Over the last several years OnePlus has evolved from a vendor looking to disrupt the smartphone market to a company whose flagships are now eagerly awaited every year. The OnePlus 6 is the company’s biggest design change yet, and brings with it flagship specifications while still maintaining its characteristic advantage in terms of product pricing as well as long-term software support.

I have to admit that for me personally this will be the first time I’d have reviewed OnePlus device as I had missed out on past reviews and we’ve had a coverage gap last year when it came to mobile devices. As such I’m pretty much coming into the review of the OP6 with no pre-conceptions about either hardware or software of the phone, and based on what I’ve seen over the last couple of weeks and what you’ll get to read over the following pages, I’ve been massively impressed.

	OnePlus 6
SoC	Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 4x Kryo 385 Gold @ up to 2.80 GHz 4x Kryo 385 Silver @ up to 1.77 GHz Adreno 630 @ up to 710 MHz
Display	6.28-inch 2280x1080 (19:9) AMOLED
Dimensions	155.7 x 75.4 x 7.8 mm 177 grams
RAM	6GB / 8GB / 8GB LPDDR4x
NAND	64GB / 128GB / 256GB
Battery	3300mAh (12.7Wh)
Front Camera	16MP Sony IMX371, f/2.0, EIS
Primary Rear Camera	16MP Sony IMX519 1.22µm pixels, f/1.7, OIS
Secondary Rear Camera	20MP Sony IMX376K, 1.0µm pixels, f/1.7 Low-light & Depth
SIM Size	2x NanoSIM
Connectivity	802.11ac 2x2 WiFi BT 5.0, NFC
Interfaces	USB 2.0 Type-C;  3.5mm audio
Launch OS	Android O (8.1) with OxygenOS 5.1
MSRP Launch Price	6GB/64GB: ¥3199 / $529 / €519 8GB/128GB: ¥3599 / $579 / €569 8GB/256GB: ¥3999 / $629 / €619

Starting off with the specifications of the phone, this is indeed a 2018 flagship phone as it comes with the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 SoC powered by 4x Kryo 385 Gold (Cortex A75 based) up to 2.8GHz and 4x Kryo 385 Silver (Cortex A55 based) up to 1.77GHz. We’ve had extensive coverage on the SoC starting off with the announcement piece, to our performance preview and our in-depth investigations included in the Galaxy S9 review.  To say the least, every Snapdragon 845 device over the last couple of months has been very impressive and I’m not expecting any less from the OnePlus 6.

OnePlus really opted to give the OP6 a more than generous amount of RAM as well as high storage capabilities. The base model comes with 6GB LPDDR4X and 64GB of UFS storage, with the larger 128GB and 256GB (!!) models sport 8GB of RAM. The 8GB of main memory seems overkill as in daily situations the phone rarely uses more than 3.5GB, so there’s still massive amounts of headroom available for memory hungry applications or heavy multi-tasking. I commend OnePlus on the 256GB variant of the phone as not only does it makes up for the lack of a microSD slot, but actually comes at a relatively reasonable price premium compared to what other vendors ask for higher-capacity models.

The OP6 comes with essentially all required global frequency bands and as such the phone should be an option and of interest to anybody, regardless of market and carrier frequency bands.

Design-wise of course the OP6 marks a generational step it has ditched the metal body of its predecessors and for the first time opted to use a glass back on the phone. The phone comes in four different colours and two finishes: The recently announced red variant as well as the launch model “mirror black” come with a regular shiny glass finish. The “pearl white” and “midnight black” variant, the latter of which is depicted in the review, both have a matte finish which tries to mimic a polished metallic look. Personally I found this finish to be very interesting and do prefer it a lot to phones with the regular glossy glass; however some people have noted that it might be too slippery so it’s certainly something subjective and depending on personal preference.

As Ian noted in our initial hands-on article, one thing that you would expect with the inclusion of a glass panel back is the ability to wirelessly charge the phone. Unfortunately OnePlus doesn’t see the need to include this into their phones as of yet as they deem the ecosystem too immature and found wireless charging not commonly used. Obviously this is a chicken-and-egg issue, and while lately I have increased my usage of wireless charging and even now have a pad next to my bed, I don’t find the lack of it all that troublesome for a device. It’s also possible that including a wireless charging coil would have resulted in an ever so slightly thicker phone, which given the overall larger dimensions of the device would have likely hampered its ergonomics.

One controversial addition to the OnePlus 6 is the display notch. Here the screen extends upwards to the sides where usually we would’ve found the top bezel of the phone. In the middle cut-out we find the earpiece flanked by one side the sensor array and notification light, and on the other side the 16MP front-facing camera. As I’ve talked about in our review of the Huawei P20 and P20 Pro, the notch is absolutely not bothersome at all in daily usage and can be blacked out via software option, something that works extremely well on the AMOLED screen of the phone.

Speaking of screens, the OnePlus 6 sports an AMOLED screen with a 6.28” diagonal. Again the diagonal has little meaning nowadays as the 19:9 aspect ratio screen doesn’t properly convey the actual size of the device. At 75.4mm wide the OnePlus 6 is 1-2mm wider than some of the competitor devices in the same size range; however the very thin rounded sides of the phone do help it a lot in terms of ergonomics so it’s still extremely useable. One aspect that OnePlus could have in my opinion done better with the OP6 is to try to reduce the side bezels just a bit more as I think that would have made for a much sleeker look.

At the back of the phone OnePlus rearranged its camera positioning from the top left corner to the middle with a vertical dual-camera layout with the flash and fingerprint sensor located underneath. Camera wise the main rear sensor is a Sony IMX519 sporting a 4608x3456 resolution (16MP) and has a pixel pitch of 1.22µm. The CMOS is supported by a f/1.7 lens with a 35mm equivalent focal length of 25mm and the module includes OIS.

The secondary sensor is also a Sony sensor coming in at 20MP and f/1.7, however this isn’t a telephoto lens but rather a OnePlus unique use-case where the secondary sensor is used sometimes in low-light conditions as well as for depth data in capturing modes such as portrait mode. We’ll look into the camera evaluation extensively in another large comparison across a wide variety of recent flagship devices.

At the bottom of the phone we find a single bottom-firing speaker which we evaluate later on in the review, the phone’s USB-C connector port, the bottom microphone as well a 3.5mm audio jack. Keeping the 3.5mm jack is definitely an advantage for the OP6 as the company evidently resisted the popular urge to restrict user choice on the matter. As a note, I’m still looking into rebuilding our audio evaluation methodologies, but likely won’t have anything ready until later in the year.

On the left side of the phone we find the SIM tray which contains two nanoSIM slots, with the volume rocker located underneath.

On the right side we find a slider button which acts as a hardware switch to quickly switch between the three states of silent, vibrate only and regular ringing, a feature that’s essentially not found any more in many Android devices.

Overall the OnePlus 6’s design is very impressive – build quality looks and feels very solid. It’s a large phone but thanks to its ergonomics it still manages to achieve very good usability. Some people will have concerns about the new glass back of the phone and how that affects durability, but personally I don’t mind it at all and find the matte finish variant extremely pleasing.

Software UI - OxygenOS 5.1

As noted in the introduction, I haven’t had the opportunity to spend much time with OnePlus devices in the past so OxygenOS is also naturally something I haven’t had much experience with. OnePlus is known to have excellent software support with quick and frequency updates. Indeed my review device was very quick in getting the latest July update to 5.1.9 and most interesting for users living on the bleeding edge, OnePlus takes part in the Android P beta program and it’s available for the OP6.

Design-wise, OxygenOS is as close to clean Android as it can be. Out of the box the phone comes with just the bare essentials with the only OnePlus “specific” application being the OP community app. The launcher includes both an app drawer as well as puts most recently installed applications on the second home-screen. The left screen from the homescreen acts as sort of a dashboard with various preconfigured widgets such as memo functionality, recent contacts, recent apps and other subjectively useful toolboxes. The important feature here is that you’re able to add in arbitrary widgets onto the scrollable list, which is an interesting way of organizing your widgets.

The notification tray is very clean and doesn’t veer far away from standard conventions.

A much appreciated default feature in the OS is the ability to switch the OS into a dark theme. This turns the then predominantly white UI into mostly black and dark coloured elements, not only throughout the SystemUI but also in the bundled system applications.

I’ve talked about how I really liked the gesture navigation on the Xiaomi MIX 2S and how it allowed for regaining more screen-estate by ditching the navigation bar. OnePlus’ implementation is similar in that swiping up from the bottom edge of the screen goes to the homescreen, but the back navigation functionality, instead of swiping up from the bottom lateral sides of the phone like on MIUI is implemented by swiping up from the sides of the bottom bezel which I find a lot more natural in terms of movement.

One aspect of OnePlus’ implementation that I did not like at all is the hold duration needed to bring up the multi-tasking screen. This is done by also swiping up from the bottom middle of the screen, but holding your finger instead of letting it go will open up the multi-tasking screen. The problem for me was that I found the hold duration required to be too long and kind of detracted from the fluidity of the navigation.

As an avid user of desktop browser gestures for a good 15 years, I’m extremely happy to see gesture navigation catching on in mobile – for many years we’ve had various innovative implementations from Chinese vendors but due to Google CTS limitations in the past we haven’t had the opportunity to see it wide-spread more often in western devices. Ironically it took Apple introducing them on the iPhone X to see Google finally have a change of heart. UI-less gesture navigations are in my opinion the single best solution to ergonomics. I think what Google did in Android P is a very poor and rushed attempt – hopefully vendors will have the liberty to implement their own variants.

For OnePlus what I’d like to see in the future is to have more customizability such as varying hold duration, and maybe more customizable gestures to just let the user decide how he’d like them to function.  I’m really looking forward to how things will evolve over the next couple of years as I think in the transition towards immersive bezel-less displays the traditional navigation bar has outlived its purpose.

As mentioned in the intro, the notch attracts a lot of controversy. In reality there’s nothing controversial about it and it fulfils its purpose wonderfully: to extend screen real-estate. The OnePlus 6 in no way hinders any kind of experience and if you don’t like the visual cut-out, you can simply black it out.

Overall OxygenOS on the OnePlus 6 is very straightforward and there’s very little to criticise it on. Performance is also outstanding, and that’s what we’ll more closely analyse in the next section.  

System Performance

Another Snapdragon 845 device, another system performance section to dwell into. By now following the Galaxy S9 review and Mi MIX 2S review we should have some clear expectations of how the OnePlus 6 should perform. In my MIS 2S review in particular I was very vocal about how superbly the phone performed in terms of performance, and attributed this to a great software implementation on the side of SoC. The OnePlus 6 very much deserves the same praise as it not only has the same extraordinary snappiness, but actually ever so slightly manages to beat the MIX 2S in some cases.

Starting off with PCMark’s Web Browsing test, the OnePlus 6 is very much within the top scorers in terms of performance.

The video editing test again is mostly performing as expected.

In the Writing 2.0 test which uses Android APIs and does operations such as text editing and PDF rendering the OnePlus 6 actually manages to take the top spot in terms of performance. This test alone correlates extremely well with overall system performance of a phone and the OP6 taking first place is indeed very well representative of the phone’s feel.

Photo editing test, alongside the Mi MIX 2S also takes top spots among current devices.

The data manipulation score averages out among top Snapdragon 845 devices.

     

Finally the total score matches the Mi MIX 2S. There’s not much more to say here other than Qualcomm’s scheduler improvements in the S845 BSP have really paid off this generation and this directly results in excellent real-life performance.

The web tests showcase pretty much identical performance to the Mi MIX 2S which in turn both slightly outperform other S845 devices such as the Galaxy S9 and LG G7.

UI Fluidity

Over the past few months there’s been more outspoken discussions about Android speed tests versus actual device fluidity. In general the latter is extremely hard to quantize into a figure and there will always be corner cases or outliers that will probably perform better or worse when comparing between devices.

In the context of the OnePlus 6 as well as Snapdragon 845 devices I’ve looked more into what actually is different between them and what is seemingly causing the OP6 and MIX 2S to perform better than, say the Snapdragon Galaxy S9.  Looking deeper into the kernel it looks like OnePlus and Xiaomi are both using a newer kernel build with more scheduler modifications than the kernels running on the S9 and G7. The details here go quite low level and is out of the scope of any public article, but the effects can be easily seen.

  
OnePlus 6 vs Galaxy S9+ (S845) Jitter Test

In the UIBench Jitter test we see the difference between the OnePlus 6 and the Galaxy S9 – the latter has a lore more inconsistent rendering frame-times. While in this test both have very clearly great frame-times well under 16.6ms – having more consistent frame times in turn can avoid random workload events that might push frame times over the deadline and result in dropped frames. The OnePlus 6 so far has been the best device in this particular test – only the Pixel phones come near to it but they don’t seem to have the same consistency over time.

Overall system performance of the OnePlus 6 deserves the same praise as the MIX 2S – both devices are currently the very best and fastest on the market and you will be absolutely not disappointed in their performances.

GPU Performance

During the release of the Snapdragon 845, the performance increases of the Adreno 630 GPU were touted to also come with large efficiency increases. Based on our testing with the Galaxy S9 and subsequent devices we’ve found that while the peak performance increases indeed matched Qualcomm’s projections, the higher benchmark scores came at a cost of increased device power consumption. This had the negative effect that in our new sustained performance tests the S845 did not manage to maintain an equal excellent % of peak performance as S835 devices.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time retesting these results and still always came within the same conclusions. The OnePlus 6 however seems to be the one S845 device that seems to particularly perform out of the norm here, as we’ll see in the following benchmarks.

Starting off with the 3DMark Sling Shot Physics test is mostly a CPU bound test within a GPU power constrained thermal environment, the OnePlus 6 fares just a tad better than the Galaxy S9+, posting slightly better peak and sustained scores.

Switching over to the Graphics results of the test however, we see some very large divergences of the OnePlus 6 versus other devices. Here the OP6 posts a much better sustained score and a larger percentage of peak performance than other Snapdragon 845 devices. The LG G7 also showcases a slight advantage over the earlier devices but not quite as good as the OP6.

Switching over GFXBench Manhattan 3.1, we see a similar result as the OnePlus 6 posts 45% better sustained performance than the Galaxy S9+ and the Mi MIX 2S, with only the LG G7 behind it.

To verify these figures and to make sure that it wasn’t any change in environmental conditions during the testing I tested the phone alongside the Galaxy S9+ re-running the methodology again on the Samsung phone, and indeed the OnePlus 6 just was much better at sustaining performance as the initial end-result of the S9+ was reproduced.

Finally, in T-Rex, the OnePlus 6 again manages to take the top spot in terms of sustained performance under stable thermal envelope.

As to why the OnePlus 6 really seems to post such different sustained performance characteristics is something that I think is attributable to thermal design of the phone. I measured 3D graphics power in the workloads and it didn’t really differ much from the measurements on the S9+, so this doesn’t seem to be a case of the GPU consuming less power either through whatever optimisations or possible better binned SoC unit.

While the Galaxy S9+ and Mi MIX 2S can get some quite high temperature hotspots at peak performance exceeding 55°C, the OnePlus 6 was much better and the worst skin temperature I measured on the warmest point, on the screen just over where the SoC is located, didn’t exceed 46°C. The phone seems to be much better at dissipating the heat throughout its mid-frame, and while overall the phone can still get quite warm, it’s more evened out and allows the SoC to seemingly maintain higher performance states. Obviously this is all circumstantial observations, it’s also possible that the OnePlus 6 also just has higher thermal throttling temperature settings, but then it would have also reached the very high temperature hotspots measured on the S9+ and MIX 2S, which just don't happen on the OP6.

In the end, the OnePlus 6 now posts the best graphics performance of any smartphone we’ve come to measure. This is not due to improved efficiency or power, but rather through a better sustained thermal envelope of the phone itself. It’s to note that while performance is very high, power for the Snapdragon 845 is still well above the Snapdragon 835 in this scenario and thus overall battery life at these high performance states will be worse.

Display Measurement & Power

The OnePlus 6 comes with a 6.22” diagonal 19:9 Samsung AMOLED screen sporting a 2280 x 1080 resolution. The first impressions of the screen are generally excellent, be it that the resolution is quite stretched at this large size. 

There’s no Android 8.1 colour management available for the screen, while it does support simple HDR content. OnePlus instead relies of various pre-defined colour profiles which can be found in the display settings:

 

The default mode is a very saturated wide gamut mode not particularly targeting any specific colour space. The firmware provides two accurate modes options representing the sRGB and DCI-P3 colour spaces. The Adaptive mode is also very much a viable alternative that again isn’t accurate to any standard, but comes with good compromises between higher colour saturation and more accurate skin tones.

As always, we thank X-Rite and SpecraCal, as measurements are performed with an X-Rite i1Pro 2 spectrophotometer, with the exception of black levels which are measured with an i1Display Pro colorimeter. Data is collected and examined using SpectraCal's CalMAN software.

 SpectraCal CalMAN
Standard (sRGB)       
DCI-P3    Adaptive

Starting off with the greyscale measurements we see that the screen fares quite well in terms of accuracy, albeit the colour temperature both in the sRGB and DCI-P3 modes are slightly too warm coming in at 6350K; the Adaptive mode is the only one which comes in at perfect whites of 6586K resulting in one of the bets greyscale dE2000 scores at 1.15. 

All modes slightly have a higher average gamma than the usual 2.2 target, which results in colours luminance to be slightly darker than what they are meant to be. 

 SpectraCal CalMAN
sRGB Greyscale Comparison

 SpectraCal CalMAN
Adaptive Greyscale Comparison

In terms of brightness, the screen goes up to a maximum of 420cd/m² in manual mode which is essentially standard for what we’ve seen over the years in terms of AMOLED screens. The more disappointing discovery here is that there’s no high brightness mode under default conditions and it can only be enabled at low-level driver interfaces. In effect this puts the OnePlus 6 at a visible brightness disadvantage in bright conditions, not least because of the lack of raw brightness, but also because it’s not adapting to the artificial low gamma and high saturation colour profiles that that vastly improves sunlight legibility usually found in other AMOLED devices.

 SpectraCal CalMAN
sRGB Mode / DCI-P3 Mode

The gamut and saturations accuracies for the sRGB and DCI-P3 modes are excellent, with only very slight deviations most prominent in magenta colours. In the DCI-P3 mode it also looks like OnePlus undershot the maximum chromacity for reds as it doesn’t quite reach the full gamut of the colour space – there’s also slight oversaturations in both profiles at the lower red levels meaning the colour compression on that channel is perfectly linearly configured.

 SpectraCal CalMAN
sRGB Mode / DCI-P3 Mode

In the Gretag Macbeth charts which showcase common colour tones, both sRGB and DCI-P3 profiles perform very well with dE2000 of 1.67 and 1.87, while not perfect, it will be mostly unperceivable to most users in daily usage.

SpectraCal CalMAN
sRGB GMB Comparison

SpectraCal CalMAN
DCI-P3 GMB Comparison

 
SpectraCal CalMAN

The Adaptive mode is again extremely interesting as it doesn’t really adhere to any one colour space, and it’s something we most recently saw implemented in the MIX 2S; it’s a wide gamut colour space (DCI-P3), however skin tones are mapped to the sRGB space. This gives best compromise of bringing vivid colours to objects while attempting to display accurate skin tones. Given that this mode also has the single best pre-defined white-point, I think it’s generally the best alternative for most users.

 SpectraCal CalMAN
Adaptive GMB Comparison

Overall the OnePlus 6 is an excellent screen with only two weaknesses; one of not having a high brightness mode at disposal to the user even though the hardware is capable of it, and the second point being that the resolution of the screen being rather stretched out for its form-factor.

In past OnePlus as well as most recent devices reviews we’ve brought up the point of resolution several times; as we’ll see in the battery life section there is effectively no disadvantage to 1440p AMOLED screens in terms of power as their emissive nature isn’t really affected by luminosity power efficiency deficiencies at higher resolutions the same way LCDs are, and the computational overhead of the higher resolution seems to be minimal.

What a 1440p screen would greatly differ in though is pricing, and here maybe OnePlus just isn’t ready to justify the increased component cost for devices that aim to be the best possible value. 

Battery Life

The OnePlus 6 contains a 3300mAh / 12.7Wh battery. In general there’s nothing pointing out to expect bad battery life out of the OnePlus 6 as both the SoC and screen should be quite efficient. The most comparable phone would the Galaxy S9+ in the results, as both have the same SoC and both employ AMOLED screens of similar sizes, with the OP6 having a 6% smaller battery capacity.

In the web browsing test the OP6 ends up pretty much exactly where we projected it, at slightly above 10 hours of runtime the phone lands on the better side of battery life results for this generation. Only Huawei’s phones with larger batteries and phones with more efficient screens end up higher. Overall a very respectable result for the OnePlus 6.

In the PCMark test, the OnePlus 6 ends up below the S9+ - here the OnePlus 6 essentially achieving the highest scores of any Android device bar the MIX 2S also have to be accounted in the result. It’s interesting to see the OP6 beating the MIX 2S in the web browsing test yet losing to it in PCMark – the discrepancy could come due to different dynamic brightness behaviours between the phones and we can’t maintain a steady backlight level throughout the totality of the scenarios, something that’s of particular concern in the LG G7 which we’ll be reviewing in the very near future.

Overall battery life of the OnePlus 6 is excellent – of course there’s devices beating it, and most of the time this can be attributed to their higher battery capacities. Active heavy usage of the phone will naturally result in more battery drainage, but that’s also because the device is able to sustain also very high performance in a variety of use-cases.

Camera - Architecture & UI

The OnePlus 6 offers a new Sony IMX519 sensor as the main rear camera shooter. It comes with a 16MP resolution with pictures coming out at 4608 x 3456 resolution. The sensor has a slight pixel size disadvantage compared to other 12MP 1.4µm main camera shooters as the 1/2.6” sensor results in 1.22µm pixels. The optics on the main sensor is an f/1.7 aperture lens with a 25mm equivalent focal length. The module also comes with OIS.

As mentioned in the introduction, the second camera of the OP6 is an oddity as its optics isn’t any different from the main shooter, it’s still an f/1.7 lens with the same viewing angle. The sensor here is a 20MP Sony sensor with 1µm pixel pitches. OnePlus uses this secondary sensor for depth information such as in portrait mode (even though the blurring is done computationally), and is said to use it in certain low-light conditions in coordination with pixel binning to 5MP and rescaling to result in better low-light photography. I’ve had a hard time trying to figure out exactly how the low-light functionality works and didn’t really see much effect in my testing, and there’s been seemingly a large consensus among the community and reviewers that OnePlus should just have went with a telephoto module here as the current use of the second sensor seems like a bit of a waste given the limited use-cases.

Interface-wise the camera app was a joy to use and OnePlus used the KISS principle (Keep it simple, stupid) with only providing the most essential interface elements and shooting modes. Over the last year or two we’ve seen some vendors go down the rabbit hole of offering added shooting modes over shooting modes, which in effect vastly decreased the shooting experience as in many cases you’re not actually sure which mode will result in the best quality result. The OnePlus 6 on the other hand is very straightforward as the default mode it comes in is essentially what you’ll use all the time.

Alongside the auto mode, there’s quick swipe actions to video and portrait mode, and the rest of the basic functions such as slow motion, time-lapse, pro-mode, panorama and the new integrated Google Lens mode are also very quickly accessible.

One thing I was actually surprised to see is that the camera doesn’t offer any resolution choice other than a quick switch between 4:3, 19:9 and 1:1 aspect ratios. Again I think this is positive as effective there shouldn’t really be any reason why you’d want to capture in a resolution less than the full sensor width/height.

Camera - Daylight Evaluation

[ OnePlus 6 ]
[ G7 ] - [ G6 ] - [ V30 ]
[ Mi MIX 2S ] - [ Pixel 2 XL ] - [ Mate 10 ] - [ P20 ]
[ P20 Pro ] - [ S8 ] - [ S9+ ] - [ iPhone X ]

In this first scene we see the OnePlus 6 really take advantage of the 16MP increased resolution as it’s able to maintain an excellent amount of detail, closely battling with the Galaxy S9 in terms of actual effective spatial resolution, and obviously the P20 Pro’s 40MP shots just have brute force things in terms of detail.

In terms of exposure, the OP6 performed among the best as in my view it had one of the best retentions of highlights and dynamic range. Overall the processing here is extremely similar to the MIX 2S; I wouldn’t be surprised if this is generally some kind of common behaviour of the Snapdragon 845 ISP.

[ OnePlus 6 ]
[ G7 ] - [ G6 ] - [ V30 ]
[ Mi MIX 2S ] - [ Pixel 2 XL ] - [ Mate 10 ] - [ P20 ]
[ P20 Pro ] - [ S8 ] - [ S9+ ]
[ iPhone X ]

The next bridge scene again fares extremely well for the OnePlus 6 – the exposure is able to retain the sufficient highlights in the sunlit foliage and clouds and is able to beat a lot of phones, bar the LG V30 and P20Pro. Only the latter in its sensor pixel binning mode is able to achieve sufficient native high dynamic range.

Detail wise again the OP6 is pulling punches with the S9 and personally I would prefer the OP6’s results here as it’s able to perform better on the foliage detail due to its increased resolution.

[ OnePlus 6 ]
[ G7 ] - [ G6 ] - [ V30 ]
[ Mi MIX 2S ] - [ Pixel 2 XL ] - [ Mate 10 ]
[ P20 ] - [ P20 Pro ]
 [ S9+ ] - [ iPhone X ]

The next shot we come to a similar conclusion as the OnePlus 6 manages one of the best overall results compromising between maintaining sufficient dynamic range in the shot and not flattening out the highlights of the bottom half of the scene as much as other phones.

Detail wise again it’s a close battle between the S9 and the OP6. The S9 preserves a tad more shadow detail in some areas as it’s HDR is able to bring them out a bit more, but again this also causes the highlights to disappear. Sharpness wise I think the OP6 does the best job on the wide shot – this scene in particular would have really benefitted from a telephoto lens for the OP6.

[ OnePlus 6 ]
 [ G7 ] - [ G6 ] - [ V30 ]
[ Mi MIX 2S ] - [ Pixel 2 XL ] - [ Mate 10 ]
[ P20 ] - [ P20 Pro ]
[ S8 ] - [ S9+ ] - [ iPhone X ]

The final scene of this type is a repeat story of the previous two – the OP6 is among the best in managing to preserve the dynamic range throughout the whole scene as other devices’ HDR processing really flatten out the image on the bottom half in favour of the sky, the iPhone X and the LG V30 are the two other phones who do the best here but I favour the OP6’s and V30’s colour renditions.

Detail wise the OP6 wins again over the competition, albeit it looks like the S9 has less issue with chromatic aberration that can be seen in some parts of the OnePlus shot. The P20Pro’s 40MP mode in this shot resulted in a mess so wasn’t of consideration.

[ OnePlus 6 ]
[ G7 ] - [ G6 ]
[ V30 ] - [ Mi MIX 2S ] - [ Pixel 2 XL ]
[ Mate 10 ] - [ P20 ] - [ P20 Pro ] - [ S8 ] - [ S9+ ] - [ iPhone X ]

The OP6 in the abbey shot is again really good as it’s able to produce a well-balanced exposure retaining high dynamic range throughout the shot. The MIX 2S in the second sample is actually seemingly again the nearest in terms of processing, but the OP6 went for a longer exposure and results in just a brighter picture which I think is better.

Detail wise, the V30 and S9 are the closest competitors to the OP6. The V30 has a narrower field of view and this results in an advantage in terms of spatial resolution versus the OP6.

In the OP6 shot again at 3/4^ths of the screen we can see chromatic aberration most likely caused by defects in one of the lenses, this seems to be localised to the right side of the screen as the left side look to suffer from such visible effect.

[ OnePlus 6 ]
[ G7 ] - [ G6 ] - [ V30 ] - [ Mi MIX 2S ] - [ Pixel 2 XL ]
[ Mate 10 ] - [ P20 ] - [ P20 Pro ] - [ S8 ] - [ S9+ ] - [ iPhone X ]

In this shot again the OP6 is most closely matched up with the MIX 2S in terms of exposure and colour balance. Although the OP6 seems to have better resolution, the S9 brings out much better texture detail throughout the scene.

[ OnePlus 6 ]
[ G7 ] - [ G6 ] - [ V30 ]
[ Mi MIX 2S ] - [ Pixel 2 XL ] - [ Mate 10 ] - [ P20 ] - [ P20 Pro ]
[ S8 ] - [ S9+ ] - [ iPhone X ]

In the shop front shot with lots of detail and colours I think the OP6 I think misses it a bit in terms of colour temperature as it’s too warm, and it’s also flattening out the highlights a bit too much as it’s trying to bring out the shadows a lot more than other phones.

Detail wise, again in some parts of the scene the OP6 is the winner, however the large aperture lens doesn’t do it favour as we can see chromatic aberrations, most visible on the haze of the left most elephant as well as on the blurriness of the silver elephant in the shop window.

[ OnePlus 6 ]
[ G7 ] - [ G6 ] - [ V30 ] - [ Mi MIX 2S ] - [ Pixel 2 XL ]
[ Mate 10 ] - [ P20 ] - [ P20 Pro ] - [ S8 ] - [ S9+ ] - [ iPhone X ]

In the last shot I try to evaluate the colour reproduction and dynamic range one of the toughest scenarios for smartphones – getting the correct colour reproduction on flowers such as the imaged petunias. Some phones such as the iPhone X can come completely off-mark here and essentially every phone has its own interpretation. Wrong HDR processing here can really ruin the shot. Unfortunately the OnePlus 6, while doing well in terms of colour balance, fall prey to the processing as it flattens the highlights too much as it tries to bring out more shadows off-subject. The V30 and S9 have the best colour reproduction, but the S9 is a step ahead in terms of avoiding colour clipping as well as detail retention.

Overall the OnePlus 6 in daylight was an extremely good shooter competing for the top in terms of picture quality. I really enjoyed seeing it having a really good HDR implementation that didn’t flatten out much of the highlights in sunny conditions – something other smartphones have a tendency to do. Consistency of the OP6 has been also great in daylight, and I haven’t had really any bad shots with the phone.

In terms of detail, the OP6’s 16MP sensor can take the top spot in terms of details and in many scenes takes the top spot in terms of resulting spatial resolution, however its detail consistence across the scene isn’t equal because it seemingly suffers in sharpness due to its optics and imperfect lens that results in chromatic aberrations in distinct parts of the scene.

In normal daylight shots, the secondary camera seems to be essentially useless as I haven’t found any use-case for it yet. This could have been replaced with a telephoto lens in my opinion, but let’s first see the night time shots.

Camera - Low Light Evaluation

For the night time shots, I wanted to change it up a bit and chose to take the photos at sun-down, which resulted with still some light in the sky. These conditions are more challenging for the phones as they need to decide on the right exposure and possibly HDR processing.

[ OnePlus 6 ]
[ G7 ] - [ G6 ] - [ V30 ]
[ Mi MIX 2S ] - [ Pixel 2 XL ] - [ Mate 10 ] - [ P20 ]
[ P20 Pro ] - [ S8 ] - [ S9+ ] - [ iPhone X ]

The OnePlus 6 on paper is at a disadvantage here as its f/1.7 lens and 1.22µm pixel pitch shouldn’t be able to keep up with the 1.4µm and larger aperture phones.

This first shot is evident of that as although it still manages a respectable result, it lacks the shadow detail of other phones. Using some manual exposure compensation to brighten up the scene would have been beneficial to the OP6.

[ OnePlus 6 ]
[ G7 ] - [ G6 ] - [ V30 ] - [ Mi MIX 2S ] - [ Pixel 2 XL ] - [ Mate 10 ]
[ P20 ] - [ P20 Pro ] - [ S8 ] - [ S9+ ] - [ iPhone X ]

This road crossing was one of the rare scenes where the OP6 wans’t really consistent with its shots and gave three consecutive different results. All three shots have the same exposure and ISO settings so the difference in brightness seems to be purely due to the resulting processing, with the third shot being the most natural and the first two having varying degrees of HDR processing flattening out the image to bring out the shadows.

Overall the shots of the OP6 here are still quite good, although it lacks the natural background shadow detail of other phones. It’s still able to maintain the natural spotlight of the street lamp, and more importantly, it got the white colour temperature of the light a lot more correct than other phones.

In terms of detail if feels like the OP6 is employing sharpening and artificial contrast. The third sample is by far the best here as it also has less visible noise artefacts.

[ OnePlus 6 ]
[ G7 ] - [ G6 ] - [ V30 ] - [ Mi MIX 2S ] - [ Pixel 2 XL ]
[ Mate 10 ] - [ P20 ] - [ P20 Pro ]
[ S8 ] - [ S9+ ] - [ iPhone X ]

In this second scene the OP6 was more consistent and all the captured shots looked the same. Again it’s doing “OK” in terms of results, competing well in terms of sharpness but just doesn’t have the dynamic range to capture as much shadows in the scene.

[ OnePlus 6 ]
[ G7 ] - [ G6 ] - [ V30 ] - [ Mi MIX 2S ] - [ Pixel 2 XL ]
[ Mate 10 ] - [ P20 ] - [ P20 Pro ]
[ S8 ] - [ S9+ ] - [ iPhone X ]

Going to darker scenarios here at the playground, one aspect where the OP6 does very well is capturing the accurate white colour temperature of the lamps, while for example the S9 and G7 and Pixel 2 got it really wrong.

While again lacking in terms of some of the shadows, the details captured are actually quite good and the OP6 manages to compete with the S9 in terms of textures, only the V30 does better. Of course the P20Pro wins out in terms of dynamic range in its pixel binning 10MP mode, even though its night mode shot is more representative of the real light distribution.

Extreme Low Light

[ OnePlus 6 ]
[ G7 ] - [ G6 ] - [ V30 ] - [ Mi MIX 2S ] - [ Pixel 2 XL ]
[ Mate 10 ] - [ P20 ] - [ P20 Pro ]
[ S8 ] - [ S9+ ] - [ iPhone X ]

Finally in the last extreme low light shot the OnePlus 6 just didn’t fare well. It just didn’t have sufficient light capture capabilities to get a reasonable shot. Here OnePlus could have introduced a pixel binning feature such as on the LG G7 and V30 in order to trade off resolution for light sensitivity.

Overall in low-light shots, the OnePlus 6 just doesn’t have the raw hardware required to perform quite as well as other phones. The results are still extremely competitive and by no means a deal-breaker, it’s just that by now we’d see some kind of usage of that secondary camera module. Unfortunately that’s not the case for the OP6.

OxygenOS 5.1.9 Camera Update

One larger disclaimer I have to make is that the camera evaluation was done on the 5.1.8 firmware before the 5.1.9 version came out which promised “improved camera quality”.

[ Dim Light 1 ] - [ Dim Light 2 ] - [ Flowers ] - [ Daylight  ]

I did some limited A/B testing on my review device and it seems the camera changes are limited to low-light scenarios. In the daylight scenes the differences were minute if at all present.

In the low-light shots however there’s been a markable behaviour change as the new firmware seems to prefer to longer exposure and ISO settings. The surprising here is that this doesn’t result in a brighter picture in the above shots, but rather very much the opposite as the phone produced a darker and actually more representative reproduction of the scene. What was actually gained was more dynamic range. In terms of detail retention however I feel there’s been a notable regression.

Unfortunately re-doing the whole camera evaluation takes a lot of time and we’ll have to revisit the update in more detail in a future review with another round across all phones.  

Video Recording

Video recording on the OnePlus 6 is done on 720P, 1080P 30 or 60fps, and 4K 30 or 60fps. The camera has OIS in all modes, but on top of that uses EIS in 720P and the other 30fps modes. Unfortunately there’s no software switch for the EIS so you’re getting what OnePlus is giving you- which comes at a cost of reduced field-of-view.

    

EIS stabilisation works extremely well and results in a very stable and detailed video. Unfortunately because you can’t turn it off you can’t independently compare the EIS in the same capture mode to see how the detail retention works.

One thing to note was that the 1080p60 footage was extremely disappointing as it was very blurry. Looking at the encoding the 1080p30 is done on AVC on High Profile 4.0 at 20Mbps while the 1080p60 footage is encoded at High 4.2 at 40Mbps, so there must be something wrong in terms of the ISP part of the video pipeline that results in the much reduced image quality. It’s also notable that I found it to focus slower in 60fps mode than in the 30fps modes.

The 4K footage doesn’t suffer from the same degradation when going to the higher frame-rate. Here in both modes there’s great amount of detail retention.  The 4K30 footage is encoded in a [email protected] profile at 42Mbps, while the 4K60 footage is encoded at [email protected] at a dazzling 120Mbps which is actually the limit of the Snapdragon 845’s video encoder. Here the sample video of 1m29s length came in at a hefty 1.24GB. While I applaud OnePlus for the high quality encode settings, the fact that the device lacks HEVC encoding options means that you’ll have to really be careful in terms of storage management when using 4K60 footage.

Audio recording in the video was very good.

Speaker Evaluation

I’ve first introduced speaker evaluation back in our Xiaomi Mi MIX 2S review a couple of weeks ago and we’re going to apply the same methodology to the OnePlus 6.

We’re using a calibrated flat response measurement microphone for the measurements and are using REW as the supporting software suite.

For speaker loudness measurements, we’re using a pink noise source, with the measurement microphone at head level 40cm away from the phone. We measure once the perceived volume when the phone is held in portrait one-handed mode, and once while holding the phone in landscape mode with both hands, cupping the sides.

One-handed and in portrait mode, the phone gets reasonably loud at up to 77.6dB(A). Holding the phone two-handed and cupping it however results in redirecting a lot of the sound towards the listener again, attaining a very loud 86.3db(A). In an optimally designed phone, we actually don’t want this much of a difference as it means a lot of the audio is firing away from the phone. The OnePlus 6 is one of the less optimal phones in terms of its speaker design as the sound pressure is very directional and bottom-firing out of its main and only speaker. This means you’ll have to pay more attention on how you hold the phone as it can make a large difference to volume and audio quality, and also it’s very easy to muffle the sound when the speaker holes are covered up.

We use a logarithmic measurement sweep within REW to measure the frequency response of the phone’s speaker. To get a more accurate comparison between phones, the volume is calibrated via pink noise to 75dB(A) and the measurement is done in landscape two-handed mode. The graph is represented with a psychoacoustic smoothing filter for better representation.

Unfortunately the OnePlus 6’s frequency response represents what we can also clearly hear when playing back media: It lacks depth as well as clarity. In the low frequency and lower mid-ranges ranges the OP6 fared among the worst, and this results in a very hollow-ish sound.

The OP6 is actually the loudest in the mid-ranges in its sound profile.

While a lot of mobile phones have an evident peak in the treble frequencies, the OP6 actually remains quite flat, which will affect sounds such as ringtones and represent them quieter than other phones.

Finally, the OP6 also doesn’t fare well in the high frequencies and has a very steep drop-off after 12KHz. Here it’ll depend on the user’s age and his sound profile, but most will still be able to hear these frequencies and interpret them as the “brilliance” in music.

Overall, the OP6’s speaker is average at best and can’t really compete with some other flagship phones.

Conclusion & End Remarks

The OnePlus 6 is a device that generally impressed me a lot. I was going into the review without any expectations or preconceptions as it was my first OnePlus device to more thoroughly review.

Design-wise, the OnePlus 6 marks a major change for the company as it employed a new industrial design. Most notably, this is visible in the back of the phone as the new glass cover marks a replacement for the previous metal chassis. The review unit which I’ve got had the new matte “Midnight black” variant which offers a sanded glass finish. I’ve actually really liked the finish as it feels very unique and is less of a fingerprint magnet than the usual glass back. Some people have noted that they didn’t like that it’s more slippery than the shiny glass  variants – I can’t really comment on that other than saying that I personally didn’t have an issue with it.

The front of the phone also attracted a lot of attention due to the fact that OnePlus adopted a display notch in the OP6. As I’ve stated in past reviews such as Huawei’s P20’ pieces, I’ve actually had no issue at all with the notch. In practical terms it actually does offer more screen real-estate by having the notification icons and status icons where there usually would be phone bezel. You can black out the “ears” via a software option if you wish to and this works very well with the AMOLED screen, with only the occasional screen reflection reminding you that there’s actually a notch there.

The display of the OnePlus 6 is very good and has accurate colour profiles if that’s a requirement for you. Viewing angles are excellent, as is usual for an OLED display. The only two drawbacks here is that OnePlus by default doesn’t enable the high-brightness mode of which the hardware is capable of, and this comes at a detriment of legibility in bright scenarios such as direct sunlight. Also the screen resolution, while for most people might be sufficient, is for me personally too stretched out over the large screen and I would have really preferred the phone to come with a 1440p panel.

Performance of the OnePlus 6 is its absolute shining point as not only does it offer the same outstanding system performance that I’ve described in our Mi MIX 2S review, naming that one of the fastest devices I’ve ever experienced, but actually the OP6 also manages to distinguish itself from other Snapdragon 845 devices by having vastly superior sustained 3D performance. This latter, while I’m not exactly certain on the facts, is something that I want to attribute to a seemingly better thermal dissipation design on the OnePlus 6.

The camera on the OnePlus 6 also impressed me a lot in daylight shots. It was among one of the best cameras in terms of exposure, colour reproduction and resulting natural high dynamic range images. The 16MP shooter also was able to very much obtain some of the most detailed shots among current generation devices, although it was visible that OnePlus pushed quite hard in terms of the optics and the f/1.7 aperture, as we can discern some defects in the lens.

In night-time the OP6 did also well and is more than adequate as a shooter, although it’s hitting hardware boundaries as it just doesn’t have the same light capture abilities of other flagships.

The second sensor on the OP6 is one of very limited value as its only use-case is the depth perception within the portrait mode. Given that the bokeh blur is actually a computational effect applied in software, adding a second module just for depth perception is an expensive endeavour which doesn’t benefit the camera in any other capturing modes. I wish OnePlus had invested the resources into a wide-angle or telephoto lens instead.

Speaker wise, it’s probably one of the weaker phones out there as the sound quality is below other flagships. However the OnePlus 6 has a 3.5mm headphone jack – which can be make or break decision for a lot of buyers, so congratulations on OnePlus for keeping the option for the consumer.

The battery life of the phone is also excellent. It doesn’t top out the charts as it does only have a 3300mAh battery, but the SoC and screen are power efficient enough to make up for it.

Overall I think the OnePlus 6 is an excellent device, and while it’s not perfect, it offers incredible value at its price range and easily beats out any other contender. The Galaxy S9, in particular the Snapdragon variants, are still probably overall better devices, but also come at a price premium.

Generally I’ll easily recommend the OnePlus 6 to any buyer as I just don’t see any deal-breaking negatives that would make anybody regret purchasing the phone.