Monday, June 15, 2020

OnePlus 8 Hands-On

Two months ago, OnePlus officially launched its successors to the OnePlus 7T, the OnePlus 8 series smartphones. It boasts high refresh rate AMOLED displays, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 865 chipset paired with up to 12GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage. But today, we’ll be checking out the vanilla OnePlus 8.

The OnePlus 8 is a very sleek piece of hardware that feels super-premium. It is one of the cheaper flagship devices on the market, but make no mistake, for the OnePlus 8’s design doesn’t feel cheap at all.

The back has a beautiful frosted Gorilla Glass 5 panel that isn’t that prone to smudges and fingerprints, which is excellent. Here we find the vertically aligned rear camera module in the upper center. It’s either that OnePlus isn’t a fan of the square-type camera module, or they’re saving it for next-gen devices.

For display, we get a 6.55-inch AMOLED display with a resolution of 2400 x 1080 at a refresh rate of 90Hz, along with HDR10+ support. This makes it an almost perfect display for most usual tasks like media consumption, gaming, and productivity.

The bezels are quite thin, but the screen isn’t precisely edge-to-edge, and the front camera is hidden with a punch-hole setup. The fingerprint scanner is also kept under the display and is of the optical variety. All these things contribute to the phone’s very clean look.

On the left side, we get the volume rocker.

On the right, we have OnePlus’ signature three-way volume switch and power button.

At the bottom, we’ll find the loudspeaker, primary microphone, USB-C port, and card tray that supports two nanoSIM cards. Sorry, no microSD expansion here.

Finally, up top, we get the secondary noise-canceling microphone.

At the back, we’ll find the cameras consisting of a 48MP primary sensor, a 16MP ultrawide, and a 2MP macro while for selfies, we get a single 16MP shooter.

Powering the OnePlus 8 is a Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 chipset with an Adreno 650 GPU, up to 12GB of RAM, and up to 256GB of internal storage. We’ve all seen how well the Snapdragon 865 performs, so there is no questioning this phone’s performance chops. Running the device is OxygenOS 10 on top of Android 10, which is probably one of the cleanest Android skins in the market.

For the battery, we get a 4,300mAh cell, which is relatively big but doesn’t contribute a lot to the phone’s weight, which is nice.

Only the 8GB + 128GB variant of the OnePlus 8 is available at Digital Walker for PHP35,990. And for a pretty solid flagship device, that’s a competitive price, especially considering how much a smartphone of this caliber costs these days. If you want to find out more about the OnePlus 8, stay tuned for our full review.

OnePlus 8 specs:
6.55-inch FHD+ (2400 x 1080) Fluid AMOLED 90Hz display, 402ppi
HDR10+
Corning Gorilla Glass
Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 octa-core CPU
Adreno 650 GPU
8GB, 12GB LPDDR4X RAM
128GB, 256GB UFS 3.0 w/ Turbo Write and HPB
Triple-rear cameras: 48MP Sony IMX586 F1.75 OIS + EIS (main) + 16MP F2.2 (ultra-wide) + 2MP F2.4 (macro)
16MP Sony IMX471 F2.45 front camera (fixed-focus)
Dual-SIM (nano)
5G, 4G LTE
WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac/ax
Bluetooth 5.1 aptX HD
NFC
GPS (L1+L5 Dual Band), A-GPS, GLONASS, Galileo (E1+E5a Dual Band), Beidou, SBAS
Haptic Vibration 2.0
Fingerprint scanner (in-display)
Face Unlock
USB Type-C 3.1
Dual Stereo Speakers w/ Dolby Atmos
OxygenOS (based on Android 10)
4,300mAh battery w/ Warp Charge 30T (5V/6A)
160.2 x 72.9 x 8.0 mm
180 g
Onyx Black, Interstellar Glow, Glacial Green