7 things you need to know about the OnePlus 7 Pro

OnePlus has steadily built its reputation of being able to bring a great, almost-flagship experience to users who can’t afford to spend thousands on their devices. While this is the company’s most expensive phone to date, the OnePlus 7 Pro has managed to reduce the amount of compromises it’s had to make to produce a more affordable premium phone. Here are the things you need to know about it:

Price

There are two colour options coming out via OnePlus.com starting May 17: Mirror Gray and Nebula Blue. A third Almond colour option will be available post-launch. The base model starts at $999 for the 6GB RAM/128GB ROM option in Mirror Gray, $1,049 for the 8GB RAM/256GB ROM option in Mirror Gray and Nebula Blue, $1,119 for the 12GB RAM/256GB ROM option in Nebula Blue. The Almond option will come in a 6GB RAM/128GB ROM option, but there is no word yet on how much that will cost.

When compared to the OnePlus 6T, the base model of this phone is $274 more expensive before it became available. But for the first time in Canada, OnePlus will be offering a device trade-in program, allowing you to get a discount off your OnePlus 7 Pro purchase by trading in select devices via Phobio. All past OnePlus phones are eligible to trade in.

What’s missing

Now that we have price out of the way, let’s talk about what you can’t get on this phone. The headphone jack is finally gone. If you want to spend on wireless headphones, OnePlus has its new Bullet 2 wireless headphones.

There isn’t an official water resistance rating here, either. But this is given with the movable, pop-up camera. It can handle a bit of a spill, but otherwise, don’t take it swimming with you.

And no wireless charging still. If you’ve made the move to going wireless, well, you wouldn’t be able to do that with this phone. OnePlus claims it still doesn’t believe the wireless charging technology hasn’t been able to live up to its own proprietary fast-charging standards just yet.

Battery & charging

You get a sizeable 4,000mAh battery here that promises to get you through your day. Now, if you’re a heavy user, you can rely on the aforementioned fast-charging technology. With the company’s Warp Charge 30 cable and plug, you can get up to half of the phone’s battery life in 20 minutes.

Camera

One area that OnePlus has been improving on is its phone’s camera capabilities. With the OnePlus 7 Pro, the company hopes to change your opinion of its mobile photography capabilities. You get a 48-megapixel main camera, 16-megapixel wide-angle lens, and 8-megapixel telephoto lens. OnePlus isn’t the first to do this setup, you’ve seen this on Samsung’s and Huawei’s flagships. DxOMark, a camera industry benchmarking company gave this phone the third best score against the current crop of phones, with just a point behind the Galaxy S10+ and Huawei P30 Pro.

As for the front camera, OnePlus opted to use a pop-up 16-megapixel camera. This allows for an almost bezel-less full screen display. If you’re worried about accidentally breaking it, OnePlus claims it’ll automatically retract the camera if it detects that you’ve dropped it. And the camera itself can reportedly support the weight of a 40-pound block without snapping off.

Display

As mentioned, you get an almost full-screen display here. And it’s a big one, measuring 6.67 inches diagonally. It’s a super sharp AMOLED display, too, with a 90Hz refresh rate. With the screen refreshing 90 times a second, you get a smooth experience—whether you’re scrolling through a site or tweets, playing games, typing, or watching something on it.

Specs

You’ve already read what memory and storage options this phone has. And as we said, you get up to 12GB of RAM here and up to 256GB of internal storage. The OnePlus 7 Pro is also powered by the latest Snapdragon 855 processor, so expect nothing less than a fast, smooth experience. OnePlus takes away as much of the bloatware as it can, with OxygenOS mirroring as much of stock Android as it can.

No OnePlus 7 here

This last one might be a bit of a copout. But if you were thinking about getting the more affordable OnePlus 7, then you won’t be able to get that here. OnePlus has no plans to release this version in Canada. Instead, OnePlus will be offering a discounted version of the OnePlus 6T. It’ll be $40 less, which means it’ll cost $729 for the 8GB/128GB model and $799 for the 8GB/256GB model.