Following today’s ambitious announcement, Chinese manufacturer OnePlus is officially done with its “flagship killer” strategy, not that it didn’t start pricing its products above the amazingly value-oriented range a few years back already.
By deciding to avoid releasing the regular OnePlus 7 in the United States (and the rest of the continent) and focusing solely on the OnePlus 7 Pro, the firm is leaving us with no room for cutting it any degree of slack. A $700 Android smartphone, which is how much the mid-tier OnePlus 7 Pro configuration costs, is either a full-fledged premium device or something that ought to be judged extremely harshly if it isn’t.
Luckily, OnePlus didn’t pull a BlackBerry KEYone here as its latest phablet is truly a high-end affair and here are five of its top features underlining its flagship, no-compromise capabilities:
Fluid AMOLED Display
It took OnePlus over half a decade to move past the Full HD space but the transition finally happened with a display that covers over 93-percent of its front. What’s more, this 6.67-inch QHD+ panel has a 90Hz refresh rate, which should make your gaming experiences even more responsive, so long as you’re fine with sacrificing some battery life for immersion, or perhaps a competitive edge.
Its long (19.5:9) screen edges curve ever so slightly, underlining how Samsung perfected this flexible display design to the point that it can deliver that “wow” factor while almost guaranteeing accidental touches are fully avoided regardless of one’s usage habits and hand size.
Triple rear cameras
Much like its approach to mobile screens, the firm’s pursuit of high-end imagery has often fallen short. Even as OnePlus talked about additional investments in the field, those promises never materialized for unknown reasons.
Luckily for all smartphone users in dire need of a more competitive flagship segment, the OnePlus 7 Pro ups the ante in this regard as well, delivering what some image benchmarking experts claim is the third-best mobile camera setup ever created. The three-lens system revolves around a 48-megapixel sensor capable of acting on its own, even in low-light conditions.
Then there’s the intelligent stabilization akin to Huawei’s AIS, 3x optical zoom, and a wide variety of other features meant to improve your mobile photography game, including an incredibly fast 16-megapixel front camera.
Warp Charge to rule them all
A 4,000 mAh capacity battery sounds nice but that’s only until you realize a 90Hz display is a power hog and will drain it faster than OnePlus devours variations of its Never Settle logo. Thankfully, the new Warp Charge delivers top-of-the-line performance, being capable of refilling roughly half of the OnePlus 7 Pro’s battery capacity in a mere twenty minutes.
Sure, wireless charging is still not here, but the way things are moving, the next OnePlus device will go from zero to 50-percent by the time you remember where you threw your wireless charger the last time you used it.
Strength in numbers
Assuming you’re not looking to lock yourself into a carrier contract, the OnePlus 7 Pro actually presents you with a respectable amount of choice when it comes to memory configurations; while the base model that starts at $669 is equipped with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of (first-ever UFS 3.0) storage space, the top-tier version of the phablet doubles the former and the latter for only $90 more.
Combined with two or three colors (depending on the market), the OnePlus 7 series is a truly diversified line even if you ignore the existence of the regular OnePlus 7 and the incoming OnePlus 7 Pro 5G.
Naturally, your choices aren’t that great in the context of individual carrier portfolios, not to mention the fact that the Shenzen-based manufacturer decided the OnePlus 7 will be skipping North America entirely because it wants to push for higher profit margins in the rich West. If flexibility is that big of a concern to you, going unlocked was by far the most viable option you had anyway, regardless of your next smartphone brand of choice.
Gaming-worthy cooling
Sure, the new OnePlus phablet is a powerhouse, so were its predecessors relative to their respective launch years, but when it comes to mobile gaming, graphically intensive games require sustained performance more than they benefit from untenable peaks.
The OnePlus 7 Pro should be by far the most consistent performer from the Chinese company to date as its ten-layer liquid cooling system is one of the best in business, guaranteed to help it maintain performance in even the most demanding of 3D titles.
This smartphone may not be advertised as a gaming-first device but the combination of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 855 chip and the vapor-based cooling mechanism is by itself reason enough for serious mobile gamers to consider getting it.
More info: OnePlus 7 Pro (OnePlus)