OnePlus 9 Pro Review – Everything you need to know

learn the facts here now (starting up at $969.ninety nine) delivers a streamlined flagship expertise to T-Cell and Verizon subscribers, lastly catching up to its opponents. The cellphone alone is mild in the hand, and the consumer knowledge is weightless as very well. The cameras just take knockout photographs in quite a great deal all problems and the integrated speedy charging is the most effective we’ve witnessed. The Galaxy S21 Ultra scores a little bit improved in our battery and wi-fi radio testing, performs with Samsung’s excellent S Pen stylus, and its camera features killer optical zoom, so it just edges out the nine Professional to be our Editors’ Option amongst flagship smartphones. Nonetheless, the OnePlus nine Professional is outstanding. If you want a leading-notch, loaded cell phone that would make your heart sing, you’re now spoiled for preference.

The OnePlus Assure Is Last but not least Realized
OnePlus was when a business that manufactured a solitary terrific mobile phone at a time. Now it has a total line of telephones at T-Cell (and providers such as Google Fi, Metro, and Mint Cell that use T-Mobile’s networks): the $969.ninety nine OnePlus nine 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 signifies speedy, tasteful software program and a streamlined actual physical design.

Cameras have constantly been the a person location OnePlus tended to tumble driving Samsung and Apple, so OnePlus created a offer with Hasselblad for color tuning and acquired a new sensor from Sony. As a end result, the 9 Pro’s rear digital camera stack stands out from the level of competition. It might not have amazing optical zoom like the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra, but it offers lots of much more opportunities for inventive expression. In addition to the regular extensive and extremely-extensive lenses you will obtain on most phones, OnePlus extra an XPan manner that creates photos in a 65:24 format.

The OnePlus nine delivers identical all round effectiveness to the nine Professional but techniques down a bit on screen, camera, and radio excellent, and it does not integrate tremendous-quick wireless charging. If you do not mind those people downgrades, you can save $240 and get an even scaled-down and lighter telephone. See our evaluate of the OnePlus nine for all the details.

Light, Sleek Structure

The nine Pro’s foundation design has 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. The 12GB/256GB product costs an supplemental $a hundred. There is no memory card slot. The cellphone is correctly sized, measuring 6.42 by two.89 by .34 inches (HWD) and weighing six.nine ounces. That’s a minimal wider than the two.eight inches we use as the cutoff width measurement for small phones, but it truly is significantly smaller and lighter than the Galaxy S21 Ultra, and narrower than the OnePlus 8 Pro. Of the a few, the nine Professional is the least difficult to use with a single hand.

Three views of the OnePlus nine Professional, exhibiting the eco-friendly and silver scenario choices.
The OnePlus nine Professional arrives in inexperienced or silver.
The style, incredibly in tune with OnePlus’ “burdenless style” philosophy, is slender and tasteful. The phone’s physique is rounded, with the conventional OnePlus mute swap on the remaining facet and the Hasselblad-branded camera module on the back. The camera doesn’t stick out virtually as a lot as recent Samsung digital camera bumps do (due to the fact it doesn’t have a huge periscopic zoom lens in it). The entrance-facing digicam is a hole-punch on the upper remaining corner, just like on the 8 Pro.

The telephone has an IP68 ranking for water and dust resistance, and comes in two colours. If you might be not likely to set your phone in a situation, we like the matte pine green better than the mirrored silver morning mist glass back again, which attracts greasy fingerprints. Our evaluate unit arrived with a black carbon-fiber situation that made that situation moot. (You will find a 3rd, black phone, but OnePlus tells us it will not be sold in the US.)

The back again of the OnePlus 9 Professional in silver
The mirrored again of the silver situation is a fingerprint magnet.
Contrary to the Galaxy S21 Ultra and the latest iPhones, your OnePlus telephone will come with a cable and a 65W charger. Luxurious! You will find a purpose: OnePlus works by using proprietary USB-C chargers. Nevertheless the cell phone will charge from any USB-C resource, it will only realize its highest charging speeds with the bundled adapter.

There’s no headphone jack or USB-C-to-three.5mm adapter in the box. That stated, the nine Pro sports activities aptX, aptX Hd, LHDC, and Sony’s LDAC Bluetooth codecs for fantastic wi-fi audio. If you opt for OnePlus’ Buds Pro earphones, you will get customized faucet features together with 24-bit/96kHz audio at up to 900kbits/s. If you might be on the lookout at other wi-fi earbuds, seem for a pair with LDAC since it can be much more widely offered and provides the optimum-resolution audio delivered over Bluetooth.

As for the onboard speakers, the audio good quality is excellent. Twin stereo speakers deliver audio with a peak quantity of 98dB and a shocking little bit of mid-bass. For voice calls, which have a utmost quantity of 81dB, the telephone supports the very best voice codec at this time out there, Hd voice with EVS.

A Brilliant, However Battery-Preserving Display screen
The shiny and crisp 6.seven-inch, 525ppi, three,216-by-one,440-pixel monitor can be dialed again to 1080p in the phone’s settings if you want to conserve battery life. The display screen utilizes a relatively new know-how called lower-temperature polycrystalline oxide (LTPO) that decreases energy consumption and offers cellphone manufacturers extra manage in excess of refresh costs. It really is the similar technological innovation that powers Apple’s Iphone 13 Pro styles as well as the Samsung Galaxy S21 collection.

The LTPO display of the OnePlus 9 Pro, displaying an impression of clouds
The LTPO show can help conserve energy.
This is a top rated-of-the-line OLED display screen with a bonus: It can be extremely obvious in immediate daylight. A display screen protector is preinstalled we did not take away it from our take a look at unit. In accordance to DisplayMate Labs assessments, the nine Pro’s show set to Auto Brightness manner beats the 8 Pro, the Galaxy S20 sequence, and the latest iPhones in ambient light, but not the Galaxy Be aware twenty Extremely. The 9 Professional also improves the optimum colour gamut in its vivid display screen method, which assists it manage colour saturation in out of doors lighting.

Large brightness manner benefits
Besides in brightness and color, the 9 Pro’s screen is just not quickly distinguishable from other latest best-of-the-line OLED panels. The true news is power optimization, as the LTPO panel dynamically—and imperceptibly—changes its refresh charge from 120Hz all the way down to 1Hz to save electrical power. Test out our in-depth distinctive for extra on the exhibit.

Color change outcomes
Remarkable Velocity and Relieve of Use
OnePlus phones are always quickly, and the OnePlus nine Pro is no exception. It really is powered by a leading-of-the-line Qualcomm Snapdragon 888. It scored a little bit much better than the Galaxy S21 Ultra on Geekbench, with solitary-core scores all-around 1125 and multi-main scores about 3700. That’s a 24% improve on solitary-core benefits and a twelve% boost on multi-core results above the OnePlus eight Professional. None of these phones can surpass the Apple iphone 12, however, which scored 1596 SC and 4049 MC with its Apple A14 processor.

The Snapdragon 888 gives a elevate in graphics general performance, far too. On the GFXBench Car Chase offscreen benchmark, the nine Professional scored all around 70fps, with 37fps onscreen in WQHD method and 58fps onscreen in Hd mode. Which is a big soar up from the eight Pro, which scored 51fps offscreen and both 26 or 45fps onscreen depending on screen resolution.

See How We Take a look at Phones

These benchmarks do not consider into account OnePlus’ computer software, which incorporates a bunch of effectiveness enhancements. In our expertise with OnePlus phones, they truly feel like the speediest Android phones, even more rapidly than Google Pixels (especially considering that Google commenced applying midrange chipsets in its flagships with the launch of the Pixel five).

The cell phone runs Android eleven with OnePlus’ OxygenOS enhancements, and OnePlus states it’ll get updates as considerably as Android thirteen alongside with bi-every month stability updates for 3 several years. For a flagship, that is a very little disappointing, especially due to the fact Samsung provides at minimum 3 a long time of software program updates on its funds A series versions.

The nine Professional in a charging cradle exhibiting a game.
Substantial-end games enjoy effectively on the nine Professional.
OxygenOS has usually had a bunch of nice touches, such as the capacity to put in two copies of social-media apps for different accounts, a environment to alter display colour primarily based on ambient gentle, and a Zen manner that quickly disables the phone’s most distracting features. With this model, OnePlus provides RAM compression that it suggests improves the quantity of apps that can continue to be in memory with saved condition. Our take a look at device had no difficulty trying to keep seven apps in memory, even with the huge RAM-hog Genshin Effect at the again of the line.

To take a look at cooling, which OnePlus claims it really is improved in excess of past versions, we ran a processor-pumping app named CPU Throttling Test on the nine Professional, the Galaxy S21, and the 8 Pro for fifteen minutes. At the ten-minute issue, the 8 Pro’s general performance took a sharp dive to about eighty% of peak. Each of the more recent phones were nevertheless keeping closer to ninety% overall performance at that time. Just after 13 minutes of pumping the processor, the Galaxy S21’s effectiveness effortlessly declined to a small about eighty% of peak, whilst the nine Professional remained in the 90% assortment. Ultimately, the 9 Pro’s performance declined significantly at almost specifically fifteen minutes as the cell phone attempted to great itself down. For the duration of the exam as a entire, the 9 Pro and Galaxy S21 done at 87–88% of max performance, although the eight Pro was down at 78%.

Gaming overall performance is amped up with a 360Hz touch reaction charge, but only in 4 apps: PUBG Mobile, Phone of Responsibility, League of Legends, and Brawl Stars. OnePlus says it will do the job on incorporating 360Hz touch guidance to more online games. That would unquestionably help this element increase from a curiosity to a differentiator. The Samsung Galaxy S20 telephones offer a 240Hz contact sampling charge Samsung won’t give a spec on the Galaxy S21, but we assume it’s the exact same.

Extremely-Super-Mega-Rapid Charging
The pair of batteries in the nine Professional overall four,500mAh. Which is limited of the Galaxy S21 Ultra’s 5,000mAh, but OnePlus has a selection of software tips up its sleeve to hold the phone charged—so a lot of that we are not even confident all of them came into use during our testing.

On our typical battery examination, running a YouTube video clip above Wi-Fi at full monitor brightness, the cell phone lasted for eight hrs, 50 minutes in WQHD resolution and nine several hours, 40 minutes in High definition. Display screen brightness issues a ton to battery lifestyle: Take the brightness down to 75% and these quantities leap to twelve several hours, forty minutes on WQHD and 13 hrs on High definition. That is a great deal shorter than the Galaxy S21 Extremely (11 hours twenty minutes) and the Galaxy S20 FE (12 hrs thirty minutes), but you really should have no challenges acquiring by means of a day of reasonable use.

But you will find a lot more to this battery than satisfies the eye. To commence with, the display screen slows down to 1Hz when you are on the lookout at static material, this sort of as an electronic mail you are mulling in excess of or a web site of an e-ebook. That can be a big energy saver. OnePlus also has a standing for shedding a lot less electric power to history procedures than Samsung does. If you use seventy five% monitor brightness most of the time, you may possibly get a lot more than a working day of battery daily life from just one charge.

OnePlus nine Professional with USB-C Port in focus
The Warp Charge 65T charger can absolutely recharge the nine Pro in about thirty minutes.
The nine Professional also has by significantly the quickest charging speeds of any mobile phone we’ve at any time examined. It will come with a Warp Demand 65T USB-C charger, which charges the nine Professional from % to 20% in six minutes and to a hundred% in just 36 minutes. Which is two times as rapidly as any the latest Samsung cell phone rates. If you use a 3rd-social gathering charger, the cellphone will demand at up to eighteen watts, with correspondingly lengthier charge occasions.

The serious breakthrough is in OnePlus’ new Warp Demand fifty wireless charger, a $sixty nine.ninety nine accent cradle that plugs into your current Warp Cost sixty five adapter to provide fifty-watt wi-fi charging for the 9 Pro, or fifteen-watt Qi charging for any other device. In testing with the Warp Cost fifty, the 9 Pro went to 29% in 11 minutes and one hundred% in 46 minutes. Other phones, like the nine, just take between 90 minutes and two hrs to wirelessly cost completely.


This all fits with OnePlus’ approach to cell phone energy: It may well not have the most significant batteries in town, but it can refill them the fastest.

All the 5G Trimmings, for T-Mobile and Verizon
Like other Snapdragon 888 phones, the nine Professional works by using a Qualcomm X60 modem, which performs with all of the characteristics T-Cell and Verizon intend to use in the following number of several years, like new airwaves and aggregation techniques. It has Bluetooth 5.two and Wi-Fi six as properly, but not Wi-Fi 6E (in contrast to the Galaxy S21 Ultra).

T-Mobile is the only carrier marketing the 9 Pro, but if you obtain an unlocked product from OnePlus or a retailer, it will also get the job done on Verizon. If you consider to use it on AT&T, OnePlus states it will only connect to 4G.

OnePlus nine (remaining) and OnePlus 9 Pro (right).
OnePlus nine (still left) and OnePlus 9 Pro (correct)
The OnePlus 9 Pro has all of the new technologies remaining built-in into T-Cellular and Verizon’s networks, which include CBRS, C-band, and millimeter wave.

This is a solitary-SIM telephone, with no eSIM choice. With a T-Cellular SIM in, the cellphone enabled Wi-Fi contacting, “wise 5G” (which turns 5G on and off to conserve battery), and twin-channel community acceleration (which employs Wi-Fi and 5G at the identical time if important). With an AT&T SIM in, as predicted, the mobile phone applied only 4G and lacked Wi-Fi calling.

The major spec variation involving the nine and the 9 Pro is that the nine Professional has mmWave. T-Mobile currently only takes advantage of mmWave in 7 towns, and is most probably to roll it out in super-crowded locations: athletics stadiums, live performance halls, conference facilities, and the like. It can be a may well-be-wonderful, not a ought to-have. It truly is is extra fascinating on Verizon, which has mmWave in the centers of much more than 70 metropolitan areas now.


We tested the nine and the nine Pro against the Samsung Galaxy S21 with 86 rounds of assessments making use of Ookla Speedtest software in New York Town, in a variety of network problems. (Editors’ Note: Ookla is owned by Ziff Davis, PCMag’s publisher.) Over 17 checks, the Galaxy S21 turned in the finest general performance, the 9 Professional acquired a raise from mmWave to arrive in second, and the 9 dropped to third. Across a assortment of non-mmWave exams with combined signal quality, the Galaxy S21 arrived in initially area all over again. In a standalone T-Cell mid-band “extremely capacity” region, on the other hand, the a few phones performed just about identically.

If you are exterior a major town, you’re most likely most anxious about weak-signal overall performance. In our checks, the Galaxy S21 showed the strongest 4G RSRP sign 29 occasions the 9 Pro was strongest 26 moments, and the nine was strongest 22 situations. So the Galaxy S21 wins at the time again, though not by a great deal. Over six rounds of tests in a weak-signal region, the Galaxy S21 confirmed much better signal only 3 of the situations, but the nine Pro had two signal dropouts. The Galaxy S21’s edge is slight but visible.

Blinding You With (Color) Science
Imaging collaborations usually are not new for smartphone companies. Huawei has partnered with Leica for yrs the Zeiss name is plastered on the back of smartphones from Nokia, Sony, and Vivo. Hasselblad’s only previous US partnership was with Motorola on its clunky but able Correct Zoom Moto Mod, but the 9 series provides Hasselblad back again to the smartphone sector in triumphant design. The 9 Professional is able of getting amazing pictures with each lens.

The 48MP major lens has an f/1.8 aperture, optical impression stabilization (OIS), and electronic image stabilization (EIS). There is also a 50MP extremely-extensive lens with an f/2.two aperture, and a 8MP telephoto lens with an f/2.four aperture, as very well as a 2MP monochrome sensor. You’ll uncover all the usual flagship bells and whistles on the 9 Pro: dual LED flash, multi-autofocus with omnidirectional Phase Detection AF (PDAF), Laser AF (LAF), and Contrast AF (CAF). A big 50-megapixel ultra-broad lens normally takes wonderful lower-mild photographs. There is certainly also 8K video clip at 30fps and 4K at up to 120fps, and tremendous-sluggish movement at up to 480fps in 720p.

Back again of OnePlus nine Pro with digicam in emphasis
A substantial 50-megapixel ultra-extensive lens requires stunning lower-light pics.
For the most aspect, the camera app is intuitive and easy to use. The shutter button is a Hasselblad-branded orange, and it tends to make a distinct Hasselblad shutter audio. Our only criticism is that we located Tilt Shift method a little bit clunky and tricky to use.

Picture of rooftop with eco foliage
The OnePlus 9 Pro’s tumble update enhanced minimal-gentle efficiency.
Some of the 9 Pro’s most major digital camera capabilities are in the computer software. Hasselblad worked carefully with OnePlus to update its color science and build supplemental features for pro smartphone shooters. In automobile and Professional modes, shades are warm, with reds and blues acquiring a healthful saturation boost when yellows and greens to be a tiny undersaturated. Given that OnePlus and Hasselblad place a massive emphasis on the nine series’ shade science, we in contrast the nine Pro to a couple of other flagships and found it stood up incredibly properly to the competitiveness.

Apple seriously enhanced its colour science with iOS 14 and the Iphone twelve. Wherever the 9 Pro tends to saturate reds and blues, Apple focuses much more on boosting luminance, so the Apple iphone 12’s shots are inclined to search a small additional genuine to life than the 9 Pro’s.

Spot photographs from the 9 Professional and the Galaxy S21 Extremely facet by side and you can instantly recognize the distinction concerning the two cameras. OnePlus takes a lighter hand with boosting saturation and other computational changes Samsung is considerably a lot more aggressive. In one of our check photographs, a dreary March sky captured on the Galaxy S21 Ultra abruptly turned blue. The nine Professional was substantially much more accurate in its total illustration of the scene.

Facet-by-facet photos of a building under a cloudy sky in the image on the still left, the sky looks blue
The photograph colors from the nine Pro (ideal) are much more accurate than the ones shipped by the Galaxy S21 Extremely (left).
In Professional method, you can adjust ISO, concentrate exposure time, white stability, and a number of other options. There is also the solution to shoot in 12-little bit Raw structure, which features sixty four periods the coloration knowledge of the 10-bit Raw on other flagships.

The extremely-extensive 50MP lens is a Sony IMX 766 sensor that is considerably larger than the one particular in the Apple iphone twelve Professional Max. In our tests the lens did a wonderful career in both of those brilliant and small light-weight. Images are crisp with fantastic depth of area and reliable track record depth.

Aspect-by-aspect ultra-vast-angle pictures of a building
Ultra-extensive-angle photographs are a significant benefit for the 9 Pro (right), which creates a great deal significantly less edge distortion than the Galaxy S21 Extremely (left).
Our shots taken with the key lens ended up amazing as properly. In good gentle, the nine Pro retains its very own versus other flagships, with reasonable depth of subject and hardly any loss of fantastic detail.

In the tumble of 2021, OnePlus delivered a significant update to the camera’s software. Exam shots exhibit much more precise white balance and are crisp with no being oversharpened, a popular challenge with most smartphone cameras. When we reviewed the images at complete size, the photos remained crisp and experienced a lot less noise.

The application is also quicker in standard and there is considerably less shutter lag. It really is a slight modify, but it helps make a big variation when using photographs with movement.

A snowy rooftop with many sculptures and other objects
The primary lens requires leading-notch images even in muted gentle.
But wherever the digital camera truly excels is in minimal mild. The key lens did perfectly, as expected. Our check shots with the drop update remained crisp with an improved texture-to-sounds ratio. The massive improvement, nonetheless, was with dynamic vary and general scene accuracy. The two labored in conjunction to develop a far more genuine reflection of the instant.

And even though we ended up significantly bowled above by the extremely-large lens’ functionality in our first exams, the digicam update just designed matters improved. All of the advancements we seen in the major lenses were being obvious in our ultra-large examination shots. These enhancements, merged with the deficiency of distortion, can make the OnePlus 9 Pro’s ultra-extensive lens the greatest we’ve examined.

A cityscape at night time, with lights reflecting off a damp road
Ultra-wide minimal-mild illustrations or photos are wonderful, with shockingly small distortion.
We failed to recognize substantially enhancement in our photographs with the telephoto lens following the software update. The OnePlus 9 Pro’s telephoto lens is far better than what you are going to discover on its predecessor, but it still does not examine with the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra’s. At lessen zoom levels, our exam photographs experienced a good deal of detail, nevertheless there was some envisioned reduction of depth in the length.

Side-by-aspect photographs of illustrated signals at 30x zoom.
The Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra does a a great deal superior occupation at 30x zoom.
As we bumped up the zoom, having said that, we started off to see important blur and noise when in contrast with the same graphic taken on the Galaxy S21 Ultra. The unnatural sharpening we recognized in our primary test shots, however, has been noticeably enhanced.

Aspect-by-aspect 10x zoom visuals of a stop indication
Even though the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra has an edge at 10x zoom, the nine Professional does a good occupation with its the latest slide digicam update.
Smartphone macro lenses are almost never truly worth employing, but right here the 9 Professional truly stands out. Our macro shots were being significantly sharper than predicted, and leagues superior than shots taken with the 8’s 2MP macro lens.

A picture of red and inexperienced macarons on a white plate
Macarons, in macro.
The monochrome sensor operates in tandem with the major sensor to acquire stunning black-and-white images with tons of depth and inky blacks. Huawei involved a very similar attribute for yrs and then suddenly taken out it, resulting in an outcry from smartphone shutterbugs. If you realized and cherished that characteristic, the 9 Pro’s resurrection of it will delight you.

Black-and-white photograph of public artwork installation in which a large white sculpture of a hand grabs a tree trunk
The monochrome lens can take good black-and-white photos.
The most significant, and most spectacular, improve to the OnePlus 9’s camera, nonetheless, is the addition of XPan mode. It can be a function that mimics Hasselblad’s now-discontinued XPan cameras to generate an image which is reminiscent of individuals you’d choose with its 30mm and 45mm lenses.

The shots are cropped to a 65:24 part ratio. It is a dramatic search that provides you a full new way to convey to tales, and evokes visuals of movie stills. There are solutions to shoot in shade as perfectly as black and white.

It really is tricky to overstate just how much room XPan offers for creativeness. 4:3 and 16:9 component ratios are so ubiquitous, that it takes a beat to get made use of to all the unique items you can do in the structure.

Panoramic shot of a Catholic rectory at evening.
XPan manner makes it possible for you to get remarkable photos in a special component ratio.
We tested XPan in a number of lighting eventualities and it executed beautifully. Our take a look at photographs were being immersive and crisp, with outstanding dynamic array. Depth of industry is superb as very well.

Black and white image of a mid-century creating
Monochrome shots in XPan mode glimpse amazing.
Hasselblad’s special shade science for XPan also generates an totally various really feel that is very similar to photos shot on Kodak Ektachrome or Fuji Provia slide movie. Our images showed considerably less distinction and more natural hues that nearly appear to be a little bit undersaturated because we have grow to be so accustomed to around-saturation on smartphones.

Decommissioned switching station with festive lights
Portraits and scaled-down scenes seem greater with the 30mm focal-size location in XPan mode.
On the entrance of the nine Pro, you will find a 32MP lens. It performs very nicely in any lighting issue. There’s a tiny qualifications blur in our photos, which is to be anticipated. Foreground detail and depth of industry, nonetheless, are place on. Portrait mode is effective without the need of a hitch as very well. Our test pictures had a natural bokeh and fantastic depth mapping in every shot.

A selfie of a bearded white male in eyeglasses and a cap
Selfies are comprehensive and obvious.
A person Small Move Shy of the Crown
The OnePlus 9 Pro is an great mobile phone. At $970, it retains its individual versus the a bit much more high priced Galaxy S21 Ultra and Apple iphone 12 Pro. It will not rather match the Galaxy S21 Extremely on camera zoom or network performance, but it really is lighter and sleeker, it has some distinctive digital camera tricks, and there is certainly that renowned OnePlus speed and tasteful software program. That awesome rapidly charging and the battery-conserving display also make a significant change in day-to-day use. The nine Professional is greater than the OnePlus 8 series in just about every way, so the up grade is easily warranted. It only fails to nab our Editors’ Preference award mainly because the Samsung Galaxy S21 Extremely is even additional exceptional and can be applied on any provider. The 9 Professional and the Galaxy S21 Ultra together at the moment outline the Android state of the art. Based on your priorities, either will provide you extremely nicely for the future handful of many years.