Gadgetory

my favorite phone right now is the samsung galaxy s 9 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 cost of staying current metric becomes an important one to consider so is the s9 plus really $300 better than the one plus 6 let's figure that out shall we brought to you by P I a private Internet access features fast multi gigabit VPN tunnel gateways worldwide so if you're looking for a VPN you can learn more about P ia at the link in the video description I already covered the specs of the oneplus six 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 enthusiasts 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 flew it 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 roll out but the oneplus 3 and the 3 T were among the first older Android phones to get Android 8.0 Oreo in November of 2017 that's four months before the galaxy s 8 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 knotch 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 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 apples 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 worry is that back would interfere with scrolling on long webpages 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 mega pixel counts meaning anything so I spent some time in our studio and on the streets of London to gather some test images now 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 s 9 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 petals have some orange to them not one of the other phones I tested including the oneplus 6 managed to pick this up though - oneplus is credit they avoid the awful over sharpening artifacts that destroyed pretty much everything ten Pro spat out this brick right here looks like a painting if you zoom in enough and subjectively the six does as good a job as any other device that I tested of capturing the scene in front of me as my I saw it with true ish to life colors and not a ton of noise in the image now I'm not into folk 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 launch is so fast snap so quickly and look 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-on display the one plus six is water resistance is unofficial rather than IP rated the six lacks wireless charging altogether an awesome feature these days oneplus is 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 s nines cool panorama selfie the six is earphone speaker isn't amplified for stereo sound in landscape mode which is a huge bummer for me and while dual SIM is good a secondary convo slot for a second sim or a microSD card is much better the one plus six 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 to excel 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 gonna switch back to the s9 plus but that's only because I already have one if it was my money today the oneplus six 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 deep brand skins are available in a wide variety of different colors and finishes and feature unrivaled precision they measure many times to insure 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 on their products are affordable and shipped worldwide check out D brand at the link in the video description so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked do you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description also down there is our merch storage has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join