 Real talk time. There's no reason to use a flagship killer phone that falls short in water resistance, camera quality, or features like wireless charging, when you can just grab one of the other half a dozen, or more than half a dozen, actual flagships that are crammed into a drawer in your office. And that is the biggest reason that I've never daily driven a OnePlus device. Their slogan is, never settle. But their shtick has always been bang for the buck, which made them devices that were easy to recommend, but never one that I would actually keep in my pocket for the long term. Never. I really hope that word's delicious, because the OnePlus 8 Pro and its little brother, the OnePlus 8, are getting dangerously close to making me eat it. Just like you guys eat up these segues to our sponsors, like Thermal Grizzly. Thermal Grizzly's Conductonaut Liquid Metal Thermal Interface material offers maximum cooling performance for your PC. We actually even used it in a phone once, although we don't recommend that. Check it out and keep things cool at the link in the video description. The specs of both the OnePlus 8 and OnePlus 8 Pro are cutting edge. Snapdragon 865 processors with eight or 12 gigs of RAM, 128 or 256 gigs of high speed UFS 3.0 storage, lightning fast in-display fingerprint sensors, OnePlus's legendarily optimized Oxygen OS Android variant, and X55 5G modems for the latest in modern mobile connectivity. That is assuming your neighbors haven't burned down all the nearby antennas. And they are just as pretty on the outside. Both the 8 and 8 Pro are aluminum and curved Gorilla Glass sandwich designs that remind me very much of a Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus, but with a notification slider instead of a Bixby button. And to be clear, I intend that comparison in a good way. The feel in the hand is absolutely wonderful with a subtly more rounded curve on the back and very smooth transitions from glass to metal to glass. Although that doesn't mean I don't have complaints. It's kind of my job to complain about things. OnePlus's camera bump is extremely aggressive this year with the 8 Pros in particular likely to cause some discomfort for those of us who go bareback with our devices. Now it wouldn't bother me quite so much if the ridge wasn't as sharp, making it such a strong contrast against the smooth curvy feel of the rest of the device. My other gripe is with the inclusion of a hole punch display. Last year, 7 Pro and 7T Pro used a motorized selfie camera that gave OnePlus, in my humble opinion, the best implementation of an all screen phone. Now I understand that this was to save weight and internal space and unofficially, probably to improve the water resistance that OnePlus builds in but doesn't certify on their phones. But now we're stuck on both models, regular and Pro with an asymmetrical dead zone that makes me honestly think longingly of the anxiety that I used to feel about my fear of getting a dead or stuck pixel on my new monitor and not being able to return it. How far we've come. At least the displays are a lot better than they used to be though. Both are high refresh rate OLED panels with a thin sexy aspect ratio and outstanding color accuracy and HDR performance delivering a wonderful on the go movie watching experience coupled with the strong clear stereo speakers. Enough of what's the same between the two devices though, let's talk about what is different. The A Pro is a touch larger and about 10% heavier. Now it's not a huge difference on paper, but in practice, it makes them feel kind of like his and hers devices. It also comes with some extra features. I'm gonna start with the least important ones. MEMC or Motion Estimation Motion Compensation Technology is that high frame rate video conversion mode that sports fans leave enabled on their TVs that makes everything look like a cheap soap opera at best and an artifact written pile of garbage at worst. It's obviously. Thankfully it's turned off by default. So good job OnePlus. There's adaptive color temperature. I also turned this off. I don't like it on iPhones and I don't like it here, but what it has got that I do like is a 200 nit brighter and higher resolution display. Now at this kind of a size, the difference between 1080p and 1440p is something that I would have to be trying to read my Google Docs in their thumbnail preview in order to notice, but it is there. And on the OnePlus 8 Pro, it's the only way I'm aware of to have both your high resolution cake and eat your 120 Hertz refresh rate too. Yes, my friends, unlike Samsung who locked out simultaneously maxing the refresh rate and resolution of their S20 lineup, OnePlus has allowed their users both silky smooth scrolling and ultra sharp picture quality. Now I didn't find myself noticing the 120 Hertz difference much after the initial, whoa, oh gee, this is so smooth excitement because 90 Hertz feels pretty good too. But given our next differences here, the upgrade to faster, more power efficient, LPDDR5 RAM and the 210 milliamp power bigger battery, oh, what the hey, I'd as well keep it enabled. Bringing us finally to a really, really big one, warp charge 30T, 30 watt charging that, well, okay, actually strictly speaking, they do both have that, but the difference is that the 8 Pro does it wirelessly. Boom, boom, boom, boom. I read that and I was like, what? It's true, my friends, if you're willing to endure the whiny fan noise of OnePlus's warp charge 30 wireless charger and the fact that your phone will still be noticeably warm to the touch when you pick it up in spite of the charger's built-in cooling fan, you can wirelessly charge your OnePlus 8 Pro faster than most of your friends are topping up with a cable and a standard wall wart. And it's got reverse charging too, which can be handy if you use wireless earbuds, which you will because no headphone jack, there, I got that in there, there's no headphone jack. Finally, there's the camera hardware. Instead of a primary, ultra wide and macro loadout, the Pro gets a primary, ultra wide, optically stabilized 3X hybrid zoom telephoto with a fourth color filter camera that's supposed to allow you to apply various lighting effects and filters. I don't know, I'll leave it to the Instagrammers to tell you how good that is because I'm not really into that stuff. As for whether the other cameras held up to my expectations, this is the one part of this review where things get a little bit tough for me. I already alluded to OnePlus's abandonment of their flagship killer positioning. And so I guess I might as well say it. The 8 starts at 700 US dollars and the fully loaded 8 Pro costs 1000. Now I can forgive a solid, if not industry leading camera when you're not flirting with the $1000 price barrier. But when your night mode performance gets crushed by my two year old daily driver Note 9 and then utterly embarrassed by an iPhone 11 Pro, it starts to raise some uncomfortable questions. Now the hardware itself is pop shelf. I'm especially impressed by the inclusion of two 48 megapixel sensors in the 8 Pro. One cutting edge model in the main shooter and a lower tier one in the wide. And I generally like OnePlus's approach to software processing. They take a what you see is what you get approach to colors that I respect a lot compared to some manufacturers tendency to overcompensate for poor lighting to the point where you end up capturing a completely different looking scene. But there are definitely going to be edge cases if you buy this device and particularly its little brother where you're going to be acutely aware that it is no, not in fact an iPhone or a pixel in your hands and it's always going to be apparent when you're shooting video. This footage of our cat Dash shows the inconsistency of OnePlus's on the fly white balance and also what a blocky mess her fur turns into shows the relatively poor processing under poor indoor lighting conditions. The ASAP OnePlus's sleeve that might counterbalance the camera for a lot of people though is OxygenOS. It is such an apt name for it because the switch from anything else feels like such a breath of fresh air. I mean, it's almost fast to its own detriment sometimes. Double clicking the lock button to launch the camera while the display is on will lock the phone. Then it's like, oh snap, you want the camera and it wakes the phone back up, then launches the camera all almost as quickly as an iPhone 11 Pro just launches the camera app. To be clear, I'm not hating on the iPhone either. It's a really fast phone. I'm just saying that this is darn impressive. And it's clear that OnePlus has made the right investments over the last few years. The writing's been on the wall for the hardware race for some time. Phone processors just aren't going to get faster the way that they used to. Look at the marginal improvements from the 2018 to 2020 iPad Pros. It's all gonna be in software moving forward and OxygenOS with its snappiness and all day everyday battery management is one of the best, if not the best Android experiences out there. If you can afford it. That's something I've never had to say before. As for me, I don't have to afford it. So the only question left to answer is, do I go for it? Do I put a notch in my pocket and give up my headphone jack for this snappy lightning fast experience? I think I'm gonna give it a try. I use my AirPods Pros more often than anything else these days anyway. And the Galaxy Fold, rest in peace. The YouTube app doesn't support stories, which I need for work. So I haven't been able to use that. Already had a notch. And so I guess I kinda, kinda like moved on. I might end up moving back though. We'll see. Just like we'll see how he transitions to our sponsor this time. Adding a VPN to your security toolkit lets you mask your IP and encrypt traffic to and from your devices. Private Internet Access has reliable service with over 3,300 servers in 30 countries. They've got no bandwidth caps, they've got configurable encryption and an internet kill switch to keep you in control of your connection. And when combined with private browsing best practices, a VPN can make websites think you're in a different country. Try it risk-free with their 30-day money back guarantee and connect up to five devices at once with a single account with apps for Windows, Mac OS, Android, iOS, and Linux. Check it out today at the link in the video description. So thanks for watching guys. If you enjoyed this video, maybe check out what a difference a camera can make. We did a photography challenge, putting a high-end smartphone camera in the hands of an experienced photographer against a high-end real camera in the hands of basically a novice, me. It's a really fun video. Thanks for checking it out.