OnePlus
OnePlus 8
Believe it or not, one of Prime Day’s best deals this year is a flagship phone. The OnePlus 8 was part of the phone manufacturer’s lineup for 2020. While the OnePlus 8 Pro was bigger in size and specs, the high-end specs of this standard model still make it a decent flagship phone in 2021.
OnePlus phones generally appealed to us by offering flagship-level specs and performance for less than the ever-rising price of most high-end smartphones. This year’s Prime Day sale brings the $500-600 OnePlus 8 to $349, a much more competitive price that gives more expensive (and cheaper) phones another run for their money.
If you just look at the spec sheet, you can see that – with 5G support (on GSM networks like AT&T and T-Mobile), a 6.55-inch 402-pixel-per-inch OLED display with a refresh rate of 90 Hz, 8 GB of RAM (albeit from the slower LPDDR4X variant), 128 GB of UFS 3.0 storage and Qualcomm’s flagship Snapdragon 865 processor for 2020 – the OnePlus 8 is a phone that remains competitive. Unfortunately, there is no removable storage, although that is not uncommon in 2021.
There are also great specs in terms of battery and camera. The 4,300mAh battery, according to the company, uses OnePlus’ Warp Charge technology to take the phone from 1 percent to half-full in 22 minutes, and typically lasts about a day with normal use. However, wireless charging is not available.
To allow for different shots and artistic expression, the camera range includes three different cameras: one with a standard lens, one with a macro lens and one with an ultra-wide angle lens. The cameras range from decent to not that great, although we had some surprisingly good moments in our experience with the phone.
Fortunately, OnePlus is one of the better phone OEMs when it comes to Android updates: the updates usually arrive within a few weeks of each release, although the company is often one to three months behind security updates. The company’s Oxygen OS still looks good and makes useful tweaks to the Android OS, but as the OnePlus 8 is already a year old, expect only one major software update to Android 12 and just under two years of security updates .
The OnePlus 8’s update ability, good looks, low cost and non-cheap hardware are much more than we can say for many Android phones in 2021, especially at this price.
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