OnePlus 8 Review – The Beginning of The End for OnePlus?

OnePlus, the company that started the race to make the cheapest and most powerful flagship out there. Does it still hold the crown of flagship killer?

As a professional cheapskate, I find myself struggling to accept the constantly climbing prices of smartphones. Even the “budget” options are slowly making their up the ladder to the prices of the flagship from companies such as Apple, Samsung and Huawei. I’ve watched OnePlus, follow that same dark path into the flagship zone whilst continuing to spout their Never Settle mantra. OnePlus however has indeed settled. Although they do still offer good value for money, they certainly settle.

I’ve had the OnePlus 8 since September 2020 and it’s been absolutely brilliant. I did however manage to get it at slightly less than full price from John Lewis using their price match guarantee. Like I said, professional cheapskate. I’ve actually been using a OnePlus since the release of the OnePlus 3 in 2016. I’ve gone from OP3 to OP6 and now to OP8. I certainly don’t feel the need to get a new phone every year and even at the rate that I upgrade I sometimes feel guilty as I feel that I could get much more use out of a phone than I currently do. But to be fair it is the only thing I really treat myself too, when it comes to more expensive purchases.

So, the actual phone. What makes it good. Why do I consider it a good phone. You can get a “good” phone for much cheaper nowadays, and as MKBHD says “good phones are getting cheap and cheap phones are getting good”. The competition in the budget phone sector has been getting stronger and stronger since OnePlus first set foot in the market. Progressively they have been facing tougher and tougher competition from similar companies such as RealMe and Oppo. For example, when I was looking into a new phone, the RealMe X50 Pro 5G was an extremely tempting offer however my previous experience with OnePlus gave them the edge for me. Now however, with their ever increasing prices, OnePlus may not be able to draw me back on brand loyalty alone.

OnePlus really has hit the nail on the head when it comes to performance. The Snapdragon 865 5G has been flawless for everyday running, and I personally don’t game on mobile as I honestly have never felt a worse gaming experience than trying to use touch controls. I have however, notices occasional software hiccups, especially after the latest update to Oxygen OS 11. Oxygen OS 10 seemed far more reliable to me than their latest update, and I have to say, their recent announcement merging their software codebase with Oppo’s colour OS has been a bit of a comfort as I think with their far more sizable device line-up has caused a bit of a slowdown in their software update schedule. Their is now a guarantee from OnePlus that all of their more recent phones, up to and including the OnePlus 8 will now get three major software updates and four years of security updates (although some of their older phones are left dead in the water). This change in policy may lead to a more consistent update cycle and a more polished final software experience.

This was also the first phone I had used with a display refresh rate higher than 60Hz and I have to say it’s very nice indeed. I do notice the difference when using someone else’s device and I had initially thought that I would never be able to live without it but after swapping between the two every so often I realised that after going back to 60Hz for any longer than about 5 minutes I barely even felt any change. I simply adapted. That’s not to say that I wouldn’t prefer 90 or even 120Hz but it’s not as life changing as I initially thought. Perhaps 120 would make me more convinced as I do enjoy that on the iPad Pro. The AMOLED screen has once again proven to be a great viewing experience. Everything looks great on it, especially content on Netflix in HDR, however the brightness is a bit strange. In most conditions it works flawlessly, however in bright light, it seems to overcompensate and use some sort of excessive brightness boosting that makes colours look blown out. It does make the display more visible but I can’t fathom why the brightness would need to be that excessively high and that suddenly.

The cameras have always been an area in which OnePlus have unfortunately settled. The hardware they use for photography is still top of the line, although we’ll not mention the waste of space that is the “macro camera” which is utterly useless. The results that I achieved from the two other camera, that is the wide and the ultrawide were certainly impressive although in some situations the viewfinder seemed to make the image look better than the actual image ended up after post processing. Occasionally, areas of the image appeared a bit painting like, with a sort of smudged look. This has been a recurring issue with the processing OnePlus uses one it’s smartphones and for some reason they seem determined to keep it. I also fiddled around with a few variations of the Google Camera app port and it also produced nice results, although not that dissimilar to that of OnePlus’s efforts. I really appreciate the ultrawide however. I didn’t think it would be that useful but it really does improve how some shots look, allowing for more of a landscape to be captured in a group photo or just getting a closeup that also covers more area. Speaking of closeups, the macro camera is a waste of space. I think it’s sole purpose is to allow them to market the phone as a triple camera setup, when in actuality you get better “macro” shots when you just zoom in with the primary wide angle camera.

So overall, the OnePlus 8, was it a successful product, obviously yes. It hits all the marks I wanted it to hit and it looks good doing it. However, the price hikes OnePlus has been making with each generation of phone makes it seem less and less likely that I will be sticking with them in the future unless their Nord line-up fills the gap more effectively. Until then I’ll be looking for a company like RealMe or even looking towards Apples cheaper iPhone’s, as they’ve been making all the right moves when it comes to software updates recently. But until then the OnePlus 8 will do very nicely.