shipped a major update to the camera’s software program. Exam pictures display far more correct white balance and are crisp without having being oversharpened, a widespread problem with most smartphone cameras. When we reviewed the images at comprehensive dimension, the shots remained crisp and had considerably less sound.
The application is also quicker in general and there is considerably less shutter lag. It truly is a minor adjust, but it makes a big variation when using photographs with motion.
A snowy rooftop with a number of sculptures and other objects
The major lens takes best-notch images even in muted gentle.
But wherever the camera really excels is in reduced gentle. The main lens did perfectly, as predicted. Our examination photographs with the tumble update remained crisp with an enhanced texture-to-sounds ratio. The huge advancement, nonetheless, was with dynamic variety and over-all scene precision. The two worked in conjunction to produce a much more honest reflection of the instant.
And though we had been specially bowled above by the extremely-huge lens’ efficiency in our first tests, the digital camera update just designed items far better. All of the enhancements we found in the main lenses were being evident in our ultra-large check shots. Those people enhancements, combined with the absence of distortion, will make the OnePlus 9 Pro’s ultra-huge lens the finest we’ve examined.
A cityscape at evening, with lights reflecting off a moist road
Extremely-large reduced-light visuals are gorgeous, with shockingly tiny distortion.
We did not discover a great deal improvement in our pictures with the telephoto lens soon after the software package update. The OnePlus nine Pro’s telephoto lens is better than what you can locate on its predecessor, but it continue to doesn’t evaluate with the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra’s. At decrease zoom levels, our check pictures had a lot of detail, however there was some anticipated loss of element in the distance.
Side-by-side pictures of illustrated symptoms at 30x zoom.
The Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra does a a lot superior job at 30x zoom.
As we bumped up the zoom, on the other hand, we begun to detect important blur and sounds when in contrast with the very same image taken on the Galaxy S21 Ultra. The unnatural sharpening we discovered in our unique exam pictures, however, has been significantly improved.
Facet-by-side 10x zoom photographs of a halt indication
Though the Samsung Galaxy S21 Extremely has an edge at 10x zoom, the 9 Pro does a sound occupation with its the latest tumble digicam update.
Oneplus 5T cases
Smartphone macro lenses are rarely worthy of using, but listed here the 9 Pro seriously stands out. Our macro pictures were being substantially sharper than expected, and leagues greater than pics taken with the 8’s 2MP macro lens.
A picture of crimson and eco-friendly macarons on a white plate
Macarons, in macro.
The monochrome sensor operates in tandem with the primary sensor to get wonderful black-and-white pictures with a lot of depth and inky blacks. Huawei involved a equivalent element for a long time and then suddenly removed it, causing an outcry from smartphone shutterbugs. If you knew and cherished that attribute, the nine Pro’s resurrection of it will delight you.
Black-and-white picture of public artwork installation in which a huge white sculpture of a hand grabs a tree trunk
The monochrome lens takes good black-and-white pics.
The largest, and most spectacular, transform to the OnePlus 9’s camera, having said that, is the addition of XPan method. It is really a characteristic that mimics Hasselblad’s now-discontinued XPan cameras to make an impression that is reminiscent of all those you would take with its 30mm and 45mm lenses.
The shots are cropped to a sixty five:24 aspect ratio. It’s a spectacular glimpse that gives you a whole new way to convey to stories, and evokes pictures of film stills. There are options to shoot in coloration as perfectly as black and white.
It really is tricky to overstate just how much home XPan presents for creativeness. four:three and 16:9 element ratios are so ubiquitous, that it can take a defeat to get employed to all the unique points you can do in the format.
Panoramic shot of a Catholic rectory at evening.
XPan method allows you to take dramatic photos in a unique component ratio.
We analyzed XPan in various lighting eventualities and it carried out flawlessly. Our examination pictures had been immersive and crisp, with outstanding dynamic array. Depth of industry is exceptional as well.
Black and white image of a mid-century creating
Monochrome photos in XPan mode seem breathtaking.
Hasselblad’s distinctive shade science for XPan also makes an completely distinct experience that is equivalent to photos shot on Kodak Ektachrome or Fuji Provia slide movie. Our images confirmed much less contrast and a lot more natural colors that practically seem to be slightly undersaturated considering the fact that we have turn into so accustomed to above-saturation on smartphones.
Decommissioned switching station with festive lights
Portraits and lesser scenes look much better with the 30mm focal-duration location in XPan method.
On the front of the nine Pro, you will locate a 32MP lens. It performs particularly very well in any lighting ailment. There is a very little background blur in our photos, which is to be envisioned. Foreground depth and depth of area, having said that, are location on. Portrait manner operates with no a hitch as nicely. Our test photographs experienced a all-natural bokeh and perfect depth mapping in every shot.
A selfie of a bearded white person in glasses and a cap
Selfies are in-depth and apparent.
1 Smaller Step Shy of the Crown
The OnePlus 9 Pro is an superb cell phone. At $970, it retains its have against the a little additional costly Galaxy S21 Extremely and Apple iphone twelve Pro. It isn’t going to pretty match the Galaxy S21 Ultra on camera zoom or community general performance, but it can be lighter and sleeker, it has some unique camera tips, and there is that renowned OnePlus velocity and stylish program. That remarkable quickly charging and the battery-saving display also make a massive variance in day-to-day use. The nine Pro is greater than the OnePlus 8 sequence in just about every way, so the upgrade is easily warranted. It only fails to nab our Editors’ Option award because the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra is even much more fantastic and can be applied on any carrier. The 9 Professional and the Galaxy S21 Ultra alongside one another now outline the Android point out of the art. Relying on your priorities, possibly will provide you very nicely for the upcoming number of a long time.
