OnePlus 10 Pro review: A budget-friendly Find X5 Pro?
PHOTO: HardwareZone
PUBLISHED ONJune 24, 2022 1:00 AMByLiu Hongzuo
Design & handling, display & audio, user interface
Overview
Two weeks after its global announcement, OnePlus started taking pre-orders for the OnePlus 10 Pro in Singapore some time in April 2022. Unlike other regions, however, Singapore only gets the Volcanic Black colourway, while the Emerald Frost version makes its way around other markets.
OnePlus 10 Pro also marks a new generation of OnePlus handsets launched after the company effectively merged back with Oppo. Fortunately, the teams are still keeping OxygenOS around, which has been the Android reskin used on OnePlus devices outside of China.
The phone enters its second consecutive year of Hasselblad partnership, bringing 10-bit colour photo-taking and DCI-P3 gamut colour support, on top of 12-bit RAW capture for its three rear cameras.
As the brand’s flagship 2022 offering, it still tries to bundle best-in-class parts – like a 6.7-inch 1440p LTPO AMOLED display, 80W fast-charging, and the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipset inside an IP68-rated body. However, prices have been steadily climbing for OnePlus, with an official retail price of S$1,299 for 12GB RAM with 256GB storage. Comparatively, the OnePlus 9 came in at S$1,199, while the OnePlus 8T came in at only S$899. While there are valid reasons for the price creep, for the general consumer, the increasing price point would stick out the most. That said, the OnePlus 8 Pro did debut at exactly the same asking price as the new OnePlus 10 Pro we have today.
How would the latest OnePlus flagship hold up in the 'budget flagship' space? Is it finally trying to compete with the bigger boys like Samsung and its amazing Galaxy S22 series handsets? Did the Oppo merger change anything about OnePlus’ new flagship offering? Let’s find out.
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Design and handling
We must say that the OnePlus 10 Pro is one of the best-looking OnePlus phones it has ever designed thus far. The handset offers a matte frosted glass look on the rear, which is highly resistant to fingerprint smudges and marks. The camera housing is covered in ceramic, giving the phone extra style points and making the housing 30per cent more scratch-resistant than normal glass.
While it still uses a tried-and-tested design (curved sides), OnePlus blended its aluminium frame seamlessly with its front and back. It handles pleasantly since the phone’s weight distribution feels centred in hand, while the power and volume buttons are located on opposite sides of the device.
OnePlus’s physical silence toggle slider makes a return, sitting above the power button. It offers three modes: default, which allows the phone to ring and vibrate per normal, a Vibrate Mode that relegates all incoming pings to vibration only, and a Silent mode that completely cuts out any ringing or vibrating. It’s a unique feature since OnePlus remains the only brand to reliably bring back physical toggles for silencing Android phones.
If there’s a gripe to have, we’d say that the OnePlus 10 Pro is structurally weak, as shown in this JerryRigEverything video, so users would do well to use the phone with extra care. Otherwise, the phone feels pleasant in hand, looks relatively modern, and has intuitive button placements as a whole.
Display and audio
OnePlus 10 Pro offers a 6.7-inch Fluid AMOLED (LTPO) panel rated at QHD+ (3,216 x 1,440 pixels resolution) with 120Hz refresh rate, making it plenty sharp and accurate for its panel size.
Having an LTPO AMOLED panel also meant more battery savings since it lets the panel go as low as 1Hz refresh rate, but the true benefits of 1Hz comes only when the OnePlus 10 Pro is idling.
Another cool display feature of the OnePlus 10 Pro is dual colour calibration, a fancy name for having the display colours calibrated at two different brightness levels: 100-nits and 500-nits (peak brightness). It’s a nice feature since peak brightness typically sees use under direct sunlight, while we tend to relegate the phone to low-to-medium brightness in most circumstances.
The panel has been certified with a Fluency A rating for 36 months by TÜV SÜD, a third-party certification organisation that’s supposedly “widely recognised and respected as a trusted symbol of quality, safety and sustainability”. According to OnePlus, this also means that TÜV SÜD certified the OnePlus 10 Pro’s smooth user experience for at least three years. Obviously, we can’t test that since the phone only came to us recently.
The phone features dual stereo speakers, with the call speaker doubling up as another output for sound. Unfortunately, playback is pretty mediocre and soft, so you’re going to need a good pair of wireless headphones or earbuds to go with your OnePlus 10 Pro.
UI and features
The OxygenOS 12 UI (based on Android 12) is mainly consistent in design choices, using thin sliders for settings (brightness, volume) and squarish app icons. Both menus and animations are oblong-shaped, proving to be swift and fluid between interactions. Only the pull-down menu had circular icons that ran contrary to the phone’s software design.
OnePlus said that the 10 Pro now packs a brand-new SLA X-axis linear motor that’s 40per cent stronger and twice as responsive as the one sitting inside the OnePlus 9 and 9 Pro. At the risk of sounding risqué, we found the vibrations pleasant and sufficiently strong for our needs. It was also interesting to see how the OnePlus 10 Pro lets you adjust the vibration’s intensity – this is an uncommon feature for phones. Still, we suppose intensity control is a must on other vibrating products.
The upgraded, ultra-thin fingerprint sensor on the OnePlus 10 Pro is faster than the Google Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro, but slower than the ones on the Samsung Galaxy S22 series and Oppo Find X5 Pro. That puts the OnePlus 10 Pro’s sensor firmly in the middle of the pack – it’s not groundbreaking, but still fluid, responsive, and secure enough for daily use.
We’d like the OnePlus 10 Pro to have a higher max volume for notifications and ringtones. It’s on the softer side, so we ended up using the phone on silent mode most of the time anyway (to avoid being a nuisance). The phone’s ideal for office use since it’s so gentle on the ears, but folks with field work and noisy workplaces might miss important calls or messages given how soft the OnePlus 10 Pro is.
For mobile gamers, the OnePlus 10 Pro packs a software-based Frame Stabiliser that fluctuates CPU and GPU usage to ensure a smooth framerate. Then, there's O Sync, a feature that increases syncing speed between display input and the device’s processor to reduce response times by up to 30ms. We did try gaming on various titles with the OnePlus 10 Pro but did not notice any substantial advantages conferred by these features.
For users who want the latest and greatest, you’ll be happy to know that the OnePlus 10 Pro offers LPDDR5 RAM and UFS 3.1 storage, along with a USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-C port.
Imaging performance
On the rear comes three cameras making up the overall imaging capabilities of the OnePlus 10 Pro:
- 48MP main camera with Sony IMX789 sensor (1/1.43-inch, 1.12μm pixel size, f/1.8 aperture, OIS, EIS)
- 8MP telephoto camera with 3.3x optical zoom (up to 30x digital zoom) and OIS
- 50MP ultra-wide-angle camera with Samsung ISOCELL JN1 sensor (150° field of view with AI-based distortion correction)
The ultra-wide-angle camera gets a special mention too since its 150° field of view surpasses the typical 120° FOV found on other ultra-wide-angle phone cameras. All of the cameras share the phone's All Pixel Omni-Direction autofocus features (which include Phase Detection AF, Laser AF, and Continuous AF).
This time around, OnePlus' partnership with Hasselblad goes into the second year, offering both practical and superficial enhancements. All three rear cameras are capable of shooting in 10-bit colour using DCI-P3 colour gamut.
Then, there's also a Hasselblad Pro Mode that gives users access to 12-bit RAW capture on all the rear cameras. Computational photography software still applies in this mode.
Finally, there are filters made in collaboration with Hasselblad photographers found within the default Camera app. These filters are done in the style of previous Hasselblad Master winners, so you can get highly stylised images with minimal effort.
All these perks sound fancy, but how does the base imaging performance hold up? Let's look at some sample shots.
Sample images
The OnePlus 10 Pro does try its best in managing contrast differences and retaining detail, but some are lost when it comes to the crates and boxes in this image. Also, we can't help but suspect it really likes red hues, since the apples and dragonfruit are unnaturally vibrant among other yummy candidates. Beyond those concerns, the image quality feels serviceable. Let's look at more samples first.
We also found the OnePlus 10 Pro competent when it came to lush green plants, despite the trees not being the focus of these shots. The ultra-wide-angle camera seems more able to accurately balance out the light fed into its sensor (noon, overcast day). For reference, here's an ultra-wide-angle shot from an Oppo Find X5 Pro for reference with a 110-degree FOV, and you can compare it against the above shot to get a feel of the difference in FOV.
OnePlus 10 Pro's digital zoom capabilities leave more to be desired, with the loss of detail beyond the focus area (see top left and grass patches). Below, the 30x digital zoom sample shows the phone's telephoto is functional, although nowhere near ready for use (like uploading on social media).
The photos by OnePlus 10 Pro certainly have a pink cast in certain instances. Here is one example where we have overly pinkish hues on brown benches and beige apartment buildings on the left. Compare that with a more colour accurate shot as captured by the Oppo Find X5 Pro.
The pink difference is notable when you switch over to the ultra-wide-angle camera. Naturally, having 150° FOV also meant some fish eye distortion, despite OnePlus' best efforts in using AI-based correction.
Overall, we felt that OnePlus could do better across all its rear cameras. They could start by fixing the inconsistent pink hues in its main camera, better detail capture across all three, and work a little more on the fish eye distortion in its ultra-wide. Telephoto works well if you kept to optical zoom range, but it's not usable beyond that point. It fares really well whenever the phone's cameras encounter greenery, so that's a tiny advantage OnePlus 10 Pro has in our books.
Benchmark performance
OnePlus 10 Pro packs a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipset, putting its performance on par with both budget flagship models (its tier) and premium flagship models above it. Its natural rivals (at least, the ones we've tried) are the Samsung Galaxy S22+ (same price range with the same processor) and the Google Pixel 6 Pro (same price with Google's very own flagship chipset). Other plausible competitors are priced above - like the Oppo Find X5 Pro - which shares an equally competent display and processor but commands a premium price.
OnePlus' proprietary cooling techniques include a 3D Passive Cooling System that consists of a vapour chamber, copper foil, and copper carbon on both sides of the phone's motherboard. There's also a graphene cooling film built into the system. From our test results below, it does seem like its cooling system is allowing the OnePlus 10 Pro to perform at its peak and is able to maintain an edge over others.
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JetStream 2.0
JetStream 2 is a combination of a variety of JavaScript and Web Assembly benchmarks, including benchmarks that came before like SunSpider and Octane. It primarily tests for a system's and browser's ability in delivering a good web experience. It runs a total of 64 subtests, each weighted equally, with multiple iterations, and takes the geometric mean to compute the overall score. The higher the score, the better.
Geekbench 5
Geekbench CPU is a cross-platform processor benchmark that tests both single-core and multi-core performance with workloads that simulate real-world usage. Geekbench 5 scores are calibrated against a baseline score of 1000, which is the score of an Intel Core i3-8100. The higher the score, the better.
3DMark Wild Life (Unlimited)
3DMark Wild Life is a cross-platform benchmark for Windows, Android and Apple iOS for measuring GPU performance. Its graphics test consists of multiple scenes with variations in the amount of geometry, lights and post-processing effects, mirroring mobile games that are based on short bursts of intense activity. Wild Life uses the Vulkan graphics API on Windows PCs and Android devices. On iOS devices, it uses Metal.
In Unlimited mode, the benchmark runs offscreen using a fixed time step between frames. Unlimited mode renders exactly the same frames in every run on every device, regardless of resolution scaling. The higher the score, the better.
PCMark for Android — Work 3.0 and Storage 2.0
PCMark for Android is a benchmark for testing the performance of Android phones and tablets. The Work 3.0 test checks how the device handles common productivity tasks such as browsing the web, editing videos, working with documents and data, and editing photos. Storage 2.0 checks write-in and read-out performance for internal storage, external storage (if applicable), and SQLite database management. Together, the benchmarks can clue us in on how capable a phone is at handling everyday use. Work 3.0 scores are above, while Storage 2.0 scores are immediately below for each device — the higher the score, the better.
Battery life
Our standard battery test for mobile phones has the following parameters:
- Looping a 720p video with screen brightness and volume at 100 per cent
- Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity turned on
- Constant data streaming through email
Packing 5,000mAh, the OnePlus 10 Pro was able to deliver 13 hours of continuous uptime. It's more efficient than many of its competitors, besting more expensive alternatives with the same chipset (Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra and Oppo Find X5 Pro) and being far more efficient than competitors at the same tier with the same screen size, resolution and capabilities (Google Pixel 6 Pro).
OnePlus said that the 10 Pro is capable of 80W SuperVOOC fast-charging. The included charging adapter in our box is rated at 80W, and was capable of giving us 0 per cent to 50 per cent in 24 minutes and 0 per cent to 100 per cent in 55 minutes. The Oppo Find X5 Pro too boasts an 80W SuperVOOC charging, though we found Oppo to maintain faster charging rates than the OnePlus 10 Pro. Still, it's combination of fast charge times and long battery life means you can leave the phone off the charging cable for most of the day comfortably.
Wireless charging is rated at 50W, which is still plenty quick and it spares your USB-C port from wear and tear. The phone also played nicely with a random third-party wireless charger we found (40W) lying around our testing spot.
Conclusion
For once, OnePlus finally made a phone with a relatively clean-looking design. OxygenOS is also much more pleasant than before, and choosing it over other Android reskins is a matter of preference now.
You'll notice that we've stopped calling it a flagship killer — and that's because OnePlus has dropped all pretenses and decided to charge S$1,299 for its signature device. Gone are the days where OnePlus offers all the best-in-class parts under a thousand bucks. But, not all is lost.
As a flagship smartphone, the OnePlus 10 Pro does quite well for the price it commands. At S$1,299, it's squarely up against the Google Pixel 6 Pro, the base version of the Samsung Galaxy S22 (or S22+ on a discount), and other recent phone entrants like Xiaomi.
Where it does well is the inclusion of high-end specs across the board. For instance, the Pixel 6 Pro doesn't packs 256GB of storage nor tout a powerful Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 like how the OnePlus 10 Pro does, while the Galaxy S22 and S22+ do not have QHD+ resolution LTPO AMOLED displays. Specifically, the Galaxy S22+ at the same display size costs a lot more than the OnePlus 10 Pro.
It's also a class below the premium-tier Oppo Find X5 Pro. Sure, you won't get the same imaging performance, audio quality, or fingerprint sensor speeds, but it has nearly identical displays, fast-charging wattage, and the same main processor while helping to save S$400 (based on their official listed prices).
The OnePlus 10 Pro stands in as a handset for users who are not willing to compromise on both ends, replete with other perks like getting a full charge in under an hour with 80W fast-charging and IP68 certification against dust and water.
The phone does fall a little short against its closest rivals in important areas like imaging and sound quality. We'd easily pick the Pixel 6 Pro or Galaxy S22/S22+ for nicer images on Auto mode, and both rivals also sound better with their external speakers. Having imaging quality that's rather average surely hurts the OnePlus 10 Pro more. Could OnePlus have done more at its price point? Certainly, considering it's already using premium parts, building a more durable device is a matter of product design. We've not come across a device in recent times that snaps as easily as the OnePlus 10 Pro, so that's definitely a concern for those who thrust their phones in their pockets.
Also, it's competing against other very attractive alternatives. Immediate rivals that come to mind aren't just giants like Google and Samsung, but also Xiaomi and its sub-brand Poco, which has a huge following for its similar value-for-money slant. If OnePlus decided to do just one more thing better (the cameras could be one place to start), it might very well be the top choice for phones under S$1,300.
As it stands now, the OnePlus 10 Pro is still a good consideration at its price point if you're keen on getting a phone that feels good in the hand, sports a modern design, has a large 6.7-inch AMOLED display with QHD+ resolution, high refresh rates and HDR processing, plenty of storage (256GB) and RAM (12GB), and runs on Android 12 OS with a Google Play Store. From our testing, it's also got good performance to boot, so it lives up to the typical OnePlus proposition, though not quite as affordable as some of its predecessors were.
The OnePlus 10 Pro is exclusively available at its Lazada online storefront, with an official retail price of S$1,299 (12GB RAM + 256GB storage).
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