OnePlus 10 Pro long-term review

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.