OnePlus 9 and 9 Pro: everything we know about the new phones coming on March 23rd

The OnePlus 9 Pro is a legitimate flagship phone that is genuinely competitive with the best Android phones on the market — at least from a features and quality perspective. Yet in terms of market and mind share, it’s still destined to be a niche device for a small group of enthusiasts looking for a specific kind of elegance in their Android device.

And that’s great.

The OnePlus 9 is a very good phone that holds its own against other (often more expensive) flagships. It has all the things that truly matter: a great screen, excellent performance, good battery life, and a capable camera. But for better or worse, it still doesn’t feel quite like a device that’s well-suited for the mainstream. It misses a couple of features present on the competition like a stabilized main camera and broad 5G support. 

Instead, it offers some neat but arguably not as useful extras, like really fast charging and an excellent ultrawide camera. It leaves this device in somewhat unusual territory: it’s good and well-priced, but it’s not the Android flagship I’d recommend to just anyone.

OnePlus has released its new batch of phones, the OnePlus 9 and the 9 Pro. As is the tradition with OnePlus, the phones are equipped with the latest high-end Snapdragon chips and are priced lower than most of the competition.

Both phones also include charging features that Apple and Samsung don’t match: they wirelessly charge at a super-fast 50W and can charge at 65W over wired charging. They also both have Hasselblad’s camera tuning and software.

It’s taken years, but OnePlus is finally getting in the smartwatch game with the newly announced OnePlus Watch, starting at $159. The new watch (as was revealed last week) has a round design that looks similar to a regular wristwatch, instead of the oblong rectangle popularized by the Apple Watch and its imitators, like the Oppo Watch.

The case itself is stainless steel, measures 46mm, and features two buttons on the side (one of which features the OnePlus logo). It’ll be available in two colors: silver and black. The display is a 1.39-inch OLED panel at 326ppi, with sapphire glass.

OnePlus has announced the first two phones in its OnePlus 9 series, the OnePlus 9 and OnePlus 9 Pro. As expected, the OnePlus 9 Pro is the flagship, designed to face off against the likes of Samsung’s Galaxy S21 Ultra and the iPhone 12 Pro Max, while the OnePlus 9 is its lower-specced and slightly more affordable counterpart. The OnePlus 9 costs $729 with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage or $829 with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. Meanwhile, the 9 Pro costs $969 with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage or $1,069 with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage in the US. Both phones will go on sale on April 2nd, with preorders starting March 26th.

OnePlus spent much of its announcement talking about the cameras on the new phones, which have been developed in partnership with Hasselblad. OnePlus says the colors have been tuned to look more natural and that the ultrawide sensor on the 9 Pro and 9 is one of the biggest to ever ship on a smartphone. The ultrawide uses a 50-megapixel Sony IMX766 sensor that’s 1/1.56” in size with an aperture of f/2.2. Meanwhile, the 9 Pro’s main Sony IMX789 sensor has a resolution of 48 megapixels and is 1/1.43” in size. (The regular 9 has a Sony IMX689 sensor, but it has the same resolution of 48 megapixels.) Both have a 2-megapixel monochrome sensor and 16-megapixel selfie camera, but only the 9 Pro has an 8-megapixel telephoto.

OnePlus will be formally announcing the 9 and 9 Pro phones, a smartwatch, and a blazing-fast wireless charger on March 23rd — but why wait? OnePlus definitely isn’t: it’s been spoiling its own announcements nonstop on Twitter, YouTube, and even right here at The Verge. One day, the CEO will tweet out which processor the phone will use; the next, the company will upload pictures of the phone from multiple angles! If you haven’t been keeping up, we’ve compiled all the... leaks? Mini-announcements? in one place.

OnePlus has been in the habit lately of trying to build up suspense for its events, which is why you see it and its executives just tweeting out information about the phones. Here’s what we’ve learned from them:

OnePlus’ long-awaited first smartwatch has made its first appearance ahead of the company’s upcoming March 23rd launch event, which is feeling increasingly irrelevant as almost every piece of news about its new product lineup trickles online in bits and pieces.

Revealed fully for the first time by Unbox Therapy, the creatively named OnePlus Watch doesn’t appear to break too much new ground when it comes to smartwatch design. Visible are two buttons on the right side of the watch (notably, there’s no scrolling crown-style wheel) on an otherwise normal-looking watch. Also of interest are what appears to be standard watch straps, instead of the proprietary bands that are popular among companies like Apple and Fitbit.

A third phone in the upcoming OnePlus 9 series has been confirmed by the company’s CEO, in an interview with News18 (via Android Police). The announcement, which is coming just five days before the OnePlus 9 and 9 Pro are set to be fully revealed, confirms rumors that OnePlus would also be announcing a less expensive phone in addition to its new flagships. So far, though, the phone is only confirmed to be coming to India.

In the interview, OnePlus CEO Pete Lau says that the company wants “to go even further” than it did with the OnePlus Nord, in regards to the included tech and design. Depending on how closely you follow OnePlus, you may remember the Nord as a mid-range phone that was available in Europe and India, or as a budget phone released in the US. Which part of the price-to-performance spectrum OnePlus is targeting isn’t clear yet, though some of Lau’s comments indicate that it may be closer to the mid-range end.

It’s not often that the actual spec is better than the rumor, but that’s the case here: the OnePlus 9 Pro supports 50W wireless charging — a little faster than the 45W rumor we reported on earlier this year. We’ve been able to test drive this feature ahead of the phone’s official debut on March 23rd and can confirm: the 9 Pro offers really, really fast wireless charging.

OnePlus claims that the phone will charge wirelessly (with the new Warp Charge 50 charger) from 1 to 100 percent in 43 minutes, and our own testing confirmed this down to the minute. That’s a big boost over the OnePlus 8 Pro’s 30W wireless charging, which supplied a 50 percent charge in 30 minutes. The improvements aren’t limited to wireless charging, or the 9 Pro for that matter; the 9 and 9 Pro have 65W wired charging that takes the battery from empty to full in 29 minutes. While the base model OnePlus 9 doesn’t get those fast wireless speeds, it can be used with the new charger at up to 15W. Additionally, both the 9 and 9 Pro support standard Qi wireless charging at 15W.

We have a very clear picture of what the upcoming OnePlus 9 and 9 Pro will look like thanks to WinFuture — the site has published a whole bunch of official press renders of the upcoming phones well ahead of the March 23rd launch. We got our first official look at the upcoming flagship in a teaser video from OnePlus earlier this week, but this latest leak features both regular and Pro models from multiple angles in a variety of colors.

These renders align with what OnePlus has already shared, and they also resemble an alleged prototype device that was leaked late last year. It appears that the OnePlus 9 Pro will come with a slightly curved 6.7-inch display, and the OnePlus 9 will feature a flat 6.5-inch screen. That’s about the extent of the spec details in this leak; WinFuture speculates that the 9 may use a plastic chassis rather than metal, but it’s hard to say for sure based on these images.

Along with a confirmed release date, we got our first official look at the OnePlus 9 today and another tidbit of information: it will come with a charger, unlike recent flagships including the Galaxy S21 and iPhone 12.

In a message thread on the company’s community forum, OnePlus CEO Pete Lau said that the 9 will ship with a charger in the box. Recently, Apple and Samsung stopped including chargers with their flagship devices, citing environmental benefits and saying that customers already had the adaptors anyway. The jury’s still out on the environmental impact of the move, but it’s sure to have helped the companies’ bottom lines.

OnePlus has announced an official launch date for its next phones: the OnePlus 9 series will be formally announced on March 23rd at 10AM ET. It’s also confirming a partnership with Swedish camera maker Hasselblad to improve the devices’ camera systems — something that’s been leaked and hinted at previously.

Rumors thus far have pointed to the announcement of a OnePlus 9 Pro with curved 1440p 120Hz display, 45W fast charging, and reverse wireless charging. OnePlus’ reference to the “series” product launch would seem to confirm more than one device debuting later this month. There’s also confirmation of 5G, which isn’t surprising in this year of our lord 2021.

OnePlus CEO Pete Lau is teasing a “moonshot” announcement on March 8th, when the company expected to reveal details about its next flagship smartphone, the OnePlus 9. “Something new is on the horizon” a teaser site reads, alongside a photograph that looks an awful lot like the famous “Earthrise” photograph from the Apollo 8 mission. That photo was taken with a Hasselblad camera, the 180-year-old Swedish company rumored to be partnering with OnePlus on its upcoming phones.

In the past, manufacturers have also used photographs of the Moon to advertise the capabilities of their phones’ zoom cameras for astrophotography, indicating that this could be a key feature of the OnePlus 9 lineup.

Leaked images of the unannounced OnePlus 9 Pro suggest the flagship smartphone will include a Hasselblad-branded camera array. The images shared in a recent Dave Lee YouTube video show four cameras on the rear of the phone. These include wide-angle, ultra-wide, and telephoto lenses, the latter of which appears to offer up to a 3.3x optical zoom.

At this point it’s unclear exactly what this Hasselblad branding could mean for the OnePlus 9 Pro’s cameras. The Swedish manufacturer, which is majority owned by Chinese company DJI, is best known for its expensive medium format cameras, and has previously worked with Lenovo on a modular camera accessory for Moto Z devices, as well as Vertu for its Signature Touch smartphone. Hopefully the presence of its logo means Hasselblad has provided some real camera expertise to OnePlus beyond just brand cache.