7 Alternative facts you didn’t know about the OnePlus 7 Pro

OnePlus 7 Pro Pop-up Camera 6.67 Inch 4G LTE Smartphone Snapdragon 855 6GB 128GB 48.0MP + 8.0MP + 16.0MP Triple Rear Cameras Android 9 In-display Fingerprint NFC Fast Charge Global ROM

Today I am reviewing the OnePlus 7 Pro, arguably the phone of the year so far, and I’m not the only one who thinks that. So usually when a new mobile phone first comes out, I get to do impressions video of what I first think about it when it gets released. We then talk about it in the comments section for a little bit, and we later try and figure out what people are most curious about for the full article review. Once I determine that I go about writing the report. But of course with the OnePlus 7 Pro that wasn’t the case.

I had just a couple weeks to use it and then went straight into writing the report skipping the impressions video. So now after that, there’s been a couple of things have bubbled up over the last few days, and there are some interesting tidbits for this report or updates to it that I still think are pretty impressive.

So this report is all the little things you might still not know about the OnePlus 7 Pro and some clarification on things that were in it.

1 – Waterproof

So, first of all, being waterproof, so the OnePlus 7 Pro isn’t technically IP certified(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_Code), but they have also made this point to pretty much tell everyone their phones are safe being splashed on. I did an initial test with the phone totally underwater in a bowl next to me for about 10mins and took it out at the end, and it was fine. Basically getting a phone officially IP certified means adding all the rubber and the SEALs internally and then going through independent testing that costs extra money.

So OnePlus has made it a point to still go through the same diligence to add all the rubber and the seals but not pay for the independent testing and just pass along those savings to us. I can only assume that they’ve done some sort of internal testing on their own, which gives them this confidence that they can tell people you can splash water on it or go out in the rain. I don’t know how much per unit this actually saved us, as buyers. I’ve heard numbers ranging from 10 dollars to 30 dollars per unit, which sounds like a lot to me. But the bottom line is I’m okay with it as long as the third party testing seems to show this will hold up fine.

2 – RAM

For those wondering about RAM. Since there are a couple of different specs, you can get off the OnePlus 7 Pro with either six, eight or 12 gigs of RAM. So you can check this out on a page on oxygen OS where it shows your average RAM usage from medium to heavy use.

Check RAM usage in Android oxygen OS.

Step 1: Go to settings in your OnePlus 7 Pro device
Step 2: Tap System
Step 3: Tap developer options
Step 4: Scroll down and tap Running services

I’m averaging around five gigs of memory used, so technically I’d be fine with six gigs ram, but I think I’d go ahead and upgrade to eight just to be safe. OnePlus only charges 30 dollars oxygen OS for the upgrade.

So at $699 you give yourself a little headroom but twelve gigs of RAM is a bit more about future-proofing and taking advantage of OnePlus Ram boost feature where it preload some parts of apps into the RAM so can not open any and faster, but that’s you know bordering on overkill. I love it, but you’ll only really notice it at the crazy high end of using the phone, and then there’s still no G Cam app or Google Camera port for the OnePlus 7 Pro yet. I am again crossing my fingers for it, though. Side note I don’t know how exactly it’s going to work with multiple cameras since all of Google’s phones only have one camera. Could be interesting to see what that ends up looking like.

3 – Stock Camera App

Anyway, the stock camera app also has some things to note. Number one, in the settings you can turn it on or off. It has Ultra wide-angle correction by default. It’s on, and I think most people will like it this way it minimizes distortion around the edges, but if you turn it off, this gives you a bit of a more distorted GoPro like look that you might be into. So if you want to turn it off the choice is yours then too you can actually choose which photo modes show up in the slider along the bottom and in what order. So if you take a lot of nightscope shots or if you use to promote a lot you can just move those up to be a slide away all the time or remove the ones you don’t use.

So that’s excellent customization that actually wish stock Android had. Then you cannot record video from the ultra-wide camera you can from the regular camera or even the telephoto but not from the ultra-wide like LG and why they let you. That is disappointing to me. I asked one plus about it. They told me officially they do not have plans to support video from the wide-angle camera. That’s what they said. Okay.

4- Retracting selfie camera

Another note people were asking a lot about the speed of the retracting selfie camera. So what’s cool is if this little pop-up selfie camera is out and the phone detects some sort of freefall it automatically retracts into the phone. So in case, it lands somewhere around there it’ll prevent damage. That’s smart. So I roughly timed how long it takes the motor to open and close since it’s not instant and it seems to take somewhere around half a second to actually go from entirely out to retracted freefall in that time is somewhere around one point two meters or four feet for any object including this phone. So that means if you’re at like normal selfie height and you drop it from five feet, it will be fully retracted by the time it hits the ground. But if you’re just dropping it on a counter or just like from pocket height and it’s not quite four feet there’s a chance it’ll still actually not be done retracting by the time it hits the ground.

But honestly, I still think halfway retracted is always better than fully expose if it happens to land on it. So I still think this feature is useful and a lot of fresh videos came out of it too.

5 – Oxygen OS

All right so there are some other features in oxygen OS that I’d wanted to see in some different skin. So this applies to more than just the OnePlus 7 Pro but also in a bunch of OnePlus phones that includes the ability to change the accent colour of the entire OS to literally any colour you want. That’s pretty dope. Being able to hide any of the icons up in the top in the status bar. If you don’t want them to be there. I still love that I can do that and then also this little animation for stuff in the quick settings like turning on and off Airplane mode. It’s a charming, subtle touch a couple other ROMS too do this. And then since it’s such a big phone the ability to swipe down anywhere and get notifications or swipe up anywhere in the launcher to get the App drawer, you can do this with third-party launchers but of course, being in the stock launcher that’s convenient too. I’ve seen this before, and I’m happy to have it here on such a big phone.

6 – Clarifications

So first on refresh rate, I think I mentioned that it was locked at 90 Hertz. Technically this is actually already variable refresh rate. So the OnePlus 7 Pro display is always locked at 90 Hertz unless you are watching a video in the camera app or on a phone call in which case it will go down to 60 hertz. So that’s what I heard from OnePlus officially. Those are the times it goes down. So that makes sense. Only 90 Hertz on a phone call or even when you’re watching a 30 FBI video or in the camera app where you’re not doing 90. Yes, those are the good times for it to throttle down but even still if you’re just on the home screen or if you’re just sitting reading an article and not moving the screen too much it’s still refreshing rate locked at 90 Hertz. So that’s always going to be eating through some battery life. So it says sort of a middle-level compromise, and there is still a possibility of a software update coming to improve those times where it can be refreshed invariably more often.

7- Battery

And then speaking of battery. A lot of people didn’t like my assessment of the four to four and a half hours of screen on time I was getting on the OnePlus 7 Pro game. Some other reviewers are getting 6, to 7 hours but that screen on time metric that I used it’s extremely relative and specific to your usage.

You can’t really just directly compare one person’s screen on time to another person screen on time, because these people don’t use the same apps or the same accessories or even the same brightness also I’ve notoriously had a very taxing way of using my phone’s high brightness all the time. Bluetooth always on NFC always on a GPS navigation multitasking often so you can compare my four and a half hours a screen on time on this phone with my screen on time across other devices I’ve used the same way which will range between like three hours on the worst ones to the 6 or 7 hours of the champ the Huawei P30. That being said the battery life on my OnePlus 7 Pro, it’s actually slowly gotten more consistent and slightly better over the weeks I’ve used it, but it’s still not fantastic. Since I leave 90 Hertz on and it’s a 1440 P display max brightness, but I haven’t gotten past 5 hours a screen on time on a day just quite yet. It’s not terrible by any means, but you know fast charging usually saves the day for me most of the time. And then lastly there is a standard OnePlus 7 coming. It’s just not coming to the US, so there’s a OnePlus 7 Pro we all know that starts at $699. OnePlus 7 will be you know essentially a revised version of the OnePlus 6, the teardrop notch a 10 ADP ammo led 60 hertz but just with internal specs bumped up Snapdragon 55.

That type of thing. I kind of still wish that was coming to the US at a lower price. That would’ve been pretty exciting, but I also fully understand OnePlus pricing strategy here. Maybe I’ll try to get my hands on the standard OnePlus 7 anyway. Maybe let me know in the comments if that’s something you’d be into. Honestly, though the price of the OnePlus 7 Pro is still kind of unusual though. Like if you imagine this from any other mobile phone manufacturer. Imagine for a second. Samsung comes out with a special edition Galaxy S 10 Plus right now some new colour, or something and they give it no hole punch, and 90 Hertz display and 12 gigs of RAM like you could easily see that phone being a thousand plus dollars. Right.

But because it’s OnePlus we had a particular set of expectations for it, and I still would say it delivered anyway. I hope this article clears up any questions people had about the OnePlus 7 Pro or give you some extra information you need.

Thanks to this one being done. All right. Thanks for reading. Till next time.