OnePlus – 9 Pro 5G 256GB (Unlocked) – Pine Green

Great upgrade, just make sure you price the accessories in advance. The wireless charger is a must imo. Make sure you get a second wall adapter for a secondary.

This might be the best Android experience on the market right now. It’s not the best camera but it is not too far away either. But I believe almost every other category this phone is either top or tied for top echelon.

So happy to be out of the closed sandbox of Apple. I love app development on Apple but IOS is lame. This phone has it all. It’s not perfect by any means but beats Samsung S21 hands down. Boot loader is not locked like Samsung. Fast smooth. Make sure to get the May upgrade once you set it up.

There is a lot to like about this phone and I believe it’s probably the best US flagship 5G smartphone on the market currently. Build quality is excellent, the phone’s beautiful exterior is lovingly crafted with metal and glass, no cheap plastic materials. Specs are among the best of any Android smartphone and OnePlus has designed a new cooling system for the device to keep it cool.
Cameras are excellent, and this is coming from somebody who’s last phone was a Pixel device. I’ve owned previous OnePlus phones as well (OnePlus 7 Pro and OnePlus 8T) and the camera is in another league. Way less shutter lag that previous phones, clearer photos, excellent portrait mode, and support for 4k 120FPS video (which is stunning). Optical image stabilization works wonderfully as well. A minor grievance is that I don’t like the Hasselblad logo on the camera bump, I understand that the two companies have a partnership but I’m not a fan of excessive branding on my devices (especially if it’s from a partner company). It’s worth noting that Sony (not Hasselblad) actually supplies the camera sensors for this phone.
The phone supports 60w wired charging and is absurdly fast to charge. 15w EPP Qi charging and 50w proprietary wireless charging are also supported. Personally, I have no interest in the 50w proprietary wireless charger (it’s expensive and gets the phone quite toasty from what I’ve heard) but Qi support is a nice touch for people who enjoy using wireless charging as a mere supplement to wired charging or for the rare event that you have a mishap with your charging port. Battery life has been slightly better than I’ve experienced on previous OnePlus devices with 6 hours or more screen on time before I feel the need to plug in.
Device stability is good, I have not experienced any issues with bugs, overheating, or crashes. The underscreen fingerprint sensor works flawlessly every time (OnePlus has the best optical fingerprint readers in the industry as far as I’m concerned) and is very convenient. Sound from the phone’s speakers is loud and crisp. Haptic feedback feels good.
Despite this praise, the phone isn’t perfect. For one, it lacks a headphone (3.5mm audio) jack. I listen to a lot of music, especially in my truck which has a custom sound system. My previous phone, the Google Pixel XL, had a headphone jack and outputs clean audio. When I connected my new OnePlus 9 Pro to my truck’s stereo using Bluetooth it sounded TERRIBLE. Bluetooth simply does not have good enough sound quality to substitute for a wired connection. OnePlus should put a quality DAC in their next phones and bring the jack back like Sony does with their Xperia series of phones. I refuse to be gaslit and told that a headphone jack isn’t viable on a water resistant phone; Samsung built water resistant phones with jacks for years and Sony still does. The inability to use wired headphones is also very annoying. I understand that USB-C to 3.5mm adapters exist but USB-C passthrough audio quality very rarely matches a direct 3.5mm connection (in fact, poor sound quality through USB-C passthrough audio and Bluetooth is one of the reasons I returned a previous OnePlus phone, the 8T). I’m going to force myself to live with it because I don’t have much of a choice (can’t find any suitable alternative phones with a jack that would work well on my network) but I’m very unhappy about it and will continue noting this as a complaint whenever possible.
Another thing I dislike about the phone is the ugly hole punch camera. I can at least praise OnePlus for putting it in the top left corner rather than the center of the display (corner hole punches are always going to be better than centered ones) but I still hate looking at it. The screen is vibrant and beautiful to look at but every time I see the ugly black dot for the camera I’m a little disgusted. This is coming from the same company that made the OnePlus 7 Pro, a phone with a full edge-to-edge display with no interruptions, notches, or hole punches. Hole punch cameras are such a downgrade from bezel-mounted cameras and pop up cameras. They are terrible.
OnePlus’ Visual Voicemail still doesn’t work on Mint Mobile (hasn’t since at least the OnePlus 7 Pro) which is very frustrating, especially considering I’ve seen OnePlus phones for sale on their website before! I would really appreciate if this could be addressed sometime.
The phone does come with some bloatware. You have the typical Google stuff which I can mostly give a pass, but then you have a few other weird software quirks like the inability to uninstall the Netflix app. Now personally I use Netflix, but what if I didn’t? I wouldn’t want an app on my phone I don’t use. This is the problem with bloatware, it takes choices away from the customer. All this being said, OnePlus does allow the phone’s bootloader to be unlocked to if you want to root the phone or flash a custom ROM, you can. I really appreciate that functionality as it has become very rare on US model Android smartphones. More and more manufacturers have decided to lock their phones down and disallow customer tinkering. Thank you, OnePlus, for being a part of the solution rather than the problem.
My last concern is software support. While OnePlus may be better than some Android manufacturers when it comes to updates and continued product support, in recent years they have been slacking off. Browse the OnePlus subreddit or the OnePlus community forum and you’ll see tons of complaints from customers with phones less than 3 years old who have no longer been receiving timely security or OS updates. While I can’t say how good software support will be for the OnePlus 9 Pro yet, it is something I’m a bit worried about.
Overall, I think this is a great device if slightly flawed. If you need a US 5G Android flagship, don’t hesitate. Buy the OnePlus 9 Pro.