OnePlus 10 Pro event: everything as it happened during the Android phone launch

Well, we’re going to wrap up this OnePlus 10 Pro launch event live blog – as you can see from the time of the first post, we’ve been doing this quite a while, so it’s time to take a nice little break.

Thanks for following along for the whole day if you have been, or for checking out this live blog if you’ve only spent some of the day with us. To reiterate, you can check out our OnePlus 10 Pro review here, full of camera samples, benchmark tests and images of the phone.

March has been a manic month for mobiles, and the OnePlus 10 Pro is the last of the bunch. So it’s likely it won’t see a competitor any time soon – not until the iPhone 14 Pro at least, unless something surprising comes along.

Now let’s talk about the most interesting part of the OnePlus 10 Pro: its price. 

For 8GB RAM and 128GB storage, you have to pay just $899 or £799. At that price, the phone is a closer rival to the Samsung Galaxy S22 or iPhone 13, than the Galaxy S22 Plus and iPhone 13 Pro.

OnePlus has made a phone that’s named and specc’d like a Pro or Plus device, but with a lower price, and that could win over loads of prospective fans.

Something very interesting has happened. If you follow your tech news, you’ll know that the brand Nothing was started by one of OnePlus’ co-founders, and it’s gearing up to release its first smartphone, the Nothing Phone (1), very soon.

Well, Nothing has teased that it’s going to reveal some information tomorrow. Sure, it could just be an April Fools’ day joke, and that’d be incredibly annoying (this writer finds tech-related April Fools announcements unanimously irritating). But the fact that Nothing has announced it today, which is March Serious People’s day, could lend it some legitimacy.

Here’s one final picture we’ll share – you have to hit up our OnePlus 10 Pro review for more. It’s of a dog – that’s all really.

That prior picture was taken on the main camera. We found that ultra-wide shots looked okay, but they showed signs of oversharpening, which did mar the pictures in certain scenarios. 

The lens is 150 degrees, and that’s so you can take ‘fisheye’ shots like this:

It means that, for ‘standard’ ultrawide shots in the camera app, you’re getting a cropped version of the image that the 50MP camera sensor is seeing. 

This is probably our favorite picture taken on the OnePlus 10 Pro – this was taken in the Golden Hour (just before sunset), and the framing and colors are both nice and dramatic.

Still, with a setting like that, it’d take a bad phone to take an ugly picture.

Let’s take a look at a few select camera samples to illustrate the point.

This was taken on Portrait Mode – the grass by the feet looks too blurry given how close it is. It’s subtly unreal, and makes the snap look worse than one taken on an actual camera.

This Portrait Mode on the selfie camera speaks for itself – that’s way too blurry. Way, way too blurry. Just looking at that, you wouldn’t be able to tell that those are boats in the background, or that the wall behind is covered in graffiti.

You can change the blur, but this was actually taken on the default option.

Our OnePlus 10 Pro review is live!

We’ve given it 4 out of 5 stars. It’s a big powerful phone, and its price is really tempting – however we found the cameras, for lack of a better word, ‘goofy’. 

There were just a few issues here and there that made the photography experience worse than on similar-tier rivals. Other than that, it’s really good – we wanted to give it four and a half stars, but the camera experience just wasn’t up to snuff.

The full prices are $899 / £799 for 8GB RAM and 128GB storage, and $899 for 12GB RAM and 256GB storage – sorry, US buyers, but you’re apparently missing out on the bigger option.

That 8GB RAM version is black, the 12GB one is green – you don’t get to choose the color independent of storage.

The phone is apparently available to pre-order… now. And it’ll go on sale April 5.

They’ve just flashed the prices across the screen and it was too quick for us to even see international costs. In the US it’ll be $899 for 8GB RAM and 128GB – that’s all we saw.

Oh, but the whole Shark Tank backstory was resolved with all the Sharks investing. What a fun heartwarming tale.

Wow, it’s still going on. And it’s all just faff with the whole Shark Tank backstory.

Oh, here’s something interesting – they’re addressing concerns that OnePlus has become too much like Oppo.

The company is saying that it’s retained a distinct identity despite its recent merger with Oppo… but we’re not sure we agree.

The OnePlus 10 Pro is incredibly similar to the Oppo Find X5 Pro, and even the OxygenOS software feels very, very similar to Oppo’s ColorOS to use.

Turns out OnePlus pronounces ‘Super VOOC’ (its charging tech) as ‘voke’. Not ‘vook’ as we’ve been calling it. Oh.

The company has shown off that, over the course of the stream the phone has charged from 1{f5ac61d6de3ce41dbc84aacfdb352f5c66627c6ee4a1c88b0642321258bd5462} to 60{f5ac61d6de3ce41dbc84aacfdb352f5c66627c6ee4a1c88b0642321258bd5462} – since this stream seems very pre-recorded, that doesn’t really mean much.

Here’s some actual news – the OnePlus Buds Pro is getting a new color, called Radiant Silver. It looks shiny. This was mentioned in about 5 seconds in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it section.

They’ve moved onto the display – it’s a 6.7-inch 120Hz 2K AMOLED panel. There, just saved you watching the video.

Here’s gaming on the phone – OnePlus says there’s a good cooling system here, and that’s important given how hot the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 gets.

Perhaps the worst part of this format is the teeth-clenching ‘banter’ between the Sharks/Dragons – it’s like whoever arranged this shoot saw one too many Joss Whedon films (which is any) and thought it’d be good to emulate that.

It’s embarrasing, and it’s wasting time. 

Oh, but Pete Lau just joined the stream in a pre-recorded segment (obviously this whole thing was pre-recorded).

The video has subtitles which accurately convey what the presenter is saying…

… however the auto-captions are just horribly wrong. It’s borderline gibberish at times.

Now they’re talking about gaming on the phones with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipset. The stream member who’s winning at the game looks a lot like Tom Holland.

The comments in the YouTube live stream are… not happy about this TV show pitch format. Half the comments are “cringe” or similar. The company has gone through the camera features for the OnePlus 10 Pro.

Some of the modes have been detailed including Night Video, Fisheye photos and 4K 120fps video.

OnePlus often uses a spoof format for its product debuts, and it’s no different this time. The company is putting on a mock Shark Tank / Dragon’s Den kind of thing.

It’s cringy but at least it’s a different way of conveying information than every other tech launch.

And it’s begun!

The OnePlus launch event livestream has begun, but it’s just showing us a sizzle reel for the event.

There’s a timer at the bottom counting down from 10 minutes thuogh – it should reach 00:00 at five minutes past the hour.

Less than 15 minutes to go – time to grab a cup of tea and a biscuit or two… or whatever you like to snack on.

We’re less than an hour before OnePlus’ big event begins. To reiterate, here’s how you can watch the live stream.

So what about extra gadgets, like a successor to the OnePlus Watch (pictured)? Well, we wouldn’t rule it out completely, but again it’s not too likely.

We say that because OnePlus has a cadence, where it teases aspects of a launch more and more in the build-up to the date. So if it were to launch some new tech beyond the OnePlus 10 Pro, we likely would have already heard about it.

Admittedly, OnePlus’ cadence has been a bit different this time around, since it showed off the 10 Pro so early in China, and it’s meant there’s less focus on the ‘teases’. But still, we likely would have heard if a new watch or earbuds were showing up.

We’ve heard a few phone fans wondering if OnePlus will launch a new Nord phone today, or an entry to its mid-range and entry-level line that it launched in 2020.

Honestly, this isn’t likely. OnePlus has always kept its flagship numbered series, and its Nord line, totally separate. They haven’t shared launch or release dates, and they’re also distinct in terms of design and feature sets.

So we don’t think the OnePlus Nord 3 or Nord 2T will show up today – sorry.

The best OnePlus phones

Long gone are the days where OnePlus would have one, maybe two handsets on sale at any one time. The Chinese firm has been busy diversifying its smartphone portfolio in recent years, and it means you now have a wide choice of devices to pick from.

And we’re here to help you decide which is right for you, as we’ve rounded-up the best OnePlus phones you can buy right now. 

Where will the OnePlus 10 Pro land in our list? You’ll have to wait for our full review before it can even be considered – so watch this space

Since the OnePlus 10 Pro is the only phone coming today, we’re a little sad that the company doesn’t really do ‘Lite’ phones.

This isn’t likely to be a cheap handset, and it’s always nice for there to be an affordable phone for people who can’t afford the uber-expensive top-end model. The OnePlus 9 (pictured) was that to the 9 Pro, for example.

But OnePlus’ wording was explicit that the Pro is the only handset in the line, so we’re not expecting an affordable alternative.

We’ll probably hear about OxygenOS 12 at the launch event – that is, OnePlus’ next version of its Android 12 fork.

This is importnat to all OnePlus fans as the update could come to some older phones from the brand too – so any new updates might roll out to more devices over time.

The teaser we’ve shared above shows loads of icons like a games controller, music note, paintbrush and more – we don’t actually think this means all these features will get changes, possibly more that the app symbols themselves will change.

If you’re a big tech fan, you might want to check out some of the news stories we’ve posted this morning, while you wait for the OnePlus event.

Oh, one thing to point out.

We said the OnePlus 10 Pro has 80W charging, and it does – unless you live in the US. The version of the phone there only has 65W powering. The company has confirmed this already.

We should probably look at the OnePlus 10 Pro itself at some point, right? The thing has already launched in China, so we know all about it.

The OnePlus has a 6.7-inch 2K 120Hz display, broken up by a punch-hole cut-out for the front camera. You can see the design of the phone above.

The cameras are a 48MP main, 50MP ultrawide and 8MP telephoto – oh, and there’s a 32MP snapper on the front for selfies. That’s 138MP in total, if you like the math.

The phone has a Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipset and a 5,000mAh battery, and charges at 80W wired and 50W wireless.

You’ve actually been able to pre-order the OnePlus 10 Pro for a while.

Since we know all the specs for the phone, you might be interested to pre-order it now, but we’d recommend waiting a bit – we’ve no idea how much the phone costs just yet.

Though we’re not expecting it today, we have heard rumors of a new member to the OnePlus 10 range coming later in the year.

This is the OnePlus 10 Ultra which a few leakers about – details are light on the ground but it sounds like it’ll come towards the end of 2022, and possibly with a rear display too.

As we said, this almost definitely won’t show up today.

We mentioned in the introduction to this live blog that the OnePlus 10 isn’t coming – let’s dig into that.

At MWC 2022, an annual tech show which took place in late February, TechRadar attended a OnePlus briefing where the company confirmed this fact. It told us that the OnePlus 10 series would only have one phone.

That also implies that there won’t be a OnePlus 10T, but that could be a case of ‘us reading between the lines too much’.

It sounds like the OnePlus 10 was dropped so that the company could focus more on its Nord series of mid-rangers, so we could see a phone that’s a OnePlus 10 in spirit, but not name.

In our own OnePlus One review, our tester gave the phone four stars out of five, calling it “amazing value for money”.

One of the cons in the review is “Non-removable battery” which, several years later, is something you couldn’t imagine. Not because non-removable batteries have disappeared, but because they’re completely the norm.

While today’s event is mainly about the OnePlus 10 Pro, we think they’re going to talk about the OnePlus One too.

That Tweet is our main reason for saying that, and the company has similar adverts on its website saying the same.

This could just simply be a celebration of ten generations of OnePlus phone, since ten is a nice round number, but it’s not quite that simple. There was no OnePlus Four, and the OnePlus One is only eight years old.

But ten is a nice round number,  like we said. So we’ll have to wait and see.

Welcome to our OnePlus 10 Pro live blog!

The event is hours and hours away – it’s later in the day than we generally see Chinese phone companies host their launch events – so we can have a nice slow cadence for our posts for a bit.