Oneplus 8 Pro vs Oneplus 9 Pro: Worth the Upgrade?

You may already own 2020’s best OnePlus device and are casting an envious glance over at the latest releases. Is there enough of a difference to warrant switching from the OnePlus 8 Pro to the OnePlus 9 Pro?

As we’ve mentioned already in our other OnePlus 8 vs 9 series comparison, 2021 is a very important year for OnePlus. There is a huge, new Hasselblad camera partnership, Carl Pei has left the firm he helped co-found, and R&D is now closely aligned with Oppo.

The OnePlus 8 Pro was the best OnePlus phone to date. It’s still an excellent smartphone, but the OnePlus 9 Pro ups the ante even further with tweaks and tuning that might be worth paying attention to. With that in mind, we’re here to figure out if an upgrade is something that should even cross your mind.

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Hardware

If you put the specifications of the OnePlus 8 Pro and OnePlus 9 Pro side-by-side, you could be forgiven for trying to work out what has really changed. At least the mainline 8 to the OnePlus 9 has some notable hardware changes.

The only really major difference this time around is the usage of faster storage and an LTPO AMOLED panel. So you’ve probably heard of dynamic refresh rates when we’re talking about displays. An LTPO display allows OxygenOS 11 to adjust refresh rate on the fly with more precise control.

LTPO AMOLED screens can drop to multiple refresh rates such as low as 1Hz when viewing photos or still images or even 24Hz, 30Hz, or 60Hz. This should help conserve battery life, but that depends on just how the system implements the feature.

Other than that, there are some modest improvements to the 120Hz QHD+ display, including to the overall sharpness. That said, it’s not a massive real-terms jump. If you hate curved displays, then neither OnePlus 8 Pro nor OnePlus 9 Pro will be off the table.

Daily performance should be marginally improved on the newer model, but it’s unclear if you would be able to notice. There’s no denying that the OnePlus 8 Pro is still a very powerful smartphone with so much RAM overheard to keep things ticking over nicely for a long time to come.

As with the smaller model, the outer chassis of the OnePlus 8 Pro and 9 Pro share a strand of the same DNA but with various nuances. The rear camera module is a prime hardware difference. Gone is the centrally placed “pill shape” for an upper left domino-style setup. With that in mind, you can tell there the OnePlus 8 Pro and OnePlus 9 Pro are part of a shared lineage.