OnePlus 7T Pro Hands-on Review

OnePlus’ specialty is providing Android flagships with fancy features but at a reasonable price. While the original OnePlus 7 Pro released this spring was the company’s most expensive phone yet, it was still a fantastic device that we found to be worth every penny. 

Now OnePlus has introduced the £699 OnePlus 7T Pro, a modest upgrade to the original. While the standard OnePlus 7T, revealed in September, has gotten a lot of attention for its more extensive overhaul, there’s still a few interesting changes to look at here. It’s just a shame that the 7T Pro is not going to be available in the US, where the 7 Pro remains available and the $599 7T hits stores Oct. 18. (The 7T launches in Europe on Oct. 17, where it will cost £549.)

OnePlus 7T Pro Specs

OnePlus 7T Pro Design and Display

Picking up the OnePlus 7T Pro feels instantly familiar to anyone who’s held the 7 Pro. The new phone remains large and heavy like its predecessor, around the size of a Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Plus or an iPhone 11 Pro Max and slightly heavier than both those phones because of the OnePlus pop-up camera. 

Still, the OnePlus 7T Pro is not uncomfortable to hold. The curved sides of the phone help it fit in your hand, and the weight feels well balanced through the length of the phone. If you flip it over, you’ll see the new (and only) color option for the 7T Pro: Haze Blue. This is a lighter version of the original 7 Pro’s Nebula Blue, a change made thanks to feedback from OnePlus’ users. I think it’s a very attractive hue, but as you’ll see is a bit of a theme for the 7T Pro, you don’t get a choice even if you don’t like it.

The OnePlus 7T Pro’s display, unchanged from the 7 Pro, still looks and feels great to use even if the regular OnePlus 7T has now stolen its 90Hz refresh rate thunder. The quad HD 6.6-inch AMOLED screen will transport you through menus apps and webpages smoothly and colorfully thanks to the enhanced refresh rate, although the original 7 Pro wasn’t super bright in comparison to rival phones. It was hard to tell if this was still the case with the new handset after my short time with it, but it’s something to be mindful of.

OnePlus 7T Pro Cameras

The camera hardware on the OnePlus 7T Pro is unchanged from the previous model — a 48MP wide sensor, 16MP ultra-wide lens and 8MP telephoto sensor providing a 3x optical zoom. Up front, you get a 16MP selfie camera in a pop-up module. 

The new phone gets some new camera software offering new photo modes, though. You now have access to NightScape mode and a new macro mode with the ultrawide lens. Both the wide camera and telephoto lens have access to portrait mode. And OnePlus promises a “superstable” video mode, too. 

All of these features are available on the OnePlus 7T, which has the same abilities and cameras as the Pro model, other than having a 2x optical zoom 12MP telephoto lens instead of the 7T Pro's more powerful telephoto camera. If it’s the 7T Pro’s camera capabilities that are impressing you, you may want to think about buying the cheaper model instead, assuming you live in a market where both the OnePlus 7T Pro and 7T will be available.

OnePlus 7T Performance and Battery

You only have one option for the internal specs of the 7T Pro, but they’re fairly formidable all the same. The processor has been swapped from the Snapdragon 855 inside the OnePlus 7 Pro to the newer Snapdragon 855 Plus. RAM on the new model has been locked at 8GB, as has the storage at 256GB. 

The new processor is definitely going to be an asset when you’re using the phone daily — the Snapdragon 855 Plus offers a graphic boost, for example — but it would have been nice to get a 12GB option like we had with the original 7 Pro.

The battery powering the OnePlus 7T Pro has been slightly upgraded. It’s got a whole 85mAh extra compared to the 7 Pro, which will should you a few more much needed minutes of battery life. The original 7 Pro had a less than satisfactory battery life performance according to our Tom’s Guide battery test, so hopefully the extra capacity will help address that. 

More interesting is Warp Charge 30T, which manages to improve charging speeds, particularly at low percentages, through software improvements. The 7T Pro still uses the same charging plug as the original OnePlus 7 Pro, which sounds like a smart way to do it, but we’ll have to check this out ourselves to see how much of a difference this makes.

Like the OnePlus 7T, the Pro model ships with Android 10 and OnePlus’ OxygenOS. I really like OxygenOS for its style and its small number of effective additions to stock Android, and Android 10 itself is a big step up from Android 9 Pie. 

Outlook

Ignoring the lack of a 12GB RAM option, the 7T Pro is on the whole a small upgrade on the 7 Pro, making what was already great just a little bit greater. The changes should be enough to convince users of older OnePlus phones to switch, but probably not enough to convince existing 7 Pro users to trade in.

At £699 (that's $865 if you do a straight conversion to U.S. dollars, though phone makers typically adjust pricing by region), the OnePlus 7T Pro is still a good deal if you’re happy with the phone’s size. But the OnePlus 7T and OnePlus 7 Pro — both of which are available in both the U.S. and UK — are still worth considering for providing near identical specs for a smaller price.