OnePlus 10 Pro long-term review

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.