OnePlus 7 Pro Review

The 7 Pro is the phone where OnePlus stopped chasing the flagships and briefly led them. The 6.67-inch 3120 x 1440 Fluid AMOLED ran at 90Hz, and once you had scrolled on it every 60Hz phone in the shop looked as if it were dropping frames; Google and Samsung both adopted high refresh within a year. There was no notch because the 16MP selfie camera rose out of the top edge on a motor, rated for 300,000 cycles, and dropped back in if the phone sensed a fall. A Snapdragon 855, up to 12GB of RAM and the first UFS 3.0 storage in a mainstream phone made it the quickest Android of the year, and OxygenOS 9.5 was at its best: clean, fast and small.

The 48MP Sony IMX586 main camera was inconsistent at launch, with heavy sharpening and weak HDR, and the 8MP telephoto turned out to be a crop from a larger sensor rather than true 3x optics, which OnePlus confirmed after a week of questions. Several updates later it was a good camera; it was never a Pixel 3. The 4000 mAh battery managed a day at 90Hz and QHD, Warp Charge 30 refilled it fast, and there was no wireless charging and no IP rating, which at $669 read as a fair trade. It received Android 10, 11 and 12, though the OxygenOS 12 build that closed its life was a buggy product of the ColorOS merger and a poor farewell.