my favorite phone right now is the samsung galaxy s9 plus
but you can almost buy three next tier phones for the price of two
flagships and with how slowly Android handset makers provide operating system
updates including gigantic companies like samsung this uh cost of staying
current metric becomes an important one to consider so
is the s9 plus really three hundred dollars better than the
oneplus 6 let's figure that out shall we brought
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i already covered the specs of the oneplus 6 and my recent sponsored
hands-on video so rather than listing a bunch of part numbers i'm gonna just
make this pc analogy when it comes to performance oneplus
compromise is nothing generation after generation they've crammed the latest
enthusiast grade CPU RAM graphics card
and storage device into an enclosure then saved a few bucks by going for a
mainstream level motherboard a good if
not exceptional display and then some less flashy peripherals
so my demo unit here is an 8 gig RAM 128
gig storage affair and i could easily use all the same words as any top tier
phone to describe the experience of using it snappy
fluid lightning fast but every phone is fast when it's new
and you're all tired of hearing that stuff so i'm not going to do that
instead i'm going to talk about software
because that's where oneplus seems to be trying to set themselves apart
it wasn't a perfect rollout but the oneplus 3 and the 3t were among the
first older Android phones to get Android 8.0
oreo in november of 2017. that's four
months before the galaxy s8 and six months before the s7 another 2016 phone
this kind of investment in software is what keeps older phones secure
and running smoothly and it's something that i want to encourage them to keep up
especially because i really like their oxygen os variant of Android it manages
to not screw up the light stock Android
experience while adding features and customization toggles that improve ease
of use rather than adding frustration and the display notch believe it or not
is a great example of this it's there on the phone
but you have to actually go out of your way to make it do anything stupid like
take a bite out of a full screen video in landscape mode you have to not only
enable the notch in the first place but you also have to specifically allow that
app like youtube to use that space
and oneplus also says that they'll be adding an option post launch to switch
the top pixels of their amoled display off completely so you will never have to
look at it at all another big software feature this time is gesture based
navigation now i wasn't a huge fan of apple's removal
of the home button on the iphone 10 and i still prefer buttons be they physical
or software that i can click or push on
but i'm also all about user choice especially when it comes to things that
there's just no good reason to lock down like the ability to switch the back and
recents buttons google so you swipe up the middle for home then
you swipe and hold for recents and when you're inside an app you just swipe up
on the left side or the right side for back it works really well and in spite
of my worries that back would interfere with
scrolling on long web pages the detection for where the swipe needs to
start in order to register the gesture is good enough that after 10 minutes i
never accidentally triggered it again my only real complaint is that i would like
to see a configurable delay on the recent gesture and while we're at it
maybe edge to edge coverage for the included screen protector the ridge here
is a little too sharp for comfort but i can't say the same for the camera we're
long past megapixel counts meaning anything so i spent some time in our
studio and on the streets of london to gather some test images
now i'm no photography buff like brandon so i'm sure my composition is amateur
hour but there's a lot of information that we can glean here compared to the
galaxy s9 almost anything else pales
when it comes to low light performance and samsung was the only one to handle
this extremely challenging high contrast shot correctly so you see how the inner
part of the pedals have some orange to them not one of the other phones i tested
including the oneplus 6 managed to pick this up though to oneplus credit they
avoid the awful over sharpening artifacts that destroyed pretty much
everything the mate 10 pro spat out this brick right here looks like a painting
if you zoom in enough and subjectively the 6 does as good a job as any other
device that i tested of capturing the scene in front of me as my eye saw it
with true ish to life colors and not a
ton of noise in the image now i'm not into
focus post-processing background blurring techniques but it
does have that if you're into it and thanks to the nice wide f 1.7 aperture
and larger main sensor i found myself getting a touch more real
background blur in my shots compared to other smartphones though in fairness to
the s9 in this one it is sharper across
the board we've reached the point with oneplus where the camera launches so
fast snaps so quickly and looks so good that as someone who
finds stuff like a fraction of a second 960 FPS slow motion mode pretty
impractical i don't feel like i'm giving anything up here even the selfie camera
seems adequately suitable
with a background blur update coming shortly after launch which brings us to
the part where we are giving something up
there is a reason that samsung moves more than twice as many phones as their
closest Android competitor and many times more than
scrappy upstart oneplus with a little bit of tweaking you can get pretty
screen off notifications like ambient mode and you can get quick access to the
time but that is not as good as an always
always-on display the oneplus 6's water resistance is
unofficial rather than ip rated
the six lacks wireless charging altogether an awesome feature these days
oneplus face unlock is shockingly fast
and works in a wide variety of conditions check this out
boom but it isn't as secure as iris scanning
you give up gimmicky extra camera modes like the s9's cool panorama selfie the
six's earphone speaker isn't amplified for stereo sound and landscape mode
which is a huge bomber for me and while dual sim is good a secondary
combo slot for a second sim or a microsd
card is much better the oneplus 6 has no
expandable storage so yeah
that is a pretty significant list
but none of these things have a devastating effect on day-to-day use for
me like the removal of the headphone jack on recent generation iphones and
the pixel 2 xl so oneplus gets mad kudos
both for keeping the headphone jack and for making a great value high
performance device once again
now i'm going to switch back to the s9 plus
but that's only because i already have one if it was my money today the oneplus
6 with a d brand skin of course because
even the matte version is pretty darn slippery
looks like a better bang for the buck
there we go that's a little better now i can actually like hold on to this thing
dbrand skins are available in a wide variety of different colors and finishes
and feature unrivaled precision they measure many times to ensure a factory
fit for your product and not only do they look great but they protect against
incidental damage and they make it easier to hold on to your phone in the
first place their customer service robots are easy to work with and
wonderful and their products are affordable and ship worldwide check out
dbrand at the link in the video description
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