OnePlus 8 review: has great battery life and solid performance with a 90Hz display, but camera could be better and it lacks wireless charging and an IP rating
None of the major flagship phones … Tom Warren / The Verge : The OnePlus 8 Pro has a 120Hz screen, quadruple camera, and costs $899 Andrew Grush / Android Authority : Does the OnePlus 8 offer wireless charging? Jules Wang / Android Police : The OnePlus 8 Pro and its wireless charger support normal Qi charging, too Brenda Stolyar / Mashable : Hands-on with the OnePlus 8 Pro: Wireless charging, 5G, and a stunning 120Hz display Kevin Lee / IGN : OnePlus 8 Pro Review Adam Mills / Gotta Be Mobile : 3 Reasons to Pre-Order the OnePlus 8 & 6 Reasons to Wait Ron Amadeo / Ars Technica : OnePlus 8 Pro review—The best flagship of 2020, even if it is more expensive Cameron Faulkner / The Verge : How to buy the OnePlus 8 and OnePlus 8 Pro Ryan Whitwam / Android Police : OnePlus 8 review: Second banana Sam Rutherford / Gizmodo : OnePlus 8 Review: This Is the Android Phone for Most People Dieter Bohn / The Verge : OnePlus 8 Pro review: great build quality, superb screen, and speedy wireless charging, but its color camera is gimmicky and dim light photography is mediocre Tweets: @evanrodgers : been slammed all day, had no idea the OnePlus 8 Pro had this kind of banging camera. read @raywongy's review here https://www.inputmag.com/... Input / @inputmag : Damn, the OnePlus 8 Pro isn't an iPhone killer. It's better than that. https://www.inputmag.com/... Joshua Topolsky / @joshuatopolsky : tfw you come at the king and you do not miss https://www.inputmag.com/... @techradar : OnePlus 8 review: a splendid budget flagship featuring perk after perk (90Hz display, 8GB RAM baseline), but its biggest advantage is affordable 5G https://www.techradar.com/... Matt Swider / @mattswider : An on-point OnePlus 8 review by @OutOnALumb for @techradar, completed while in self-isolation. Nice work. https://www.techradar.com/... https://twitter.com/... Dieter Bohn / @backlon : Here's my OnePlus 8 Pro review. It's the first OnePlus phone to directly challenge the Samsung Galaxy S lineup feature-for-feature. https://www.theverge.com/... https://twitter.com/... Jon.Porter / @jonporty : So here's the thing, the OnePlus 8 is pretty great, but it comes with those traditional OnePlus compromises in a year when the Pro model doesn't. The 8 is great, but the 8 Pro is better, and it's also not ~that~ much more expensive https://www.theverge.com/... Paul Thurrott / @thurrott : So. Let's see. The OnePlus 8 and 8 Pro look amazing. Am obviously very curious about the camera performance, I know the rest will be stellar. But those prices. Oof. That's a tough one, since price was previously a key advantage for them.
Context & Ripple Effects
This review lands one day after The Verge's OnePlus 8 Pro review, and together they frame the split OnePlus chose for 2020: the standard 8 keeps the fast performance and battery life but drops wireless charging and any water-resistance rating, while the Pro carries the 120Hz screen, quad camera, and speedy wireless charging at $899.
The trade-off list also reads as a progress report against the brand's origin story — the OnePlus 3 sold at $400 as a no-compromise flagship alternative — showing how far the lineup had drifted upmarket by the time the 8 arrived.
First-order effects
- Buyers who want Qi charging or an IP rating are pushed up to the OnePlus 8 Pro, making the cheaper 8 a deliberate upsell vehicle rather than a complete flagship.
Second-order effects
- The pattern held within the same product cycle: the $749 [[a:958950|OnePlus 8T arrived that October with 65W fast charging and a 120Hz display yet still no wireless charging]], confirming the base line's cost discipline even as prices climbed.
Third-order effects
- Across the corpus the trajectory runs from the $400 OnePlus 3 to the OnePlus 13 with an IP69 rating and six years of security updates — OnePlus shedding its early compromises one generation at a time until it competes on mainstream flagship terms, leaving its original value positioning behind.
The trend: OnePlus has spent a decade converting its 'flagship killer' bargain identity into a conventional two-tier flagship lineup, with each generation trading away one more differentiator for spec parity.