The OnePlus nine Pro (starting up at $969.99) provides a streamlined flagship knowledge to T-Cellular and Verizon subscribers, lastly catching up to its opponents. The cellphone itself is gentle in the hand, and the user encounter is weightless as well. The cameras get knockout pics in very considerably all disorders and the integrated rapidly charging is the very best we’ve observed. The Galaxy S21 Extremely scores a little bit greater in our battery and wi-fi radio testing, is effective with Samsung’s exceptional S Pen stylus, and its digicam delivers killer optical zoom, so it just edges out the nine Professional to be our Editors’ Preference between flagship smartphones. Even now, the OnePlus nine Pro is excellent. If you want a top rated-notch, loaded telephone that can make your heart sing, you might be now spoiled for selection.
The OnePlus Assure Is Eventually Realized
OnePlus was the moment a enterprise that built a solitary great telephone at a time. Now it has a whole line of telephones at T-Cellular (and providers these kinds of as Google Fi, Metro, and Mint Mobile that use T-Mobile’s networks): the $969.99 OnePlus nine Pro, the $729.ninety nine OnePlus 9, the $299.99 OnePlus Nord N10, and the $179.ninety nine OnePlus Nord N100. They all share the OnePlus philosophy, which usually means fast, sophisticated application and a streamlined bodily layout.
Cameras have often been the a person area OnePlus tended to tumble behind Samsung and Apple, so OnePlus designed a offer with Hasselblad for color tuning and bought a new sensor from Sony. As a end result, the 9 Pro’s rear camera stack stands out from the level of competition. It could not have unbelievable optical zoom like the Samsung Galaxy S21 Extremely, but it offers a lot of a lot more alternatives for inventive expression. In addition to the normal broad and extremely-broad lenses you are going to find on most phones, OnePlus added an XPan manner that results in images in a sixty five:24 structure.
The OnePlus 9 features equivalent general efficiency to the nine Pro but methods down a bit on display, digicam, and radio good quality, and it doesn’t combine super-rapidly wireless charging. If you never thoughts individuals downgrades, you can help you save $240 and get an even lesser and lighter telephone. See our critique of the OnePlus nine for all the information.
Light-weight, Smooth Design and style
The nine Pro’s base product has 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. The 12GB/256GB product expenditures an more $a hundred. There is no memory card slot. The cell phone is properly sized, measuring six.42 by 2.89 by .34 inches (HWD) and weighing six.nine ounces. That’s a little broader than the two.8 inches we use as the cutoff width measurement for small telephones, but it can be significantly smaller and lighter than the Galaxy S21 Extremely, and narrower than the OnePlus 8 Professional. Of the a few, the 9 Pro is the least complicated to use with a one hand.
3 sights of the OnePlus nine Professional, demonstrating the green and silver case solutions.
The OnePlus 9 Pro will come in green or silver.
The design, extremely in tune with OnePlus’ “burdenless design and style” philosophy, is trim and stylish. The phone’s physique is rounded, with the conventional OnePlus mute swap on the left facet and the Hasselblad-branded digicam module on the back again. The digicam doesn’t stick out approximately as considerably as the latest Samsung digicam bumps do (simply because it doesn’t have a big periscopic zoom lens in it). The front-struggling with camera is a hole-punch on the higher still left corner, just like on the 8 Professional.
The cellular phone has an IP68 ranking for water and dust resistance, and will come in two colours. If you happen to be not heading to place your cellular phone in a circumstance, we like the matte pine inexperienced far better than the mirrored silver early morning mist glass back, which attracts greasy fingerprints. Our assessment device arrived with a black carbon-fiber circumstance that manufactured that issue moot. (You can find a 3rd, black cellular phone, but OnePlus tells us it will never be marketed in the US.)
The back of the OnePlus nine Pro in silver
The mirrored back of the silver situation is a fingerprint magnet.
In contrast to the Galaxy S21 Extremely and current iPhones, your OnePlus cell phone will come with a cable and a 65W charger. Luxurious! There is a motive: OnePlus utilizes proprietary USB-C chargers. Although the mobile phone will demand from any USB-C resource, it’s going to only attain its maximum charging speeds with the incorporated adapter.
There is no headphone jack or USB-C-to-three.5mm adapter in the box. That explained, the nine Pro sports aptX, aptX Hd, LHDC, and Sony’s LDAC Bluetooth codecs for outstanding wireless audio. If you choose for OnePlus’ Buds Professional earphones, you will get custom made faucet features along with 24-little bit/96kHz audio at up to 900kbits/s. If you happen to be hunting at other wireless earbuds, seem for a pair with LDAC considering the fact that it truly is much more broadly offered and provides the best-resolution audio sent in excess of Bluetooth.
As for the onboard speakers, the audio high-quality is great. Dual stereo speakers deliver audio with a peak volume of 98dB and a surprising bit of mid-bass. For voice calls, which have a maximum quantity of 81dB, the mobile phone supports the most effective voice codec presently available, High definition voice with EVS.
A Brilliant, But Battery-Saving Display screen
The brilliant and crisp six.seven-inch, 525ppi, three,216-by-1,440-pixel display can be dialed again to 1080p in the phone’s options if you want to conserve battery life. The display employs a somewhat new engineering identified as lower-temperature polycrystalline oxide (LTPO) that lessens electric power use and gives mobile phone brands more manage over refresh costs. It can be the same know-how that powers Apple’s Iphone 13 Pro versions as properly as the Samsung Galaxy S21 sequence.
The LTPO screen of the OnePlus 9 Pro, exhibiting an graphic of clouds
The LTPO show allows help save electric power.
This is a best-of-the-line OLED display screen with a reward: It’s very visible in direct daylight. A monitor protector is preinstalled we didn’t eliminate it from our examination unit. According to DisplayMate Labs assessments, the nine Pro’s exhibit set to Car Brightness mode beats the 8 Professional, the Galaxy S20 sequence, and the newest iPhones in ambient light-weight, but not the Galaxy Be aware twenty Extremely. The nine Professional also improves the most colour gamut in its vivid display manner, which will help it retain color saturation in outside lighting.
High brightness mode final results
In addition to in brightness and colour, the 9 Pro’s exhibit isn’t really easily distinguishable from other the latest major-of-the-line OLED panels. The actual information is ability optimization, as the LTPO panel dynamically—and imperceptibly—changes its refresh rate from 120Hz all the way down to 1Hz to help save strength. Examine out our in-depth special for far more on the display.
Color shift final results
Amazing Speed and Ease of Use
OnePlus telephones are generally speedy, and the OnePlus 9 Professional is no exception. It is run by a leading-of-the-line Qualcomm Snapdragon 888. It scored a little bit greater than the Galaxy S21 Extremely on Geekbench, with single-core scores all-around 1125 and multi-core scores all over 3700. Which is a 24% improve on solitary-core outcomes and a 12% maximize on multi-core benefits around the OnePlus 8 Pro. None of these telephones can surpass the Iphone twelve, even though, which scored 1596 SC and 4049 MC with its Apple A14 processor.
The Snapdragon 888 offers a raise in graphics general performance, also. On the GFXBench Auto Chase offscreen benchmark, the nine Professional scored around 70fps, with 37fps onscreen in WQHD method and 58fps onscreen in High definition mode. Which is a major soar up from the 8 Pro, which scored 51fps offscreen and both 26 or 45fps onscreen depending on display resolution.
See How We Examination Telephones
These benchmarks do not get into account OnePlus’ application, which incorporates a bunch of efficiency enhancements. In our practical experience with OnePlus telephones, they feel like the speediest Android telephones, even more quickly than Google Pixels (particularly since Google begun using midrange chipsets in its flagships with the launch of the Pixel 5).
The mobile phone operates Android 11 with OnePlus’ OxygenOS enhancements, and OnePlus claims it’s going to get updates as significantly as Android 13 along with bi-monthly safety updates for three yrs. For a flagship, which is a minimal disappointing, specially since Samsung offers at the very least 3 years of application updates on its spending plan A sequence models.

The 9 Professional in a charging cradle exhibiting a activity.
Higher-stop video games enjoy nicely on the 9 Pro.
OxygenOS has always had a bunch of awesome touches, this sort of as the potential to set up two copies of social-media applications for diverse accounts, a placing to change display screen coloration primarily based on ambient light-weight, and a Zen method that quickly disables the phone’s most distracting functions. With this model, OnePlus adds RAM compression that it suggests improves the quantity of applications that can stay in memory with saved condition. Our exam unit experienced no dilemma trying to keep seven applications in memory, even with the giant RAM-hog Genshin Effect at the again of the line.
To examination cooling, which OnePlus states it truly is improved above past designs, we ran a processor-pumping application known as CPU Throttling Exam on the 9 Professional, the Galaxy S21, and the 8 Pro for 15 minutes. At the 10-minute stage, the eight Pro’s efficiency took a sharp dive to about eighty% of peak. Both equally of the more recent phones were being still protecting nearer to ninety% overall performance at that time. Soon after thirteen minutes of pumping the processor, the Galaxy S21’s efficiency easily declined to a little over eighty% of peak, whilst the 9 Professional remained in the ninety% range. Eventually, the 9 Pro’s performance declined considerably at pretty much particularly 15 minutes as the cell phone tried to interesting by itself down. In the course of the test as a whole, the nine Professional and Galaxy S21 done at 87–88% of max overall performance, while the eight Pro was down at 78%.
Gaming general performance is amped up with a 360Hz contact response amount, but only in four applications: PUBG Cellular, Call of Duty, League of Legends, and Brawl Stars. OnePlus suggests it will function on introducing 360Hz touch assistance to additional game titles. That would unquestionably enable this feature rise from a curiosity to a differentiator. The Samsung Galaxy S20 phones offer you a 240Hz touch sampling rate Samsung won’t give a spec on the Galaxy S21, but we feel it’s the exact same.
Ultra-Tremendous-Mega-Fast Charging
The pair of batteries in the nine Pro total four,500mAh. That is limited of the Galaxy S21 Ultra’s 5,000mAh, but OnePlus has a selection of software program methods up its sleeve to preserve the phone charged—so many that we’re not even positive all of them came into use all through our testing.
On our common battery test, working a YouTube movie about Wi-Fi at entire screen brightness, the cell phone lasted for eight several hours, 50 minutes in WQHD resolution and nine several hours, forty minutes in High definition. Display screen brightness issues a lot to battery daily life: Choose the brightness down to seventy five% and all those quantities bounce to 12 hours, forty minutes on WQHD and thirteen several hours on High definition. Which is a large amount shorter than the Galaxy S21 Ultra (eleven several hours 20 minutes) and the Galaxy S20 FE (12 several hours thirty minutes), but you ought to have no problems obtaining via a working day of reasonable use.
But there’s much more to this battery than meets the eye. To start out with, the display screen slows down to 1Hz when you happen to be wanting at static content material, these as an e-mail you happen to be mulling over or a webpage of an e-e book. That can be a massive electrical power saver. OnePlus also has a track record for getting rid of less energy to qualifications processes than Samsung does. If you use 75% screen brightness most of the time, you can most likely get more than a working day of battery everyday living from a person charge.
OnePlus 9 Professional with USB-C Port in concentration
The Warp Charge 65T charger can entirely recharge the nine Pro in about 30 minutes.
The 9 Pro also has by significantly the quickest charging speeds of any phone we have ever tested. It will come with a Warp Demand 65T USB-C charger, which expenses the 9 Pro from % to twenty% in six minutes and to a hundred% in just 36 minutes. Which is two times as speedy as any new Samsung mobile phone expenses. If you use a 3rd-bash charger, the cell phone will demand at up to eighteen watts, with correspondingly for a longer period charge moments.
The authentic breakthrough is in OnePlus’ new Warp Demand 50 wireless charger, a $69.ninety nine accent cradle that plugs into your present Warp Charge 65 adapter to deliver fifty-watt wi-fi charging for the nine Pro, or 15-watt Qi charging for any other system. In testing with the Warp Demand fifty, the nine Pro went to 29% in eleven minutes and one hundred% in forty six minutes. Other phones, such as the nine, acquire concerning 90 minutes and two hrs to wirelessly cost completely.
This all matches with OnePlus’ strategy to cellphone electricity: It could not have the most important batteries in town, but it can refill them the speediest.
All the 5G Trimmings, for T-Cellular and Verizon
Like other Snapdragon 888 phones, the nine Professional uses a Qualcomm X60 modem, which is effective with all of the attributes T-Cell and Verizon intend to use in the future few many years, together with new airwaves and aggregation schemes. It has Bluetooth five.two and Wi-Fi six as nicely, but not Wi-Fi 6E (as opposed to the Galaxy S21 Ultra).
T-Cell is the only carrier selling the 9 Pro, but if you buy an unlocked product from OnePlus or a retailer, it will also do the job on Verizon. If you try to use it on AT&T, OnePlus suggests it will only join to 4G.
OnePlus 9 (still left) and OnePlus nine Professional (suitable).
OnePlus 9 (remaining) and OnePlus nine Pro (right)
The OnePlus 9 Pro has all of the new systems getting integrated into T-Cell and Verizon’s networks, which includes CBRS, C-band, and millimeter wave.
This is a solitary-SIM cell phone, with no eSIM choice. With a T-Mobile SIM in, the telephone enabled Wi-Fi calling, “good 5G” (which turns 5G on and off to save battery), and dual-channel community acceleration (which employs Wi-Fi and 5G at the very same time if vital). With an AT&T SIM in, as predicted, the telephone made use of only 4G and lacked Wi-Fi contacting.
The major spec variation between the 9 and the 9 Pro is that the 9 Pro has mmWave. T-Mobile at this time only makes use of mmWave in 7 towns, and is most probable to roll it out in tremendous-crowded areas: sporting activities stadiums, concert halls, conference centers, and the like. It can be a could possibly-be-pleasant, not a will have to-have. It truly is is additional fascinating on Verizon, which has mmWave in the centers of additional than 70 towns now.
We analyzed the nine and the 9 Pro from the Samsung Galaxy S21 with 86 rounds of checks utilizing Ookla Speedtest software package in New York Town, in a range of network problems. (Editors’ Be aware: Ookla is owned by Ziff Davis, PCMag’s publisher.) Over seventeen checks, the Galaxy S21 turned in the ideal efficiency, the 9 Pro received a improve from mmWave to come in next, and the 9 dropped to third. Throughout a selection of non-mmWave assessments with combined sign top quality, the Galaxy S21 arrived in 1st area once again. In visit this site -Mobile mid-band “ultra potential” spot, on the other hand, the a few phones executed just about identically.
If you’re exterior a important town, you happen to be likely most concerned about weak-sign general performance. In our tests, the Galaxy S21 confirmed the strongest 4G RSRP signal 29 times the nine Professional was strongest 26 moments, and the 9 was strongest 22 times. So the Galaxy S21 wins once yet again, even though not by considerably. Over six rounds of tests in a weak-signal area, the Galaxy S21 confirmed more robust sign only 3 of the occasions, but the 9 Pro experienced two signal dropouts. The Galaxy S21’s edge is slight but visible.
Blinding You With (Coloration) Science
Imaging collaborations aren’t new for smartphone producers. Huawei has partnered with Leica for years the Zeiss name is plastered on the again of smartphones from Nokia, Sony, and Vivo. Hasselblad’s only former US partnership was with Motorola on its clunky but able Genuine Zoom Moto Mod, but the 9 series brings Hasselblad again to the smartphone marketplace in triumphant design. The nine Pro is able of having extraordinary shots with each and every lens.
The 48MP key lens has an f/1.8 aperture, optical image stabilization (OIS), and electronic impression stabilization (EIS). There’s also a 50MP extremely-extensive lens with an f/2.two aperture, and a 8MP telephoto lens with an f/two.4 aperture, as effectively as a 2MP monochrome sensor. You will discover all the normal flagship bells and whistles on the nine Pro: twin LED flash, multi-autofocus with omnidirectional Section Detection AF (PDAF), Laser AF (LAF), and Distinction AF (CAF). A big 50-megapixel extremely-huge lens can take wonderful minimal-light-weight shots. You will find also 8K movie at 30fps and 4K at up to 120fps, and super-gradual movement at up to 480fps in 720p.
Back again of OnePlus nine Pro with digicam in aim
A huge fifty-megapixel extremely-wide lens usually takes stunning very low-gentle pictures.
For the most component, the digicam app is intuitive and uncomplicated to use. The shutter button is a Hasselblad-branded orange, and it can make a unique Hasselblad shutter audio. Our only complaint is that we located Tilt Shift manner a bit clunky and complicated to use.
Photo of rooftop with eco foliage
The OnePlus 9 Pro’s tumble update improved very low-gentle effectiveness.
Some of the nine Pro’s most important camera capabilities are in the program. Hasselblad worked carefully with OnePlus to update its colour science and create extra capabilities for pro smartphone shooters. In vehicle and Pro modes, colours are warm, with reds and blues finding a healthful saturation enhance when yellows and greens to be a small undersaturated. click this link now to the fact OnePlus and Hasselblad set a major emphasis on the nine series’ color science, we as opposed the 9 Pro to a number of other flagships and discovered it stood up particularly perfectly to the competitiveness.
Apple severely enhanced its coloration science with iOS 14 and the Iphone 12. Where the 9 Pro tends to saturate reds and blues, Apple focuses much more on boosting luminance, so the Iphone 12’s images are inclined to search a very little extra accurate to everyday living than the 9 Pro’s.
Spot photographs from the nine Professional and the Galaxy S21 Extremely side by side and you can immediately understand the variation between the two cameras. OnePlus usually takes a lighter hand with boosting saturation and other computational changes Samsung is significantly additional aggressive. In a person of our exam pics, a dreary March sky captured on the Galaxy S21 Extremely quickly grew to become blue. The nine Professional was a great deal more precise in its overall illustration of the scene.
Facet-by-side pics of a building below a cloudy sky in the photograph on the left, the sky appears blue
The photo hues from the nine Pro (right) are extra accurate than the types shipped by the Galaxy S21 Extremely (left).
In Professional manner, you can change ISO, target exposure time, white equilibrium, and a range of other settings. There’s also the selection to shoot in twelve-bit Uncooked structure, which gives 64 instances the colour details of the ten-bit Raw on other flagships.
The ultra-broad 50MP lens is a Sony IMX 766 sensor that is substantially more substantial than the 1 in the Iphone twelve Pro Max. In our checks the lens did a terrific task in both of those vivid and lower gentle. Pics are crisp with superb depth of subject and sound background depth.
Aspect-by-side ultra-huge-angle images of a setting up
Ultra-wide-angle shots are a major edge for the 9 Professional (suitable), which produces considerably a lot less edge distortion than the Galaxy S21 Extremely (left).
Our shots taken with the major lens have been outstanding as very well. In good gentle, the 9 Pro retains its very own from other flagships, with real looking depth of discipline and rarely any decline of good depth.
In the slide of 2021, OnePlus sent a key update to the camera’s application. Test photographs exhibit much more exact white balance and are crisp without having becoming oversharpened, a widespread trouble with most smartphone cameras. When we reviewed the photos at full sizing, the photographs remained crisp and had significantly less noise.
The application is also speedier in typical and there is considerably less shutter lag. It is really a slight transform, but it helps make a huge big difference when taking photographs with movement.
A snowy rooftop with a number of sculptures and other objects
The key lens will take best-notch images even in muted gentle.
But where the digital camera seriously excels is in minimal light. The main lens did properly, as anticipated. Our examination shots with the fall update remained crisp with an enhanced texture-to-noise ratio. The large improvement, nevertheless, was with dynamic array and in general scene precision. The two worked in conjunction to develop a a lot more trustworthy reflection of the minute.
And even though we ended up specially bowled in excess of by the extremely-extensive lens’ general performance in our original checks, the camera update just manufactured matters greater. All of the improvements we observed in the primary lenses have been evident in our ultra-broad exam shots. These enhancements, combined with the absence of distortion, would make the OnePlus nine Pro’s ultra-vast lens the finest we have analyzed.
A cityscape at evening, with lights reflecting off a moist avenue
Ultra-huge minimal-light-weight photographs are attractive, with remarkably small distortion.
We failed to recognize significantly enhancement in our shots with the telephoto lens immediately after the application update. The OnePlus nine Pro’s telephoto lens is far better than what you can expect to locate on its predecessor, but it continue to does not evaluate with the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra’s. At reduce zoom ranges, our exam photographs experienced a good deal of detail, nevertheless there was some envisioned decline of depth in the length.
Side-by-side photographs of illustrated symptoms at 30x zoom.
The Samsung Galaxy S21 Extremely does a much better occupation at 30x zoom.
As we bumped up the zoom, having said that, we started off to discover sizeable blur and noise when compared with the similar impression taken on the Galaxy S21 Ultra. The unnatural sharpening we found in our first exam photographs, nevertheless, has been substantially improved.
Side-by-facet 10x zoom pictures of a cease indication
Though the Samsung Galaxy S21 Extremely has an edge at 10x zoom, the 9 Pro does a stable career with its modern slide camera update.
Smartphone macro lenses are hardly ever well worth using, but in this article the nine Professional truly stands out. Our macro pictures have been substantially sharper than predicted, and leagues better than images taken with the 8’s 2MP macro lens.
A image of purple and inexperienced macarons on a white plate
Macarons, in macro.
The monochrome sensor functions in tandem with the main sensor to acquire lovely black-and-white photos with a lot of depth and inky blacks. Huawei provided a comparable feature for a long time and then all of a sudden eliminated it, resulting in an outcry from smartphone shutterbugs. If you realized and cherished that element, the 9 Pro’s resurrection of it will delight you.
Black-and-white photograph of general public artwork installation in which a massive white sculpture of a hand grabs a tree trunk
The monochrome lens normally takes sound black-and-white photographs.
The greatest, and most spectacular, modify to the OnePlus 9’s digital camera, however, is the addition of XPan manner. It really is a feature that mimics Hasselblad’s now-discontinued XPan cameras to make an picture that’s reminiscent of those you’d just take with its 30mm and 45mm lenses.
The pictures are cropped to a sixty five:24 facet ratio. It is a remarkable appear that presents you a entire new way to notify tales, and evokes visuals of film stills. There are possibilities to shoot in coloration as nicely as black and white.
It really is tricky to overstate just how a lot place XPan features for creativeness. 4:3 and 16:nine part ratios are so ubiquitous, that it can take a beat to get utilized to all the unique items you can do in the format.
Panoramic shot of a Catholic rectory at night.
XPan mode makes it possible for you to get spectacular shots in a unique part ratio.
We tested XPan in many lights eventualities and it done correctly. Our check pictures were immersive and crisp, with fantastic dynamic vary. Depth of field is great as properly.
Black and white picture of a mid-century developing
Monochrome shots in XPan mode appear gorgeous.
Hasselblad’s exclusive color science for XPan also produces an completely distinctive sense which is equivalent to images shot on Kodak Ektachrome or Fuji Provia slide film. Our photos showed less distinction and a lot more purely natural shades that virtually appear to be somewhat undersaturated considering that we have develop into so accustomed to around-saturation on smartphones.
Decommissioned switching station with festive lights
Portraits and scaled-down scenes glimpse much better with the 30mm focal-size location in XPan method.
On the front of the nine Pro, you’ll obtain a 32MP lens. It performs particularly properly in any lighting condition. There’s a minor track record blur in our pictures, which is to be envisioned. Foreground element and depth of industry, on the other hand, are place on. Portrait manner performs with out a hitch as very well. Our test photographs experienced a natural bokeh and great depth mapping in each individual shot.
A selfie of a bearded white guy in glasses and a cap
Selfies are comprehensive and crystal clear.
One Compact Move Shy of the Crown
The OnePlus nine Pro is an superb phone. At $970, it retains its have in opposition to the a bit far more expensive Galaxy S21 Ultra and Iphone 12 Professional. It will not really match the Galaxy S21 Ultra on camera zoom or community efficiency, but it truly is lighter and sleeker, it has some distinctive camera tips, and there is certainly that renowned OnePlus velocity and elegant application. That amazing rapid charging and the battery-saving screen also make a massive variation in working day-to-working day use. The 9 Professional is better than the OnePlus 8 sequence in each and every way, so the upgrade is very easily warranted. It only fails to nab our Editors’ Option award simply because the Samsung Galaxy S21 Extremely is even more remarkable and can be employed on any provider. The 9 Pro and the Galaxy S21 Ultra collectively at present outline the Android point out of the art. Dependent on your priorities, possibly will serve you really well for the subsequent number of a long time.