OnePlus 10 Pro long-term review

Introduction

We recently reviewed the 10T, but as we pointed out, it's not a direct successor to the OnePlus 10 Pro, as the lack of the "Pro" suffix from the name strongly hints. It's more of a side-grade, for lack of a better term, with the newer flagship chipset from Qualcomm, faster charging, but also some downgrades in other areas, most obviously the camera system.

So the 10 Pro remains on sale and even received a discount in some markets, making it an even more interesting proposition than when it launched earlier this year. We were interested to see how it aged and thus decided to use it as our one and only smartphone for an extended period to figure out what it's like to live with, day in and day out, in the second half of 2022.

It still has flagship-grade specs, of course, it also has the iconic OnePlus alert slider unlike the 10T, and it's got Hasselblad branding for its camera system. Maybe one year into the OnePlus - Hasselblad partnership this actually became more than another logo stamped on the phone's back? We've attempted to find out.

There have also been a bunch of updates since the phone was released, and in recent years OnePlus updates haven't always been the most issue-free, so we were anxious to find out whether quality control has improved in that respect or not. Compared to the big names in the Android mobile space, the OnePlus 10 Pro still brings an interesting value proposition to the table, so is this a phone you should perhaps consider if you want to buy a high-end device right about now?

Join us over the next few pages of this review as we try to answer that question by providing you with as many details as possible about what it's like in daily operation, far from the cold hard synthetic benchmark numbers, in a more subjective but also more detailed fashion. Let's go.

Design, build quality, handling

From the front, the OnePlus 10 Pro is definitely a phone of its time. Specifically, an Android phone of its time. It pretty much looks like every other device out there, with two subtle exceptions - the curved screen sides are usually reserved for high-end handsets only, so that gives away its market positioning, while the left-aligned hole-punch for the selfie camera used to be all the rage among Chinese companies a few years ago but now the 10 Pro kind of stands out not having it centered.

We won't debate which position is the better one, since we can see both sides of the argument. The point is that this helps you tell this is a OnePlus, and with the curved screen, you can ascertain that it is definitely not a mid-ranger.

Flip it over, and things become more unique, and much less subtle, thanks to the design of the camera island. This was definitely polarizing when all we had to go on were leaked images of the device prior to its launch, and even at this moment in time, it's definitely not everyone's cup of tea. It's very assertive, to put it nicely. This reviewer started off really disliking it but has grown so accustomed to it by now that it simply isn't an issue anymore. We would, however, guess that not many people will call it the most beautiful camera island they've ever seen. It's just a little too weird for that.

The symmetry of the four circles is neat, though, even if the spacing is all over the place on the horizontal plane. From left to right, there's a lot of camera island frame to begin with, then after the first two circles, there's less of it, and finally, to the right of the last two circles, there's even less. This feels nitpicky to say, but we would have appreciated the symmetry theme to be respected in all areas, not just the diameter of the circles and the vertical spacing between the two pairs.

The 'camera island frame flows into the phone frame' theme has been pioneered by Samsung, and it's pretty easy to assume OnePlus got inspired by the Galaxy S21 Ultra in the process of designing this part of the phone, for better or worse. It's not one piece, though, there's a seam near the Hasselblad logo, but you can't feel it with your finger because everything is nicely finished - or should we say, adequately for this price point.

Speaking of curves, the back glass curves on the sides in a similar fashion to the screen and the two meet the metal frame at a similar angle, which is always quite aesthetically pleasing. The top of the device is flat enough that it can stand 'on its head' as it were, but the bottom being curved doesn't bode well for lovers of symmetry.

While the OnePlus 10 Pro is definitely not a small phone unless your hands are small, it should be easy enough to grip - because of the aforementioned curves, it's pretty thin on the sides. The shiny metal frame is a fingerprint magnet, but it's too slim to notice fingerprints on the sides - you do, however, tend to see them on the top and bottom. The same goes for the camera island.

In stark contrast, the back of our Emerald Forest unit has the most fingerprint-resistant matte finish we've ever seen. Or touched. It's just impossible to ever notice any sort of smudge on it, and that's impressive. Of course, with a matte back, there's generally a downside, and that's the slipperiness. Matte finishes are always more slippery than glossy ones because the latter pick up fingerprint oils that then reduce the slippage by having your fingers ever so slightly stick to them. It's a gross fact of life, this.

Build quality is as outstanding as you'd expect from this price point; there's really not much more to say about it. The phone feels incredibly well built, sturdy, doesn't creak, and its weight is just right - it's not light enough that it feels flimsy and cheap, but it's also not heavy enough that it feels like a brick.

Cases

There's a case in the box - take that, Samsung! And not only is there a case in the box, but it's among the nicest feeling bundled cases we've seen and handled so far, and it's also decently, if not perfectly, color matched to the device - no transparent jelly shenanigans here. If for any reason you don't like it, as always, OnePlus offers a variety of other case options for an additional cost, and we're fans of the sandstone one because it makes us think of the OnePlus One and its rather unique back finishing. But mostly because it's very grippy - it's basically the exact opposite of the phone itself, and that aids in usability a lot.

Of the Chinese companies, OnePlus has always been very careful about providing good first-party case options, and we hope it never gives up on that because it is nice to have the option to buy a quality case straight from the maker of your phone, even though these are more expensive than the generic ones out there. The money may be well spent in that you know you're getting quality for sure, whereas with third-party options, sometimes it's all akin to a lottery really.

Speakers, alert slider, vibration motor

The OnePlus 10 Pro doesn't have a 3.5mm headphone jack, but it does have a dual speaker system, and these speakers are definitely among the best we've ever heard on a non-foldable smartphone that we've long-term reviewed so far. There's plenty of volume in them so that you don't have to bring the phone to your ear to hear what's going on unless you're in a loud environment, and the quality is very good too - that is, if you, like this reviewer, think that phone speakers should be mids-centric and not highs-centric.

Does that make any sense to you? If so, you'll love these. If you enjoy piercing highs coming out of your handset's speakers, then you should probably look elsewhere - Samsung's high-end phones definitely have more pronounced highs, which might make them ever so slightly better for listening to music, but worse for movies and anything where the main focus is a mids-forward human voice.

Obviously, there's almost no bass to speak of here, and again Samsung high-end devices do eek out a tiny bit more bass. But if the main things you use the speakers for are voice-centric, the subjective feeling will be that the OnePlus 10 Pro's speakers just sound better. At a purely technical level, there are equally good phone speakers out there, and if you only consider dynamic range, then there are slightly better ones, but again - for YouTube videos, podcasts, TV shows, and movies, having the mids well-represented results in a better experience. Because we're in the "music should not be listened to on phone speakers, get a Bluetooth one" camp, we have to commend OnePlus for pulling this off.

Unlike the newer OnePlus 10T, the 10 Pro retains the company's now-iconic alert slider, a feature that was definitely inspired by Apple initially, but which has in the meantime grown to become a differentiating factor for OnePlus phones since for some reason no other Android device maker adopted anything like this on a similar scale. Now that seems to slowly be dying for OnePlus phones too, and what you think about that obviously depends on how useful you think it is.

For what it's worth, we really like the idea of quickly toggling between Normal (ring) mode, Vibration, and Silence, and have used the slider on any phone that had it, but way less than we initially expected to. So from this position, we can kind of see the arguments on both sides - OnePlus clearly thinks it's not enough of a differentiating factor in people's purchasing decisions to keep it for all devices, on the other hand, some die-hard OnePlus fans seem to be very keen on it. The good news is that the alert slider is present on the 10 Pro, and it's not going away from this model. It's grippy enough, and it works well, so if you're a fan, you'll definitely enjoy the experience.

The vibration motor inside the OnePlus 10 Pro is top-notch, easily among the best we've ever tested on a phone that we reviewed long-term. The one caveat here is that it's one of those "feel it more than hear it" offerings, as most are these days. "Hear it more than feel it" is generally the trademark of a cheap motor, but Samsung used to offer the best of both worlds for its Ultra flagships, until this year, when it also switched to a similar "feel more than hear" part.

Of course, your mileage with the motor will vary based on your preference; we find this to be unsurpassed by any other in the Android world at the moment, although there are a lot that is incredibly similar. Still, the point is you won't be disappointed.

Sound & vibration settings

The software can also adapt the vibration pattern to your chosen ringtone (from the built-in ones), which is always nice to see. There are a few sliding scales on which to adjust the vibration intensity for various things, and the only slight niggle we have here is that we only felt the motor delivered its best performance when all of those were maxed out. A little more give would have been appreciated. You even get to pick between two types of feel for the haptic response to your touches in a dedicated menu: we went with Crisp because Gentle simply seemed too subtle, but you may like that better.

Display quality, brightness

As we mentioned in the Design section, from the front, the OnePlus 10 Pro looks like almost any other Android smartphone in 2022, with the exception of the screen's curved sides, something that's still reserved for a subset of flagship devices, and the left-aligned hole-punch for the selfie camera, which used to be the default for Chinese brands but isn't anymore as they've basically all moved on to a centered position for it as soon as Samsung started selling them such display panels - it's a bit funny in retrospect to think that the Korean company initially used such a thing as the hole-punch position as a differentiating factor for its smartphones.

And yet, looks can be deceiving because what we have here on the OnePlus 10 Pro is not just any screen but an excellent one, quality-wise. It doesn't get as bright as most of its competitors, though, and if you have one of them around, that's quite noticeable. Don't get us wrong, it's still decently legible in sunlight, but, for example, the Xiaomi 12 Pro is much brighter. It looks like OnePlus and sister brand Oppo both prioritized... other things as their top dogs for 2022, as the Oppo Find X5 Pro seems to have the exact same panel.

Display settings

Speaking of brightness, the auto brightness algorithm on the OnePlus 10 Pro is just bad. It's not the worst we've ever had the 'pleasure' of dealing with, but it's not great either. During our time with the phone, we constantly had to manually adjust the brightness slider because the algorithm seemed to get stuck a lot of times on a brightness that matched a previous level of ambient lighting, which has since changed. This was especially problematic for subtle shifts - it worked well enough when going from pitch darkness to sunlight or vice versa, but when going from a brightly lit room to a less brightly lit one... retina sear festival, everyone!

We got used to the constant manual adjustment dance after a few days, and some of the settings did seem to get remembered for future encounters with the same ambient light levels, but keep in mind that there are thousands of 'steps' in the algorithm and the chance that you'll encounter the exact same one again isn't that high. Auto brightness and its behavior have been one of the more frustrating parts of our time with the OnePlus 10 Pro, and it's such an easily fixable issue (through software updates) that we don't really understand why right now, many months after the phone's initial release, this is still a thing. Can you live with it? Sure. Is it a good user experience? No.

While we're exploring our display-related niggles, let's also mention that the screen has diagonal polarization, and it's on the wrong diagonal. This is still preferable to vertical or horizontal polarization, which would have made the screen invisible through polarized sunglasses in either portrait or landscape mode, but it's not great - circular polarization, something Samsung has been using for ages on its flagships, would have been much better as that ensures there's no angle at which the screen is invisible through polarized sunglasses.

The OnePlus 10 Pro's display is invisible when you hold it (or look at it) diagonally, but it's the diagonal between portrait mode and what most people use as landscape mode - the one with the bottom of the phone pointing to the right. While you're rotating between these two modes, you won't see the screen through polarized sunglasses. Can you live with this? Sure, but if you're in a very sunny place, it might get quite annoying, especially in the car - depending on your phone holder's position, you might actually end up looking at it at such a diagonal angle a lot. It's a small problem otherwise, but one that reeks of cost-cutting and for a device that's supposed to be the be-all-end-all of what OnePlus can provide in this day and age, that's not great.

Color accuracy, refresh rate

The money, time, and development resources that didn't go into extra brightness or fine-tuning the auto brightness algorithm did go into color accuracy, however, as the OnePlus 10 Pro is, out of the box, among the most color-accurate smartphones we've seen. So if that's important for you, it's good to know that you won't necessarily need to tinker with color profiles, although you can also do that if you want to. The Vivid mode is calibrated to the DCI-P3 space, the Natural mode is calibrated to sRGB, Cinematic goes with Display-P3, and Brilliant just gives you all of the gamut the phone is capable of.

Color settings

The OnePlus 10 Pro has 120 Hz refresh rate, and thanks to the LTPO2 display panel this should be the most flexible 120 Hz yet, kicking into the highest gear when necessary but going down to 1 Hz when you have no need for the higher values, thus improving battery life.

While in our regular review we described in detail how the system works, over here, we'll just say that in our day-to-day use we never felt scrolling to be janky. Keep in mind that a few months have passed since our normal review, and a few software updates have arrived during this time, so that may be why. We very much appreciate when a phone feels buttery smooth, as if it's at 120 Hz all the time, but in fact isn't. Some battery life is gained, and nothing is perceived to be lost, and this is a win-win for sure.

Screen refresh rate settings

The caveat? This reviewer doesn't use Instagram or TikTok and has auto-playing videos disabled in every other social media app, so if you don't, maybe your mileage may vary, and you'll still see a little bit of jank while the phone decides what you're looking at and how to best handle it. Variable refresh rate screens aren't a new thing in the mobile world anymore, but manufacturers are still experimenting with how to best deal with all the possible scenarios, which is a bit weird in this day and age. Maybe Google should step in and build a specific algorithm for this into Android and then force device makers to use it? Maybe not, if we go by the horrible mess that its gesture navigation implementation has been.

Curves

As we already mentioned a few times, this screen curves on its sides. You might hate that, and that's okay. This reviewer likes curved screens for two reasons - the shallow 'it just looks better', but also the objectively nicer feeling Back gesture, which is the one everyone uses the most. One of the traditional downsides to curved screens has to do with them registering accidental touches, and if you use the OnePlus 10 Pro without a case, you may well run into some of those. It definitely wasn't unbearable for us, but your mileage may obviously vary.

The important thing to note here is that if you use a case, this problem goes away completely. We tried the bundled case, and the Sandstone one, and in both (excuse the pun) cases, we had zero accidental touches. So if you like to 'go naked' as they say, you might have to be prepared to live with some accidental touches. If, however, you just 'slap a case on it', it'll be fine.

Biometrics

The in-display fingerprint sensor is probably the most accurate optical one we've used so far, and it's also the fastest. Its position is good, too - sometimes these sensors are way too low to be comfortably reached without hand gymnastics, but this one is fine. It could have been placed a tad higher up, but that's just this reviewer's personal preference and might not be yours.

The important thing is that it has accurately read our fingerprint around 99% of the time, which is encroaching on capacitive sensor accuracy territory. It's also very fast, easily tied with the fastest optical sensors out there, even if it's not revolutionarily faster than any of them. Still, using it feels high-end, as it should considering this phone is high-end. There's an opt-in "quick launch" function too, where if after unlocking, you keep pressing some preset icons will appear and allow you to launch an app by sliding your finger to it all in one motion. This sounds great in theory, and a lot of phones have something similar, but we were never fans of the feature. Then again, if you are, note that it's present.

Biometrics settings

If, for some reason, you don't get along with it as well as we did, you can always use face unlocking, although as usual, it's going to be much less secure. It's also very fast, and the option to not have it unlock if your eyes are closed is on by default, as it should be.

Always-on Display, Eye comfort

As all recent smartphones do, the OnePlus 10 Pro does, of course, have Always-On Display functionality, and it's one of the most customizable available today. You can pick between analog and digital clocks, custom text, various Bitmoji, and the Canvas feature lets you turn a picture of someone into an outline drawing and have that always plastered onto the phone's screen if you wish.

Unsurprisingly, the AOD can be scheduled, and you can pick whether you want notification icons, the battery indicator, contextual information, media player controls, and new notifications to be shown, as well as the fingerprint icon appearing whenever you move or touch the phone for easy and quick unlocking. Overall, this is among the most extensive AOD offerings out there, and during our time with the OnePlus 10 Pro we didn't find ourselves ever thinking it needed to have even more features, so chances are you'll be very happy with it too.

Always-On Display settings

The blue light filter is present too, of course, and OnePlus calls it Eye comfort. You can pick between full colors and black and white for this mode, as well as schedule it to turn on and off automatically to your heart's content. You also get the traditional slider that influences the intensity of the effect, but as with most Android skins there are no options to have a textured background or 'lighter' colors as in MIUI.

Eye comfort settings

It's a perfectly capable implementation of a blue light filter, but we wish more companies would get 'inspired' by what Xiaomi is doing in MIUI and add more options, which could be very well received by those who are most sensitive to blue light.

Performance, smoothness

While it may not have the latest Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 chipset inside, the OnePlus 10 Pro's Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 doesn't seem to be missing that "+" all that much, at least in day-to-day use. In fact, this is the best-performing Android phone we've ever reviewed long-term. We say this a lot, but this one really does 'fly' no matter what you throw at it, and it's ever so slightly faster than anything that came before it into our long-term review hands.

There's just no moment where you feel like you'd need more performance, not one. We'll qualify this statement by reiterating that we're not heavy gamers - so keep that caveat in mind. Performance is great for anything else, though, and it may very well hold for constant heavy gaming too, we just can't directly confirm that. As usual, we're going to say that if gaming is most of what you do on your phone, then your attention should probably be focused on the dedicated gaming phones, with their much more intensive cooling systems. For everything else, though, you will never be left wanting for performance with the OnePlus 10 Pro, and that's exactly how things should be for a device that's positioned as top of the line.

It also gets the crown for the smoothest smartphone we've ever reviewed long-term, and by some margin. In its current form, OxygenOS really deserves to be using the "fast and smooth" tagline, as it definitely is both. No other phone we've had for one of these reviews comes close, and it's nice to see OnePlus going back to its roots in this specific fashion - focusing on performance and smoothness as the main priorities when it comes to the user experience.

The 120 Hz refresh rate of the display obviously plays its part in delivering this unprecedented feeling of smoothness, but it's probably the software that does most of the heavy lifting - after all, there are other 120 Hz flagships out there, using the same chipset even, that aren't this smooth. So we congratulate OnePlus on this achievement and can't wait for another phone to dethrone the 10 Pro - not because we have anything against it, but because we're always excited to see new devices push the envelope further and further.

For now, if performance (outside of heavy gaming) and smoothness are the most important things for you in a smartphone and your budget isn't limited, we think you should definitely take a serious look at the OnePlus 10 Pro.

Battery life, charging

Battery life has been good throughout our time with the OnePlus 10 Pro, on any day. Some days it was very good, other days, it was bordering on excellent, but it was never bad, at least for our use case, which involves around 12-17 hours off the charger in a day with primarily Wi-Fi connectivity, about an hour or two of 5G, Bluetooth always on and connected to TWS earbuds for an hour or so of music listening and an hour or so of phone calls, location always on and about half an hour of GPS navigation via Waze or Google Maps.

The screenshots below represent the worst and the best performance we've gotten out of the phone's battery. As you can see, in both cases, we're at around 4 hours of screen-on time, but in the first scenario, that's with 35% battery left, and in the second one, it's with 60% battery left. In the latter case, those hours of screen on time have come from only 6 or so hours off the charger, though, which obviously will impact the numbers.

Battery life snapshots

Overall, we'd say that, with a use case similar to ours, if you were to drain the battery down to 10% or lower each day, you'd comfortably be looking at a minimum of 6 hours of screen on time, with 7 being possible sometimes too, but not more. That's not outstanding battery life, but it is good, and if your use case isn't much more extreme, it means that this device should generally be able to last you one full day without problems.

But even if it doesn't, you can always quickly top it up during the day, which is where the extremely fast charging comes in handy - provided that you have the original cable and charger with you, of course. It only takes around half an hour to fully charge the OnePlus 10 Pro, which is getting more common these days but is still a sight to behold, especially as the proprietary tech means most of the heat is created in the charging brick and not the phone. The OnePlus 10 Pro is noticeably cooler to the touch when you take it off the charger than some of its competitors.

So with such speed, you can easily top up enough of the battery midday to last you until you go to sleep while you grab a coffee or take a shower. Despite super fast wired charging becoming more and more mainstream, this is still one of the most underrated features in a phone even today, at least in this reviewer's opinion.

Fast wireless charging is built-in, too, but we couldn't test it since we didn't have the proprietary stand that would support the maximum 50W, nor did we miss it, if we're honest, given the insane wired charging speeds. Of course, you can also use a 'normal' 15W wireless charging pad, and that will pump up the juice into the handset while you're sleeping, for example, without an issue.

What hasn't similarly been issue-free for us is nighttime charging using a cable and the dedicated Optimized night charging setting. This supposedly learns your sleeping patterns and thus will only charge the phone to 100% before your wakeup time - the rest of the time it, stops at 80% in order to preserve battery health.

Optimized night charging

This is a great feature in theory, except it never actually worked for us. Two weeks into our time with the OnePlus 10 Pro for this long-term review, we had enough and turned it off. That's two weeks of waking up to 80% charge even if the cable was connected to the phone the entire night. Perhaps this may be less of an issue for people with more normal sleeping schedules than this reviewer's, but the software clearly says it will adapt to your specific patterns. And it just didn't.

OxygenOS 12.1, updates

The OnePlus 10 Pro runs Android 12 underneath OxygenOS 12.1, which is rather hard to tell as the version of the skin isn't mentioned in the About section of Settings, weirdly enough. Anyway, think of OxygenOS 12.1 as ColorOS 12.1 with some OnePlus customizations and tweaks, and you'll get a pretty reasonable picture of what to expect.

Current software at the time of writing

Now, a lot of people will instantly dislike this arrangement, and if the argument is that losing a truly independent OxygenOS reduces choice in the Android skin game, we hear you. But a lot of people simply don't like ColorOS, and that's it. This we find harder to grasp, as Oppo's skin is now one of the fastest, smoothest, and more bug-free options you can get. So it's a solid base for OnePlus to come and modify slightly in order to make OxygenOS 12.1 out of it. Sure, before version 7, ColorOS was just a bafflingly executed iOS clone, but it's been many years since that was the case, and if you haven't looked at it since, maybe you should.

Settings

For someone who isn't a die-hard fan of the 'old', purer version of OxygenOS, there's absolutely nothing wrong with the 12.1 incarnation, ColorOS-tinted as it may be. The user interface is easy enough to navigate, the user experience is great thanks to the unmatched smoothness all over, and we have encountered only two bugs throughout our time with the OnePlus 10 Pro, on two different software versions.

The first was already mentioned in the Battery life section and has to do with Optimized night charging not doing what it's supposed to, while the second relates to having dark gray on black text in Gmail notifications - not for the email titles, mind you, but for the content. It's a minor niggle (since you can still read the titles of the emails), and while the basic assumption is there's something wrong with OxygenOS' dark mode implementation here, there is a slim chance it's a weird interaction between the skin and the app creating the problem.

Those being the only bugs we've encountered is definitely praiseworthy considering that the previous OnePlus model we reviewed long-term, the Nord 2, was an entirely different animal, with plenty of issues throughout the software. Perhaps the company simply pays more attention to high-end devices, optimizing the builds better, and that's a good thing for a prospective OnePlus 10 Pro owner, despite not being great for anyone wanting to buy a mid-ranger.

The end result is that this is the smoothest Android skin we've ever used, and so despite all of the Oppo merger shenanigans, at least that part of OnePlus' unique selling points hasn't changed. Hopefully, it never does.

Update cadence, on the other hand, could definitely be improved. As we write this in early August, the OnePlus 10 Pro still has the June security patch level, and that's now two months behind. We're confident an update is coming soon, but only issuing security fixes once every couple of months is not great compared to most of the competition, especially Samsung.

Personalizations, multitasking, screenshots

The Personalizations section in Settings neatly groups together all of the things you can do to alter the appearance of the software, and we're big fans of having such a quickly accessible hub for when you want a fresh coat of paint on your device, even if some of the settings in here are duplicated elsewhere. That's a tradeoff we think is worth it, as for people who are just getting their first OnePlus device it's very easy to notice this and jump straight in without having to surface stuff from multiple Settings sub-sections. This also helps new users realize how many things they can actually customize to their liking.

You can switch wallpapers, control the AOD functionality, as well as customize icon shapes and sizes, Quick Settings icons' shape and color accent, the color accent used throughout the skin, fonts and display size, the fingerprint animation, and the behavior of the Horizon light which comes up on the curves of the screen when you get a notification or call. That's a lot of stuff, nicely packed into one area, and it should allow people to quickly customize their software experience in a matter of minutes, every time they want to.

Personalizations

Another thing we really appreciate about OxygenOS 12.1 (and ColorOS 12.1, since they share this feature) is the ability to easily switch into split-screen multitasking mode by swiping up with three fingers. This puts the app you are currently in at the top, allowing you to quickly select another app for the lower portion of the screen. No messing with the Recent apps menu first or anything like that.

This has made us use split-screen multitasking much more than on devices that don't have such a quick way of getting into it, and we wanted to mention it because you may not be aware it's even a thing, unless you're the type to take a deep dive into Settings to look at every nook and cranny to be found over there. This is on by default, thankfully, but if for some reason you don't like it, you can switch it off.

Screenshot gesture settings

The same goes for capturing a screenshot by doing the opposite gesture - swiping down with three fingers. That said, pressing the power and volume down buttons simultaneously is a similarly quick way to achieve the same goal, so there's less of a speed improvement here than for multitasking. Still, it's nice to have an extra option to take a screenshot, we don't mind. Speaking of which, you can also touch and hold with three fingers to take a partial or scrolling screenshot.

Dark mode, gesture navigation

As we already mentioned, the OnePlus 10 Pro comes with a Dark mode. This can be on or off, made to auto switch on either from sunset to sunrise or during a custom time interval, and you have three darkness options: Gentle, Medium, and Enhanced. We always like the true blackness of the Enhanced mode, but if that's too much for you then you can pick one of the other two, for an added bit of flexibility.

We'd like it if all Android skins had something like this, but for now only ColorOS and its derivatives do - OxygenOS and Realme UI. You can also have it so the screen color contrast intensity is adjusted automatically based on ambient lighting conditions, while wallpapers and icons can be 'adjusted' to Dark mode too, meaning they get darker so that if you have a light-colored wallpaper or icon theme it won't sear your retinas while using Dark mode. This is probably the most customizable Dark mode on the market right now, and we love it.

Dark mode settings

The Beta-labeled 'Dark mode for third-party apps' function, though, is pointless. It's hilariously only available for AliExpress, LinkedIn, and Speedtest. The laughably small number of supported apps aside, LinkedIn actually has a dark mode of its own now, and Speedtest's UI has always been dark by default, so the usefulness of this feature is highly debatable.

In this day and age, most third-party apps have thankfully got their own dark themes, and some of them can even apply those automatically if your phone is in Dark mode, so this will probably never come out of Beta and instead will be on its way out in future versions of OxygenOS. Can't say we'd miss it if it did go away, especially in this barebones incarnation.

Gesture navigation is supported, of course, and it works like a charm all the time. We're thankful that you can remove the "gesture guide bar" white pill-shaped abomination that takes up screen real estate at the bottom, maybe Google should take note of the fact that this is pretty much an option in every third-party skin now? We also like that the Back gesture can trigger a vibration, as that just enhances the perceived physicality of the motion.

Gesture navigation settings

Although other skins have done away with this, OxygenOS still lets you quickly switch to the previous app by performing the Back gesture and then holding for a bit. That's a very good option to have if you don't want to constantly swipe across the bottom to perform the same task.

Launcher, Recents

The launcher that ships with the OnePlus 10 Pro has all the features you'd expect, including a choice between having an app drawer and not having one, and nothing more, but it's perfectly competent, and we've had no issues with it.

Home screen, app drawer, Google Discover feed

Well, aside from one - by default, if you swipe down from the top right corner, you're getting the OnePlus Shelf, which has been relocated here from its previous position to the left of the leftmost home screen. That's now where the Google Discover feed resides, which is a plus, but why the Shelf hasn't been provided simply as an alternative option for that position and nothing more (like Samsung does for its Today feed) is beyond us.

The Shelf setting and where to find it

The Shelf showing up when you swipe down just clutters the UI for no reason and will confuse people who are looking for their notification panel and who don't know that you can actually disable the Shelf popping up. We immediately did, and hopefully, this will be useful to those who aren't aware of what's going on.

Similarly, you can have the swipe down from anywhere else around the top bring down a global search menu or the notification area. We're fans of the latter choice, especially on devices this big, as otherwise it would take a lot of finger gymnastics to reach the absolute top of the screen. Then again, if you hate quickly being able to look at notifications and would rather search for something or look at the Shelf, you can do those things too.

Launcher settings

The Recent apps display is the usual horizontally scrolling affair, with the ColorOS / OxygenOS touch on top which means there's a row of the app icons right under their respective screenshots, and if you swipe across this row of icons you get much faster scrolling than if you swipe across the screenshots.

Recent apps

We would have liked to see some app predictions somewhere, like in One UI, especially as there seems to be enough room for that, too if the Close all button wasn't unnecessarily huge (and not to mention totally unneeded to begin with). Then again, having a row of suggested apps' icons right under a row of the recent apps' icons might get confusing, so as things stand in the Android world you get one or the other but not both.

Camera

The OnePlus 10 Pro was a flagship device when it launched, and it's still one today, thus the camera system has to be fitting of that market positioning. And on paper, things sure look interesting, with Hasselblad branding, a big main sensor, a proper telephoto, and a high-res ultrawide. So how did they all fare during our time with the phone?

The main and zoom cameras are recycled from the OnePlus 9 Pro, which is not necessarily a bad thing, as neither was terrible to begin with. The tele has a bit more zoom than your average non-periscope effort at 3.3x, while the main sensor has some big pixels in there, even though they're not the biggest on the market. Now that the context is out of the way let's dive into some samples.

Daytime shots from the main camera look good, although the processing does have a propensity to give you a very sharp, saturated, contrasty image at all costs, and those costs, while not huge, aren't negligible either. Dynamic range sometimes suffers because of this, and overall the colors you're getting may have just a tad too much 'pop' for your liking even if you're not a photo purist. The oversharpening can get out of hand sometimes too, if not by a lot. Hence, these aren't bad pictures, they're good but probably could have been better given the hardware that's used. That said, you may simply love this look, and that's great.

Daytime samples from the main camera

The ultrawide camera is the novelty for this year, sporting a Samsung JN1 50 MP sensor, and it produces decent images that aren't anywhere close to amazing. There's some softness creeping in, detail levels aren't outstanding, and color matching the main camera is pretty much a pipe dream, but you are getting usable results no matter what. You just shouldn't expect this to ever match the main shooter in quality, one-to-one.

Daytime samples from the ultrawide

While this is a decent ultrawide, it's not among the best we've ever seen, and at the OnePlus 10 Pro's launch price, maybe it should have been? The lack of autofocus can be annoying, too, especially given that, as a consequence, this phone has no way of focusing on anything under about 10cm. Top-of-the-line devices should have ultrawide cameras with autofocus, we think.

Note here that we didn't use the 150-degree mode for the ultrawide during our time with the handset for this long-term review, but if you're interested in this particular gimmick that will most likely be forgotten next year, make sure to check out our normal review of the OnePlus 10 Pro where we show you some of those heavily distorted shots.

Moving on to zoomed pictures, these are generally good, with nice amounts of detail captured, good (but not overbearing) contrast, and an ever so slightly less oversharpened look compared to the main camera.

Daytime zoom samples

At night, the main camera produces perfectly competent results, with pleasant colors, good dynamic range, and reasonable detail levels. The Auto mode is best used at night when there's still some ambient lighting around. There's a weird thing going on where above a certain ambient light threshold, the Auto mode delivers significantly better shots than Night Mode, in all respects except for pumped-up brightness - Night Mode definitely gives you that, but if there's still a lot of light around, the effect ends up looking completely artificial.

Nighttime samples from the main camera

On the other hand, if you go under a certain ambient light threshold, then Night Mode's propensity to overly brighten everything comes in handy and negates its general lack of sharpness compared to Auto mode. So, unfortunately, we can't give you a clear recommendation for nighttime shooting with this phone, unlike with others, as the Auto mode is clearly preferable in better-lit conditions, and Night Mode is definitely the way to go for dimmer settings. You'll just have to play with these a lot to then gain an intuitive sense of when to switch.

Night Mode samples from the main camera

The ultrawide struggles at night with scenes that aren't well-lit, and it definitely struggles more than the best ultrawides out there, but it's still much better than those ubiquitous 8 MP ultrawide shooters on mid-range phones. When there's barely any light around, you'll get softness all over, and dark edges.

Nighttime samples from the ultrawide

Night Mode does help create better-looking shots, but they're not incredibly impressive and can come out too bright in some settings - the exact opposite of Auto mode ultrawide shots. Still, if you're lucky, you can get a few usable pictures out of the ultrawide at night, but it's once again not clear which mode you should engage to get the best chance for that. We'd say Night Mode has a slight edge for the ultrawide, but a lot of people may prefer the more natural-looking, darker Auto shots.

Night Mode samples from the ultrawide

The telephoto camera gets complicated at night too, because for some reason, this is a theme for this phone. Aside from the already mentioned shenanigans regarding Night Mode brightening things up so much that everything looks artificial, there's also the issue of whether the telephoto lens will be used to begin with.

The general logic is that it will only be engaged if there's enough ambient lighting, but again that threshold is hard to figure out initially. And it could be important because the shots that come out of the zoom camera itself, while nowhere near the quality of those from the main snapper, are still generally usable for a quick social media share. On the other hand, when a crop from the main sensor is used instead, all you get is a smudgy mess with detail missing in action. In these samples, it's pretty easy to tell which is which just by the obvious quality difference.

Nighttime zoom samples

Night Mode for zoom shots is the same - decent, if barely so, provided you're lucky enough to have had the dedicated camera used, and absolutely unusable if not.

Night Mode zoom samples

In summary, the OnePlus 10 Pro has a main camera with good hardware specs that's sometimes hindered by the processing, an ultrawide camera that's decent but probably should have been better at this price point, and a zoom camera that's very good during the daytime and not too bad at night but is barely used by the phone in low-light conditions.

Selfies are taken by a 32 MP camera that should produce 8 MP images but actually upscales those back to 32 MP for some reason. The quality is generally good during daytime, with good detail levels and dynamic range. It's not the best selfie camera we've ever encountered for sure, but it's perfectly passable, especially if you're not very much into selfies.

Selfie samples, day and night, Portrait Mode off/on

At night, things understandably take a turn towards the worse, unless you have a good amount of ambient light to shoot in. If that's the case, you'll get decent results, aided by the screen flash function, which is on by default. These are totally shareable on social media. Portrait Mode isn't always perfect in terms of subject separation, but the effect is pronounced, so if you're into a very obvious Portrait Mode shot, you'll love this.

Conclusion

The OnePlus 10 Pro is very far removed from the OnePlus One, which launched back in 2014. Right? Well, it is, and it isn't. While the new phone comes with all the modern bells and whistles, most of the general things one can say about it are eerily similar to what was said about the OnePlus One all those years ago. Let's give it a try: what we have here is a device that focuses on performance, is incredibly fast and smooth in operation, has okay but not groundbreaking battery life, and the cameras aren't as good as the phone's positioning would have you believe. See? The OnePlus formula is practically unchanged in its general ambitions.

Okay, we know there are a ton of caveats and nuances here, so let's go through them. The OnePlus One was priced like a mid-ranger, and the 10 Pro most definitely isn't. But the fact remains that while this device wipes the floor with a Galaxy S22 or S22+ in sheer speed and especially smoothness, the Samsungs still win the camera game, no matter what the Hasselblad branding may have you believe.

The point here is that the OnePlus formula has been improved over the years, but it's still pretty similar to what it's always been, albeit at a much different price point. Speaking of improvements, the screen on the 10 Pro is extremely high quality and among the most accurate out there, even if it doesn't get as bright as its competitors.

The experience of using the phone is silky smooth, performance is on point, and battery life is good and should adequately provide a day's use for all but the most extreme power users. OxygenOS 12.1 may just be ColorOS 12.1 underneath, but OnePlus has added its own coat of paint and features that improve usability. It's also been an almost bug-free ride for us across two software versions, and we're hoping that stays the same in the future. Security update cadence seems to be twice as slow as Google and Samsung, which is obviously worse but not bad enough that it would need extensive calling out (looking at you, Xiaomi).

The cameras are good, don't get us wrong, we were just expecting a bit more in the second year of the Hasselblad partnership. That still seems to be more of a marketing stunt than any real co-development going on, Huawei and Leica style. And it's a shame because there are definitely areas where OnePlus' processing could improve, and we're assuming Hasselblad would be able to lend a hand. Maybe that's coming for the OnePlus 11 Pro, but as it is, we'd definitely not recommend anyone go and buy the 10 Pro just based on the co-branding.

Looks wise, this is a very 2022 phone, but it even manages to stand out if you consider the unique and somewhat polarizing design of the camera island on the rear. Everywhere else, it's definitely a safe design, but one that works, and handling is great unless you have small hands.

So, essentially, what the OnePlus 10 Pro brings to the table is a stellar performance, extreme smoothness, a controversial (for some) but perfectly adequate for most software experience, good battery life, and cameras that, while good, aren't among the best out there.

While the OnePlus 10 Pro is the most expensive OnePlus you can buy, competing brands do have even steeper priced offerings, and yes, those generally beat the 10 Pro when it comes to camera quality, but you are literally paying for that with their higher price tags. If you're fine with not sporting the best smartphone cameras in your pocket, care a lot about performance and smoothness, don't mind a 'less pure' skin on top of Android than OxygenOS used to be, and don't need to extract ten hours of screen on time during a day of use from the battery, then this OnePlus could be for you. There aren't any glaring problems with it, and it's a very good phone overall, just not the best at any specific thing aside from smoothness.

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