OnePlus 10 Pro review: A Good Phone but Lacks Greatness

OnePlus 10 Pro review has been overdue for some time as I have been using the phone for a while now. The 10 Pro has been grabbing headlines ever since it made its debut in China a couple of months ago which made me a lot more curious. OnePlus as a brand has been going through a transition and I was eager to see if the new Pro has once again managed the consistency that we have come to expect of OnePlus flagships. 

OnePlus 10 Pro Review: Design and build quality

I have to admit something here. When I saw the initial renders of the OnePlus 10 Pro, I felt disappointed with the design choices. However, my opinion about the OnePlus 10 Pro’s aesthetics changed when I got the opportunity to see and feel it in person. The OnePlus 10 Pro is wide, tall, and seems sleeker than it really is. Somehow it doesn’t feel like an 8.6mm thick and 201-gram heavy phone. Its outward curving sides certainly help in ensuring it feels slim and handy.

What makes the OnePlus 10 Pro look distinctive from most of its contemporaries is the rear camera module which seems inspired by Samsung S-series flagships. The entire rear camera array seamlessly merges with the side frame and back panel. The camera module includes three sensors and a LED Flash ring. Out of these three cameras, primary and telephoto cameras jut out slightly above the camera island. There is Hasselblad branding etched on the camera bump.

The unit that OnePlus loaned us is an Emerald Forest which is basically a shade of green at the back. The glass-made rear panel has a matte glass texture which looks and feels excellent in hand.

The glass front and back are held together by an aluminum frame which gets a matte anodized finish. OnePlus’ classic alert slider can be spotted on the right edge just above power. Since it’s a tall phone, it is not easy to reach the alert slider without adjusting your grip. You will find the volume rocker sitting on the left edge. The top edge of the OnePlus 10 Pro is flat housing a noise-canceling mic and earphones to hear calls. At the bottom, there is a loudspeaker, charging port, primary mic, and sim tray.

What about build quality you may ask? Well, the phone has a Corning Gorilla Glass 5 shield on the back, and Gorilla Glass Victus on the front for the display which is currently considered one of the best glass protection. While that’s good, Youtuber performed a bend test on camera where he snapped the phone in half. We didn’t push the phone to those extremes in our testing. Having said that, I have been using the OnePlus 10 Pro as my primary device for about three weeks and it has managed to maintain its posture. As a caution, we would advise you against carrying the OnePlus 10 Pro in your back pocket or putting excessive pressure on the phone.

OnePlus 10 Pro Review: Display

The OnePlus 10 Pro houses a 6.7-inch AMOLED screen that can deliver up to 3216×1440 resolution. While the resolution remains the same as its predecessor, OnePlus has upgraded it with LTPO 2.0 panel which can go all the way down to 1Hz from 120hz.

The 10-bit panel used here covers RGB and Display P3 color offers a 100 percent colour gamut. Interestingly, the OnePlus 10 Pro display is dual-colour calibrated at 500 nits and 100 nits for better accuracy. In real life, the OnePlus 10 Pro display is one of the better screens on the market.

I thoroughly enjoyed consuming content on the OnePlus 10 Pro. The screen looks sharp, vibrant, and accurate. That’s right, OnePlus has ensured it has better colour accuracy than OnePlus 9 Pro. Legibility is also not an area of concern here. The display is adequately bright and you can see or read text on the screen under direct sunlight without straining your eyes.

While that’s all great, there’s one area of concern here, that’s dynamic refresh rate implementation. The OnePlus 10 Pro screen can switch between 120Hz, 90Hz, 60Hz, 30Hz, 5Hz, and 1Hz to conserve battery. The algorithms running on the 10 Pro are slightly more aggressive than usual which makes the screen stutter while scrolling in a few apps. We hope OnePlus addresses that soon.

The screen used here can handle HDR 10 and HDR10+ to deliver good visuals while watching movies and shows.

OnePlus 10 Pro Review: Software and Performance

OnePlus OxygenOS has had tremendous goodwill among consumers. Most of us really enjoyed it up until OnePlus decided to botch it up by syncing it with ColorOS. Following the backlash, the brand has tried to course-correct but it is still a work in progress. The OnePlus 10 Pro ships running on Oxygen OS 12.1. The skin comes with only useful apps, so you won’t find glance integration or any hot apps store or spammy browser.

OnePlus continues to use its own font, its own wallpapers, and features like shelf are also present here. The software also offers several customization options and option choices between themes. In Oxygen OS12.1 you can also change accent colors, font, and more.

The new camera app looks more like an OPPO app than the OnePlus camera app that we used in the past. OnePlus has retained its Zen Mode, (basically Airplane mode) and HyperBoost Gaming to optimize games for the best experience.

Coming to performance, the OnePlus 10 Pro is nowhere close to being a sloth. The phone is driven by Qualcomm’s best of 2022 – the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. The octa-core chipset follows a tri-cluster approach using 1x Cortex-X2 core (3.0 GHz) for high performance, coupled with 3x Cortex-A710 cores (2.5 GHz) for performance, and 4x Cortex-A510 cores (1.8 GHz) for energy-efficient performance. The Adreno 730 GPU handles graphics.

Over the years OnePlus flagships have been a preferred choice for gamers, especially for their thermal performance. This year must have been a challenging one since Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 has a reputation for generating a lot of heat. Two counter that, OnePlus used a twin approach, first placing a custom-made vapour chamber, copper foil, and copper carbon to dispel heat from the motherboard. Secondly, OnePlus has slightly underclocked it to ensure it doesn’t generate excessive heat. This can be deduced with the synthetic benchmark numbers. The OnePlus 10 Pro benchmark numbers are slightly lower than other Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 phones.

While the benchmark numbers are slightly below its rivals, it runs smoothly and manages heat dissipation rather well. On the OnePlus 10 Pro, we were able to run AAA titles without excessive heating for far longer than other Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 phones we had. There was no area of concern as well. We tried using Adobe mobile apps for photo editing and that too worked well. Overall, I am happy with the performance the OnePlus 10 Pro offers and it is likely to sustain in the long run.

OnePlus 10 Pro Review: Cameras

The OnePlus 10 Pro cameras are not much different from the OnePlus 9 Pro. The main 48MP Sony IMX789 sensor and the 8MP OmniVision OV08A10 telephoto sensor are the same as those used on the OnePlus 9 Pro. Then there’s a 50MP Samsung ISOCELL JN1 sensor which can cover 150 degrees field of view.

In terms of picture quality, the 10 Pro, by default, delivers 12-megapixel images. In daylight, those images turned out to be bright and vibrant with a workable dynamic range. The camera is tuned in such a way that it focuses more on highlights and trickles-down shadows to make images look contrasty.

Over the years OnePlus has managed to improve things when it comes to color dynamics. But there are still some niggles that need to be ironed out. The AI scene optimization boosts colours to make images more likeable. To be fair, it succeeds most times but it tends to tilt the white balance slightly towards warm tones resulting in a slight yellow cast.

The Telephoto camera on the 10 Pro offers a 3.3x zoom which is useful and useable images. There’s also an ultrawide snapper which delivers comparatively softer details but is still good enough to put it up on social media. The ultra-wide camera also has 150° mode which captures a full field of view including the distorted corners.

In the low light scenario, the main camera outperforms the other two sensors in performance terms. It can capture a good amount of details even in default mode. Of course, in the dark, you will have to depend on the night mode to get any workable results. In night mode, it takes long exposure shots along with modern processing to ensure detailed images with decent dynamic range.

Like most smartphones, the OnePlus 10 Pro also has a dedicated portrait mode which uses the main camera along with a computational algorithm to create background blur. It gets it right almost every time. There is also a blur adjustment option that you can do after clicking the picture.

The OnePlus 10 Pro camera can also capture 10-bit and 12-bit images in RAW and RAW+ modes, respectively if you want more control for post-processing. As for videos, the camera is capable of recording up to 8K videos at 24fps. For best results, we would recommend you to record in 4K at 30fps.

OnePlus 10 Pro Review: battery life

Speaking of battery life, the OnePlus 10 Pro comes with a dual-cell battery which collectively offers 5000mAh of capacity. Compared to OnePlus’ previous flagship, the 10 Pro packs a bigger battery and offers better backup. We manage to survive without charging with the OnePlus 10 Pro. However, when it comes to charging OnePlus bundles an 80W wired charger with the phone which delivers superfast charging speeds. With the bundled charger, I was able to fully refill the depleted battery in about 40 minutes.

That’s not all, the OnePlus claims to offer 50W wireless charging via its proprietary charger sadly which I couldn’t test as I didn’t have a Warp wireless charger at my disposal while charging.

Review verdict: Should you buy OnePlus 10 Pro?

OnePlus as a brand has risen by offering products that were unparalleled in terms of experience, premiumness, and value. The OnePlus 10 Pro more or less still retains these strengths, but the value play is no longer its forte. Having said that, it is still less harsh on pockets when compared to the latest and greatest from Samsung and Apple. Of course, there are areas like cameras and software updates roadmap where both Samsung and Apple have an edge over OnePlus. Nonetheless, the OnePlus 10 Pro in its own right works great and if you have the budget you need not shy away from buying it.