OnePlus 9 — Review & Full Phone Specifications
oneplus 9 pro has been getting it can be pretty easy to forget its more affordable sibling it too should benefit from the collaboration with hasselbladand it also has a powerful snapdragon 888 chipset so should you get this phone
which has a glossy finish though there are two other color options with matte ones it’s slightly smaller than the pro and it’s around 10 grams lighter in markets like india and china than in north america and Europe possibly due to wireless charging support the phone has gorilla glass 5 on both sides and a reinforced plastic frame that’s high quality enough
that it could easily fool most people into thinking it’s metal while this phone has some level of protection from water and dust it’s not an ip68 rating which is disappointing on the front the display lies flat and there’s only a tiny punch hole in the corner
slim bezels all around there’s an optical fingerprint reader which we found to be located a bit lower than we’d like it works fast and accurately for the most part but if you switch up fingers even if both are registered the system can get a bit confused and unlock a little slower while the 9 doesn’t have the ltpo screen like the pro
the display is impressive nonetheless the oneplus 9 has a 6.5 inch fluid 8-bit AMOLED panel with a full HD resolution and a 120 hertz refresh rate if any of this sounds familiar it’s because it’s identical to the display on the oneplus 8t the oneplus 9 had exceptionally good color accuracy
Specifications of the OnePlus 9
the display achieved near 100 coverage in both the srgb and display p3 color spectrums you can switch between either natural or vivid color modes though we prefer the more accurate natural mode here brightness was great with a maximum of 821 nits
the high refresh rate can ramp down to save power but since it isn’t an ltpo display it won’t go down to one hertz like on the 9 pro whenever you’re interacting with the display it’ll refresh at 120 hertz but when you’re not like when you’re watching a video or using the camera it’ll drop down to 60 hertz really disappointing
that oneplus lacks support for high refresh rate gaming there’s only a couple of games that has whitelisted and even these only run at a maximum of 90 hertz as far as the audio is concerned the oneplus 9 has a stereo speaker setup with a dedicated loudspeaker on the bottom and the earpiece as a second channel the phone got a very good rating on our loudness test which is pretty much the same result as on the oneplus 9 pro
its sibling the oneplus 9 is one of the first devices to arrive with qualcomm’s new snapdragon 888 chipset the phone also used either 8 or 12 gigabytes of lpddr5 ram that oneplus claims can run up to 6000 megabits per second there’s also UFS 3.1 flash storage and the device comes with either 128 or 256 gigabytes in a nutshell this phone has tons of power and not only is it in solid flagship territory but it’s also ahead of many other 888 powered phones graphic intensive gaming heavy editing apps and day-to-day tasks will all be a breeze for it to handle the thicker graphene
Charging Features of the OnePlus 9
copper materials used inside the phone should also help dissipate the heat towards the frame the phone has a 4500 milliamp hour battery that consists of two cells despite the battery size we only got an average of 87 hours of endurance
this seems to be a frequent occurrence for phones with the 888 chipset likely due to having a high standby draw much more impressive is the fast charging with warp charge 65t the phone got 65 watt fast charging and that means it’ll charge from flat to 100 in 29 minutes
the phone also has 50 watt wireless charging and reverse wireless at up to 5 watts though like we said earlier it’s only available in europe and north America the oneplus 9 features android 11 with oxygen os 11 on top we first saw this ui on the oneplus 8t over the years oxygen os has been tweaked with large displays in mind so many things are now easier to reach one handed
it’s no longer as stock as it used to be but it’s still very quick and butter smooth you get a lot more customizations now from changing up the ambient display the system icons the accent color and the font there’s still a oneplus shelf but now to access it you swipe down on any area of the home screen oneplus also has a feature called turboboost 3.0 which allows 25 percent more apps to run in the background possibly the most intriguing part of this device
Camera Features of the OnePlus 9
the camera setup the oneplus 9 has a 48 megapixel main sensor with omnidirectional pdaf a 50 megapixel ultrawide camera and a 2 megapixel depth sensor all in collaboration with hasselblad’s camera engineers according to the marketing you can see some design differences in the camera app that reflects the partnership most strikingly the shutter button
the shutter sound aside from that most of the in-app changes are in the pro mode you can change the iso white balance and other parameters more intuitively the auto mode toggle is always there too beyond that not much has changed in terms of the app
so what about the pictures themselves during the day images had a decent amount of detail some textures can turn soupy in lower frequency detail areas and oneplus has increased the sharpening to compensate images are noisier than we expected and it didn’t look great when cropping in colors were okay and during the day
they were neutral overall though they had saturated greens under bright light it’s definitely an improvement over the performance of the oneplus 8t dynamic range was more limited than some of the competition and despite nicely balanced highlights shadows
were often a bit darker than we like with the ultrawide shots were vastly superior to previous oneplus phones the sensor captured an impressive amount of detail and the freeform lens got rid of distortion entirely so straight lines appear straight
even in the edges and corners of your shot the only downside is that this camera suffers from the same color issues as the main cam so expect over sharpening crushed shadows and a ton of noise unfortunately and surprisingly you can’t use the pro mode with this camera and save the shots
the oneplus 9 does not have a dedicated telephoto lens and the phone performs a digital zoom instead at two times image quality was not impressive details are soft and there doesn’t seem to be any upscaling there’s no ois in the main camera either and this is very apparent with zoom shots the phone can only shoot portraits with the main camera and by default the portrait mode is zoomed in slightly to reduce distortion
Camera Functions of the OnePlus 9
this however meant that images were slightly softer the background blur was aggressive and since you can’t adjust it it’s a bit of a hit or miss you can use the ultrawide camera for macro shots and as a whole the phone takes very good macro images though the camera can’t get as close to the subject as with some competitors when the light gets low the oneplus 9 doesn’t disappoint even without nightscape you can get good detail nice exposure and accurate colors
the oneplus 9 pro has a little bit more detail though still turn on nightscape and the two are almost identical images look excellent with good detail exposure and color with the new ultrawide lens nightscape is definitely the way to go and with it on images look great in most conditions
the oneplus 9 has a 16 megapixel fixed focus snapper on the front it provided a nice level of detail decent color performance and adequate dynamic range during the day selfie portraits were okay as well but you get the same issues with the aggressive blur as on the main camera the oneplus 9 can record up to 8k at 30fps
the image quality is less impressive than we’d like due to a lower bitrate it just doesn’t make sense to use it most of the time the ultrawide camera can also record 8k footage though it seems like the video has been upscaled from a lower resolution image in short the 8k video with this camera looks worse than the 4k version so you should just stick with the lower resolution
About the OnePlus 9
now as far as 4k video is concerned it was great from both cameras there was plenty of detail good dynamic range and overall we like the image quality the stabilization was okay but it can struggle when you’re trying to pan what’s more irritating is that you can’t disable it and it comes with a significant crop to the final image and makes framing more difficult in short
the oneplus 9 has a better camera setup than the oneplus 8t by a huge margin we didn’t see much evidence of the new hasselblad color science and there were often times when we were disappointed with oneplus processing
which could have pushed these cameras to a new level for now this is a good camera setup but there are better cameras on the market for a lower price lately the feature gap between the pro and the non-pro versions of oneplus phones has been getting bigger it’s reasonable for it to miss an extra camera and a slightly nicer screen of its sibling
the 9 also has no certified water protection no tele camera a downgraded main sensor from the oneplus 9 pro and even a plastic frame so should you get it well it has a very nice screen a powerful chipset blazing fast charging and a good camera setup it’s a very very good phone it’s just a bit uninspired so if you do decide to check it out also make sure to check out the iphone 12 and the galaxy s21 while you’re at it.
Originally published at https://www.technews20-21.in on March 17, 2022.
