Continued from the last post!
Most of my researching for a replacement phone in April was centered on two devices: the OnePlus 8 Pro, and the Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro. Both easily ticked off all the key requirements: they featured the industry’s current leading Snapdragon 865 processor, had NFC, wireless charging, displays that exceed the standard 60Hz refresh rates, and stabilized 4K video capture. There were still significant differences between both devices though.
The Mi 10 Pro offered a camera module that DXOMark rated, at least for a while, above all the other competing phones before it also got surpassed by Huawei’s most recent offerings. The Mi 10 Pro however was available for the first few months in China only, while the global edition which unfortunately gimped a few features including dual SIM support was released in March. Shopee listed a few importers here that were bringing in the Chinese version of the phone, and that I’d need to clean out the bloatware on the phone looked doable nonetheless. I didn’t like that the phone display was curved along the edges, but reckoned I could finally live with it. On the other hand, the 4,500mAh battery it came with is also putting out excellent longevity scores, and easily surpassing the other similar flagship offerings from other manufacturers. I reckon this is possible because of two things: aggressive software optimisation done by Xiaomi, and also that the refresh was at 90 and not 120Hz. The visual differences between 60 to 90Hz is quite noticeable, while the jump is less so from 90 to 120Hz – but it’s still visible. There are even a few YouTube videos that try to show the visual differences between refresh rates, like this one here.
There’s a local edition of the Mi 10 Pro – basically the global variant – just announced here in Singapore too, and listing for SGD1,399. That makes it at least a few hundred dollars more expensive than the China import variants, though one would also get the 2 year manufacturer’s warranty with this local edition. The pricing of Xiaomi’s Mi 10 Pro also reflects that the company is finally done with offering flagship specs at bargain prices: it’s still priced lower than Samsung’s offerings yes at launch, but not by nearly as much as before. Nonetheless, I’ve had two Xiaomi phones now – the Mi Note 3 and Mi Max – and putting aside the asinine phone activation required for the Xiaomi’s China variants, I’ve had good experiences with the brand.
OnePlus – with its clever motto “Never settle” – has also built a reputation among its fans by putting out phones that have the best hardware specifications (for the most part), but pegged at price points lower than similar flagships from mainstream manufacturers. That, like Xiaomi, however has also changed this year with its flagship offering: the OnePlus 8 Pro is cheaper than Samsung’s S20 Ultra, but the price differential is now smaller than before. However, OnePlus continues to put an OS layer on its phones that is relatively close to stock Android, a feature that continues to appeal to its fanbase who dislike the bloat that other manufacturers bake into their skins. The 8 Pro is fairly large for a 2020 flagship phone and only marginally smaller than the mammoth-sized S20 Ultra, but it ticked all the hardware boxes too. The product had already been internationally launched, and the local distributor was bringing it to Singapore too, with their top line 12GB RAM/256GB storage model listing for SGD1,398, and pre-orders were coming with an additional OEM case.
I was quite intrigued, so placed an early order for the OnePlus 8 Pro too, with the expected delivery of the phone in mid-May. However, from mid-April, the first owners elsewhere of the phone started reporting on Reddit and the official OnePlus support forums a host of issues. Most of the complaints there centered on the phone’s display: black levels that looked crushed, image retention around the thumbprint sensor area, and also green tints in low light. One poll on Reddit that had several hundred owners even showed that half of them experienced one or more of these issues. That proportion of owners facing problems was honestly quite disconcerting. Opinion was split over whether these could be finally rectified by software patches, since the Samsung S20s early on also experienced a selection of these issues but they were fixed by their Over-The-Air updates.
Still, many persons here who’d pre-ordered the OnePluses ended up cancelling their orders. I myself was half-half about whether I should also do the same, as the thought of paying so much for a phone that had display defects out of the box was worrying. Quite interestingly too was that OnePlus recognized the display oddities and put out patch after patch to fix the anomalies as the projected delivery of the item loomed, and they seem to be successful. The decision whether to keep or drop my 8 Pro pre-order though was finally made easy by one phone reseller in Singapore suddenly offering the Samsung S20+ Snapdragon variant at a price that was significantly cheaper than either the Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro or the OnePlus 8 Pro. After checking around to make sure that the listing was legit, I put an order for it in early May, and the phone has finally just arrived too – just over two weeks after placing an order. It’s the US telco variant of the phone, and – interestingly shipped from Hong Kong too. It probably could have arrived earlier, but the phone got stuck at Hong Kong airport for a week in lieu of the lack of flights between Hong Kong and Singapore during this Covid-19 period.
Continued in the next post!
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