The OnePlus 8 marks a climax of trends. It takes the well-known low-priced and specialty phones of the company closer to, if not on par with, the polish of other flagship telephones, and it also sees OnePlus in many ways following the design principles of its competitors.
This was seen before, when the headphone jack was removed in the OnePlus 7, where the OnePlus 8 and the higher-speed, but high-prior OnePlus 8 Pro swapped the phone’s pop-up selfie camera from the top-left corner with a punch-hol.
Of course, the camera is less cool to operate but this doesn’t mean that the new phones have a higher water resistance since the OnePlus 8 Pro is IP68 water resistant and dust resistant (but not onePlus 8, which only has the usual OnePlus water resistance assurance).
The new phone makes the base level handset both polished and specs. Last year, the brand phones finally separated from the Pro model, which was a significant upgrade both in terms of features and appearances, into an affordable “standard” version but this year OnePlus 8 gets physical refinement that has not been granted to more affordable models for 2019.
In other words, with a curved ‘waterfall’ display and a punch-hole, the OnePlus 8 looks somewhat more flagship with its selfie camere (teardrop notches were passed back in 2020) – and this model does not hurt to remove the large circular camera block from the OnePlus 7T for a more attractive vertical band like that of its one-price OnePlus 8 Pro sibling.
But there are the basics of the OnePlus 8: the Snapdragon 865 chipset, 8 GB or 12 GB of RAM, a 6.55-inch FHD+ AMOLED display and a 4,350mAh battery which can be fully charged within one hour by using the 30 T Warp Charge charger included in this package.
Its specs are good enough, but the OnePlus 8’s 5 G connectivity makes it the most affordable 5 G phone in many markets, at around 699 $/ £599 (about 1 100 USD) price tag. It’s a slender telephone with little downside and hard to recommend as the best affordable flagship to date in 2020.
And this provides customers with an additional incentive to opt for an inexpensive flagship over expensive intermediate phones like the iPhone SE 2020, which packs the strong iPhone 11 and Google Pixel 4a. These phones have a higher market tag, but OnePlus 8 has a wide range of more refined and 5 G cameras.