OnePlus 8 Review Roundup: The Cheapest Way Into 5G
Reviews of the OnePlus 8 are in, and the consensus is that this is the most sensible way to buy a 5G flagship right now.
The OnePlus 8 has been out for about a week and a half now, and the reviews are painting a pretty consistent picture: if you want a genuine 2020 flagship experience and 5G without paying $1,000-plus, this is currently the phone to get.
Quick recap on the hardware. You’re getting a Snapdragon 865, the same chip powering basically every other Android flagship this year, paired with 8 to 12GB of RAM depending on configuration. The display is a 6.55-inch AMOLED running at 90Hz, which by now feels like table stakes for anything calling itself a flagship, but it’s still a genuinely nice screen to use day to day — scrolling and animations feel noticeably smoother than a standard 60Hz panel. Battery is a 4300mAh cell with OnePlus’s Warp Charge 30T, which has historically been one of the faster charging implementations on the market.
Pricing starts at $699 and tops out at $799 depending on storage and RAM, and it went on sale April 29th. That’s the headline here. Compare that to the OnePlus 8 Pro, which pushes past $900, or to Samsung’s Galaxy S20 lineup, where 5G models start well north of $1,000. OnePlus is once again playing the “flagship killer” card, except this time the thing being killed is the price premium on 5G specifically.
Why this matters right now
5G coverage in most of the US and elsewhere is still spotty and arguably not worth chasing yet on its own. But carriers are clearly pushing hardware upgrades in that direction, and buying a phone now that already has a 5G radio means not having to think about it again for the two or three years you’ll likely hold onto the device. The OnePlus 8 makes that future-proofing cheap enough that it doesn’t feel like you’re paying a tax just to have the feature sitting dormant on your phone for a year.
What reviewers seem to like beyond the price: the performance is what you’d expect from Snapdragon 865 hardware, snappy and no real complaints there, and the 90Hz display keeps up with more expensive competitors. Software is OxygenOS, which continues to be one of the cleaner, less bloated Android skins out there, and that alone is worth something if you’ve used a phone loaded with carrier apps and duplicate settings menus.
The camera setup is the one area where reviews are more mixed, generally landing on “good, not great” — competent in daylight, a step behind what Samsung and Google manage in trickier lighting. That tracks with past OnePlus phones, where the story has always been “the core experience is excellent, the camera is fine.”
If you don’t need the absolute best camera on the market and don’t want to spend four figures on a phone, the OnePlus 8 looks like the pragmatic pick for anyone getting into 5G this year. The Pro model exists if you want a better screen and camera setup and don’t mind paying up, but for a lot of people the standard OnePlus 8 is probably the one to actually buy.