Over two months after launching it in China, OnePlus has finally brought the OnePlus 10 Pro to the United States. But was it worth the wait? Any fan of OnePlus knows that this year’s release strategy has been the strangest yet. OnePlus gradually revealed the 10 Pro with three different announcements at the beginning of the year and eventually released it in China in early January. Since then, the phone has remained MIA from the United States, Canada, and all other markets we expect OnePlus phones to launch in.
But that’s not the only worrying thing OnePlus fans have dealt with. In June 2021, OnePlus CEO Pete Lau confirmed that teams at OnePlus and Oppo were merging to streamline both companies’ operations. OnePlus doubled down on this integration later in September, announcing that OxygenOS and ColorOS were morphing into a new ‘Unified OS.’ Throw that together with the 10 Pro’s bizarre release, and it’s been a rough few months for OnePlus fans.
Thankfully, things are looking up. In late February, OnePlus said it was backtracking its Unified OS plans to keep OxygenOS for the foreseeable future — retaining all of the software goodies its fans are passionate about. And as of March 2022, the OnePlus 10 Pro is finally available in North America, Europe, and India. While it’s not the Galaxy S22 Ultra or iPhone 13 Pro-killer that OnePlus is hyping it up to be, there’s a lot about the OnePlus 10 Pro that works really, really well. If you’re looking for a premium Android flagship and don’t want a phone that has a Samsung, Apple, or Google logo, the OnePlus 10 Pro is a (mostly) fantastic alternative.
Almost immediately after the first OnePlus 10 Pro renders leaked in November, the phone’s design drew a lot of criticism — mainly due to the huge camera hump. After seeing the phone in person and using it as my daily driver for about two weeks, I’ve grown quite fond of it. Is the rear camera bump shockingly big? Yes. Does it look like a stovetop? Sure. But it also makes the OnePlus 10 Pro distinct and memorable. Like the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro, the OnePlus 10 Pro’s camera design is unlike anything else. And I love it because of that.
However, a unique camera housing isn’t the only design element the OnePlus 10 Pro gets right. I also love the phone’s back glass. The Volcanic Black color has an excellent matte finish that picks up virtually zero fingerprints. And when it’s in the right lighting, there’s a textured pattern similar to the old Sandstone Black of the OnePlus One. Little details like the buttons and vibration motor are well-executed too. The power button and volume rocker are both well-positioned on the right and left frame, respectively, are easy to press, and have excellent tactility. The vibration motor is also fantastic and a notable upgrade over the weak haptics of the OnePlus 9 Pro. From typing on the virtual keyboard to subtle vibrations when you scroll to the top/bottom of a page, the 10 Pro’s haptics might be some of the best I’ve used on an Android phone.
How will all of this hold up after a year or two? That remains to be seen. JerryRigEverything‘s durability test of the OnePlus 10 Pro — which showed the phone snapping in half with relative ease — doesn’t paint a good picture. At least for my use, the 10 Pro’s been a champ. The Gorilla Glass 5 for the back looks pristine, as does the Gorilla Glass Victus covering the display. What I’m not happy about, though, is how OnePlus is handling the 10 Pro’s water resistance. While the T-Mobile version of the phone does have an IP68 rating, the unlocked OnePlus 10 Pro does not. Well… at least not officially. OnePlus told me that “water resistance and durability testing were applied to all variants of the OnePlus 10 Pro to ensure they can easily cope with sweat, moisture, and light drizzles that are regularly encountered in our daily lives.” That means the unlocked 10 Pro likely has the same protections as the T-Mobile version, just without the official IP rating to back it. Even at the lower price this year, IP68 should still be standard for a $900 smartphone.
On a more positive note, the OnePlus 10 Pro’s display is phenomenal. It’s a 6.7-inch AMOLED panel with a 3216 x 1440 resolution and a 120Hz refresh rate. Those are the same display specs of the OnePlus 9 Pro, but that’s far from a bad thing. The 10 Pro offers gorgeous colors, sharp text, and beautifully fluid animations. There are also a few subtle changes that give the OnePlus 10 Pro an edge over its predecessor. The 10 Pro has an LTPO panel just like the 9 Pro, allowing the screen to automatically scale between 120Hz and 1Hz depending on what you’re doing. However, the new second-gen version of the LTPO tech means the 10 Pro switches between different refresh rates even faster. Outside of a couple of hiccups here and there when switching between apps, the LTPO function has been great.
I’ve also been happy with the OnePlus 10 Pro’s under-display fingerprint sensor. It’s fast, accurate, and easy to set up. The best part is that it’s now positioned higher up on the display. The OnePlus 9 Pro’s in-screen fingerprint sensor was at the very bottom of the screen — often making it awkward to use. The higher placement on the 10 Pro means it’s much easier and more natural to find. While it sounds like a minor tweak on paper, it makes the fingerprint sensor substantially more enjoyable than its predecessor.
In typical OnePlus fashion, the OnePlus 10 Pro is one of the fastest phones you can find in 2022. It has the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipset, 8GB of RAM, and 128GB of UFS 3.1 storage. While that’s less RAM than the 12GB offered on last year’s OnePlus 9 Pro, I’ve yet to encounter any situation where the 10 Pro has felt slow or sluggish. Apps open quickly, games like Call of Duty: Mobile play like a dream, and every interaction feels as responsive as I could ask for. Multitasking on the 10 Pro is great, too. Despite the reduction to 8GB of RAM this year, the 10 Pro has no problem jumping back and forth between 10+ apps running in the background.
What is concerning is the available storage. 128GB is plenty of space for most people, myself included. But for anyone who likes having multiple games, movies, and photos saved locally on their device, not having an option to go beyond 128GB is a problem. It’s even more frustrating since OnePlus sells 256GB and 512GB versions of the OnePlus 10 Pro in China. For whatever reason, though, U.S. shoppers get 128GB and nothing more.
Shifting gears to battery life, the OnePlus 10 Pro comes with a 5000 mAh battery — a healthy increase over the 4500 mAh battery of the OnePlus 9 Pro. Overall, I’ve been quite happy with the 10 Pro’s endurance. During one of my first full days with the phone, the OnePlus 10 Pro ended the day at 9:05 PM with 5 percent battery remaining. That was after 14 and half hours of total use time, with 6 of those hours spent with the display on. That day consisted of 2 hours and 45 minutes of watching Twitch live streams, paying Call of Duty: Mobile for over half an hour, and plenty of Twitter and web browsing. With less intensive use, the OnePlus 10 Pro easily makes it through a day and a half before needing a recharge. A less demanding day saw the phone sitting at 44 percent battery at midnight with 3 hours and 15 minutes of screen on time. It then made it to 3:06 PM the following day with 2 percent battery remaining and 5 hours and 30 minutes of screen on time.
When the OnePlus 10 Pro’s battery eventually runs out, the phone supports 65W wired charging and 50W wireless charging. While that’s no different from the 65W charging offered by the OnePlus 9 Pro last year, it remains one of the fastest charging systems for smartphones in the U.S. The OnePlus 10 Pro consistently recharges from 5 percent (or lower) to 100 percent in just 33-34 minutes. The best part? The OnePlus 10 Pro comes with a 65W charging adapter in the box.
Compared to the 45W, 30W, and 23W wired charging speeds of other flagships, this is an area where OnePlus remains undefeated. It may not seem like a huge advantage on paper, but it’s one of those things that legitimately changes how you can use your smartphone. With my iPhone 13 Pro, I start looking for a charger when it reaches 30 or 40 percent because I know it’ll take a while to get back up to 100. That’s not a problem I have with the OnePlus 10 Pro. Instead, I’m happily running the 10 Pro down to 5 or even 2 percent battery since it shoots back up to 100 in half an hour. It’s a pretty magical thing, and it’s something I desperately wish other smartphone manufacturers took seriously.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, I wish OnePlus had put more thought into its camera system this year. The OnePlus 10 Pro has a 48MP primary camera, a 50MP ultra-wide camera, and an 8MP telephoto camera. The primary and telephoto cameras are virtually identical to the sensors on the OnePlus 9 Pro. The only real hardware change is the ultra-wide camera, which has a much wider 150-degree field of view. In place of drastic sensor upgrades, OnePlus says all of its work went into the 10 Pro’s image processing — the highlight of which is the ‘One Billion Color Solution’ (a fancy way of saying all three cameras on the OnePlus 10 Pro capture 10-bit color). Combined with the DCI-P3 color gamut, OnePlus claims that the 10 Pro delivers “more delicate and pleasing colors” than ever before.
On its own, the 48MP primary camera takes very good shots. There’s ample detail, optical image stabilization keeps your images steady, and there’s a lot of natural bokeh. The above photo is a great example. There’s good detail in the snow, the background is nicely blurred, and everything is in focus. It’s a good picture!
But for all the hype OnePlus has made for its ‘Billion Colors Solution,’ I’ve actually been pretty disappointed with how the 10 Pro’s colors compare to other flagships. On its own, the above picture of a snowy pond is perfectly fine. It’s not an exciting shot, but there’s also nothing particularly bad about it.
Compared to the same scene shot with the iPhone 13 Pro, it’s immediately clear that something’s off with the 10 Pro’s photo. The iPhone’s photo shows the scene as it appeared in reality. The snow is stark white, there’s a faint blue in the sky, and the image looks appropriately cool. The OnePlus 10 Pro’s photo looks like there’s a tan/brown filter over the whole thing — resulting in a picture that’s much less pleasing to look at.
The OnePlus 10 Pro also disappoints with its low-light photography. I took the above picture pointing the phone straight up at the pitch-black night sky. It was an extremely challenging shot, and it’s one the 10 Pro really struggled with. The entire shot is blurry, there’s a weird halo across the sky, and the 10 Pro gave the sky a strange purple hue. The photo on the right (taken with the iPhone 13 Pro) is far from perfect, but it’s also miles better than what the OnePlus 10 Pro churned out. The iPhone’s shot has better focus, doesn’t have an artificial purple color, and even reveals more stars than are present in the OnePlus photo. Neither photo is perfect, but the iPhone handled the situation much better.
Also disappointing is the 50MP ultra-wide camera. On paper, a 150-degree FoV sounds fantastic. And it kind of is! If you’re trying to photograph an especially large building or another big structure up close, getting that wide of a view can be legitimately helpful. But the implementation isn’t perfect. Photos taken with the full 150-degree FoV have very noticeable distortion on the left and right edges. It’s to be expected with a camera this wide, but it doesn’t make the wrapped angles look any better. OnePlus must know this because it buries the 150-degree capture as a separate shooting mode hidden in the camera app. Tapping the main ultra-wide toggle limits the camera to a narrower 110-degree FoV. There’s no warping of the edges, but you then end up with a smaller FoV compared to the 120-degree shots of the iPhone 13 Pro, Galaxy S22 Ultra, and other handsets. And on top of all that, the smaller sensor size of this new ultra-wide camera means it captures less light than the OnePlus 9 Pro’s ultra-wide sensor.
Then there’s the telephoto camera. It delivers 3.3x optical zoom, 30x digital zoom, and has OIS for stable photos even at tight zoom distances. It’s effectively the same telephoto camera that there was on the OnePlus 9 Pro, which is to say it’s fine. It has solid detail, the OIS works well, and it’s an effective way to get a tighter angle on your subject. It certainly doesn’t push the telephoto camera world forward, but it gets the job done.
If there’s one thing about the 10 Pro that’ll polarize long-time OnePlus fans, it’s the phone’s software. While OxygenOS launched in a fairly unimpressive state in 2015, it’s since matured into one of the best Android interfaces. Its user interface looks like stock Android, there’s minimal bloat, and OnePlus offers robust customization features. At least that was true of the previous OxygenOS versions.
The OnePlus 10 Pro ships with OxygenOS 12.1 based on Android 12. Parts of the interface — like the Quick Settings panel and Settings app — look like the OyxgenOS OnePlus fans are familiar with. But other elements look like they got ripped straight out of ColorOS from an Oppo smartphone. Some of the changes are subtle. The app drawer looks a little different, some Settings pages have a slight redesign, etc. But other tweaks feel like a considerable step backward. You can no longer customize individual app icons, there are only a handful of choices for changing the interface’s accent color (instead of a manual hex code picker), and Android 12’s excellent Material You theme engine is nowhere to be found. Those aren’t game-breaking changes, but they could make the OnePlus 10 Pro a difficult transition from someone on an older model.
If you can get over those changes, there is a lot to like about OxygenOS 12. The OnePlus Shelf (a dedicated page for widgets and app shortcuts) has moved from the left-most home screen to a page you access by swiping down from the top right corner of the display. You can still customize the Shelf with all of the same OnePlus and third-party widgets, except now it’s available on the home screen and in any application. Also new is OnePlus’s ‘Work Life Balance 2.0’ system. Like Focus modes on iOS 15, Work Life Balance 2.0 allows you to switch between a Work and Life profile. Each profile can be configured to enable/disable at set times or actions (like when you connect to a specific Wi-Fi network or arrive at a set location). You can then designate specific Gmail accounts to each profile and choose which apps can send notifications. It’s not quite as robust as Apple’s Focus modes, but it’s a welcome feature nonetheless.
While I’ve personally enjoyed OxygenOS 12 while testing the OnePlus 10 Pro, it’ll be interesting to see how the software changes in the months ahead. OnePlus has already begun teasing its OxygenOS 13 update expected later this year, and some of the promised features sound like they’ll address any issues folks have with the current build. OxygenOS 13 will “improve UI personalization and consistency,” “Improve system consistency and optimize some function paths,” and “Add more features in AOD (like Music Player).” You shouldn’t buy a phone for what a company is promising in the future, but it’s reassuring to know that complaints are being heard. And with the OnePlus 10 Pro promised three major Android updates beyond Android 12, you have a few years of software changes to look forward to.
There’s so much about the OnePlus 10 Pro that I love. Its design is unique and feels great in daily use. The display looks outstanding. Performance is top-notch. The battery is long-lasting and recharges in an instant. All of that’s made the OnePlus 10 Pro a smartphone I’ve genuinely enjoyed using over the last two weeks.
But should you go out and spend $899 of your hard-earned money on the phone? That’s where things get tricky. Even though it’s cheaper than competing flagships from Samsung and Apple, certain things about the OnePlus 10 Pro are difficult to overlook. Not having an official IP rating for a $900 phone is ridiculous in 2022. The questionable structural integrity is concerning too, especially for anyone who doesn’t baby their phone. And the camera system — while good — is behind the OnePlus 10 Pro’s biggest competitors.
If you need ultra-fast charging speeds, an excellent display, snappy performance, and have a hard max budget of $899, the OnePlus 10 Pro fits the bill perfectly. But competition in 2022 is fierce. If you’re OK sacrificing charging performance for a better camera system and IP68 protection, the $899 Pixel 6 Pro is a much better purchase. And if you can up your spending to $999, the Galaxy S22+ and iPhone 13 Pro bring even more to the table. That’s what’s so great about the flagship market today. There’s no one phone that’s unequivocally better than the rest. Whether it’s the iPhone 13 Pro, S22+, Pixel 6 Pro, etc., each one brings something unique to the table. And that’s just what the OnePlus 10 Pro does. It doesn’t dethrone competing flagships. Instead, it sits alongside them as another option. It’s not a flawless option, but it’s one that deserves your attention.
Source: OnePlus