The OnePlus 7 Pro is an excellent phone; in his review, Ryne went so far as to call it "the best smartphone you can buy." It's so good, we actually had trouble narrowing this list down to just five of its best features. But even though it's OnePlus's most feature-rich device to date, the company had to make some concessions to hit a characteristic "flagship killer" price point. After considerable deliberation, here are the five best and worst things about the OnePlus 7 Pro, for your consideration.
The Best
Display
If anything signals OnePlus is serious about the 7 Pro's status as a flagship device, it's this display. It's a huge, 1440p, 90 hertz AMOLED panel, with tiny bezels on all sides and no interruption for the front-facing camera thanks to its pop-up design. The screens in Samsung's phones have been the benchmark for mobile display excellence for a hot minute, but this one will give any Galaxy a serious run for its money.
Price
Considering everything the 7 Pro has to offer — the crazy display, the overkill specs, the rock-solid build quality — nobody would bat an eye if the thing started at, say, $900. But OnePlus's whole shtick is punching above its weight with regard to price, and the company stuck to its guns here: you can get a OnePlus 7 Pro for just $669. Samsung's Galaxy S10+ has several features the 7 Pro doesn't — but are they worth an extra $300?
Software
OnePlus continues to deliver on the software front with Oxygen OS, its evenhanded take on Android. Customizations here are minimal and unobtrusive, including perks like the ability to tweak UI accent colors to your liking, scrolling screenshots, and a built-in screen recorder. There's also an interesting feature called Zen Mode that temporarily disables all but the most basic functions of the phone: you can place and receive calls and take pictures, but that's it. It's a little gimmicky, but if you're the type who has trouble disengaging from your device and you've found more standard screen time-limiting measures ineffective, it could be legitimately helpful in changing your behavior.
Warp Charge
Formerly Dash Charge (until Amazon made a fuss over the use of the word dash), Warp Charge is OnePlus's proprietary wired charging protocol. It's nuts. By moving the heat-producing electronics from inside the phone to the charging brick, OnePlus was able to engineer a system that can charge the 7 Pro at up to 30 watts. If you've got a half hour to charge, you can probably pack in enough juice to get you through a full day: 30 minutes on Warp Charge will see the 7 Pro's ample 4,000 mAh battery inch past the halfway point.
Fingerprint sensor
The OnePlus 6T's under-display optical fingerprint sensor was small, sluggish, and just not very good. The 7 Pro remedies that shortcoming with a sensor that covers significantly more display surface area and reads your tiny thumb ridges with pleasing accuracy and acuity. It also handily outperforms the ultrasonic sensor found under the Samsung Galaxy S10's display (although that's not a particularly high bar).
The Worst
Size
You've seen the photos and read the descriptions, and it's entirely true: the OnePlus 7 Pro is absolutely titanic. It is, in all likelihood, larger than the largest phone you've ever used, with a 6.67-inch screen and a weight of nearly half a pound. Considering the absence of any One UI-like optimizations to help with reachability, you're in for some serious finger acrobatics to reach all the elements of the user interface here.
Size preference is subjective, of course; you may very well prefer a tablet that also happens to make calls. But with no meaningfully smaller option available from OnePlus (my kingdom for a five-inch OnePlus 7 Mini!), the 7 Pro's size is rightfully a deterrent for many prospective buyers.
Non-functional glass back
Glass-on-glass construction is one of the more polarizing smartphone design trends du jour. A nice glass back can give a device a decidedly premium vibe, and it's one of the things that makes the OnePlus 7 Pro feel so good in the hand. But despite keeping with trends, glass is a famously fragile material, and the 7 Pro is OnePlus's third consecutive phone to use it entirely for aesthetics. With no practical reason to use glass here, it would've been nice to see a thoughtful aluminum or even polycarbonate design.
No wireless charging
This goes hand-in-hand with the 7 Pro's do-nothing glass back: why can't I plop this thing on a Qi pad to top it up? Warp Charge is almost unbelievably good, and if I had to choose between the two, I'd probably keep crazy-fast wired charging. The absence of wireless charging here isn't due to any technical limitation, though — it's just one of the corners OnePlus cut to keep costs down. Not everyone is sold on wireless charging and a lot of people probably don't mind not having it, but every other top-tier phone offers it, and it's something I've come to expect out of a flagship device.
No headphone jack
People like headphone jacks. Phones should have them. The 3.5-millimeter auxiliary jack is increasingly positioned as a budget feature (the rationale being that if you buy a fancy phone, you probably either already have or can afford Bluetooth headphones, I guess?), and the 6T didn't have one either, so its absence in the 7 Pro is unsurprising. Still, it's a disappointment. Adding further salt to the wound, OnePlus doesn't include a USB-C-to-3.5 millimeter dongle in the box. That's just cheap.
Cameras
This isn't a phone you should buy for the cameras. As you'd expect, the cameras in the OnePlus 7 Pro are the best in any OnePlus phone to date — the primary sensor is a whopping 48 megapixels, and there are wide and telephoto lenses here, too. Even so, OnePlus can't compete with the camera prowess of bigger players like Samsung, Huawei, Apple, or Google.
Shots from the 7 Pro are frequently overexposed and washed out, even with HDR mode enabled; aggressive ISO can make photos grainy; and low-light shots are sometimes blurry due to excessively long exposure. These aren't bad cameras by any means — but mobile photography is sufficiently advanced that good is table stakes, and the $399 Pixel 3a's camera trounces the $669 7 Pro's in nearly every scenario.