**Hands-On Review: OnePlus 6R**

The OnePlus 6R is a promising flagship phone that has been on my hands for a few days now, and I'm excited to share my thoughts with you. The phone's design is sleek and premium, with a large 6.5-inch display that takes up most of the front panel. The camera app is clean and easy to navigate, but it lacks some features that are available on other phones in its class.

**Camera Performance**

The camera performance on the OnePlus 6R is decent, but not spectacular. The photos look fine, with good color accuracy and detail. However, the ultrawide lens is definitely soft near the edges of the frame, which can be a bit disappointing for some users. On the other hand, the phone does do macro photography well when you get up close to subjects, although it's not great by any means. Overall, the camera performance is good but not outstanding.

**Software Experience**

One area where the OnePlus 6R truly shines is in its software experience. The interface is clean and intuitive, with a focus on ease of use that makes it accessible to users of all skill levels. However, there are some quirks and annoyances that can be frustrating at times. For example, when you have notifications open, you can only swipe away from the right side, regardless of how fast or gentle your swipe is. This can lead to a few extra swipes than necessary to clear out the notifications.

**Notification System**

The notification system on the OnePlus 6R is another area where it falls short compared to some other Android phones. When you have multiple notifications from the same app, you can't swipe down with one or two fingers to view each one in a group; instead, you're forced to click on each notification individually. This can be annoying, especially if you have a lot of notifications to sift through. Additionally, when you pull down your notifications, it takes multiple swipes to get through all of them and close them again.

**Haptics and Feedback**

Despite these quibbles, the OnePlus 6R's haptic feedback system is one of its standout features. The phone uses a combination of visual and haptic touches throughout the interface, including when adjusting brightness or volume. This adds a level of depth and nuance to the user experience that's hard to resist.

**Comparison to Other Phones**

When it comes to competing phones in the same price range, the OnePlus 6R has some notable advantages. Its Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor and 1440p display make it a top contender for those who prioritize performance and display quality. Additionally, there's an option for the $799 model with 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, which is perfect for power users.

**Redemption Potential**

So, does the OnePlus 6R mark a redemption point for the brand? While it's not a complete turnaround, I think this phone shows promise. It's clear that OnePlus has learned from its past mistakes and is trying to create a better user experience with its latest software iteration. Whether or not they've fully redeemed themselves remains to be seen, but for now, this phone feels like an important step in the right direction.

**Conclusion**

In conclusion, my time with the OnePlus 6R has been mixed. While it's had some standout features and advantages over other phones in its class, there are still some quirks and annoyances that need to be addressed. With a bit more refinement and attention to detail, I think this phone could truly shine. For now, though, it feels like a solid mid-range option with some impressive specs and a promising software experience.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enI was kind of wondering how long it would be before I could say this again if I'd ever say it again but OnePlus is kind of back so this is the new OnePlus 11. now people who have been following the industry for a little bit already know the story behind this phone which is OnePlus starting out hot as a fan favorite with a plus bang for the buck Flagship killer type of phones peaking I'd say around the OnePlus 7 Pro it's my phone of the year and then slowly descending into the very generic expensive Flagship that they swore to kill their last attempt at a phone the 10t is literally the worst phone that came out last year it won my bust of the year and I got a trophy for it and apparently they've used this as motivation they keep saying oh they now they want to redeem themselves now they're gonna turn it around and you know great like I think we all know the next phone was already in the works by the time they got that trophy but if you want to give me some credit I'll take some credit sure but the point is they're sort of reflecting shades of old OnePlus which is a really good thing because this phone is really good so this is a flagship smartphone right now for 6.99 in a world where the Galaxy s23 just came out it's 7.99 that's a sort of a de facto default for a lot of people my semi-hot take is this could be a better phone for a lot of people now it's not perfect and they still do some classic Corner cutting things to pull this off and there are still some software behaviors that I really do not like but here are the basics so if you want just a classic spec sheet bang for the buck summary this phone has a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 with 8 gigs of RAM a 6.7 inch 1440p 120 hertz OLED display triple cameras and a 5 000 milliamp hour battery with 80 watt charging for 699 bucks that's pretty damn good so I think because the phone has like the nice screen the big battery and the newest chip it begs comparisons to like the 900 000 other Flagship phones but like I said it does cut some Corners the big one being no wireless charging huge and then the other it's ip64 rated instead of IP67 so it'll survive a Mist better than a splash but on the design front I'd call this a mixed bag mixed bag you know it definitely is taking a step away from the ultra generic last generation the Hasselblad branding is back and we'll talk about the cameras in a minute but also the alert slider is back literally an iconic OnePlus feature that they somehow thought getting rid of last time was a good idea this one also has a very slightly textured matte black finish on the back not quite Sandstone level but enough to be interesting so I like it and the camera bump the camera bump is kind of a weird hybrid of smoothly wrapping around the side like Samsung used to but then turning it into a big circle Plateau that looks like a generic not seamless thing anymore at all it's whatever I don't mind it it's fine but you're not here for the back of the phone though like honestly if you just saw the back and saw the lack of wireless charging and a slightly awkward camera bump it feels like a 699 phone sure but the front is where it gets way more impressive 6.7 inch corner to corner thin bezel with a slight curve over the edges I wish it was flatter but it's not too bad 1440p resolution 120 hertz ltpo OLED 1000 Hertz touch sample rate and 1300 nits Peak brightness that's visible outdoors in all but direct sunlight and that little corner cut out for the selfie camera that's nearly as good as you can ask for these days and actually using a phone it's very Snappy and smooth it's got the fingerprint reader on the display in just the right spot it's fast and OnePlus One a little over the top with like the future proofing of the highest end fastest internals it's good details like this phone has not just Wi-Fi 6 or Wi-Fi 6E but the brand new Wi-Fi 7 not just UF S3 but ufs 4.0 the fastest storage and not just LP ddr5 but LP ddr5x the fastest memory available so this is legitimately very Snappy and it's a quick phone brand new but then because of those high-end internals I do expect the Headroom to age pretty well the snap Dragon Age Gen 2 has proven to be a pretty good chip like the other phones that have had it so far have been really good phones and this is too it's a powerful chip and the GPU is great but also it's been pretty efficient and that's affecting the battery situation and I think for battery on this phone this is where it feels the most like old OnePlus so the OnePlus 11 has a 5 000 milliamp hour battery great battery life so if I if I use it like normal maxed out High brightness 1440p and 120 hertz on I'm making it to the end of the day fine no problem when I go 1080P and still 120 hertz I was able to get two days out of this phone matter of fact I'm on the second day right now it's almost noon I have 31 percent that's pretty good I'm getting to the end of two light days with like seven eight hours of screen on time fine that's really good and then for charging in the US this one has 80 watt charging I think in China other versions have 100 watt charging there's a difference in electrical standards but super fast charging so if I ever found myself thinking oh I need a little extra battery it's kind of low right now it was rare but I could plug in for a few minutes and have more than enough it is that Oppo supervook charging Tech so it's still the brick with USB a instead of USBC but hey at least it comes in the Box plus the cable so I know also having wireless charging would be really convenient and it's kind of annoying going from a phone that does have wireless charging to one that doesn't but I think OnePlus is counting on people who have other phones now that don't have wireless charging moving to this one and finding it's like an awesome battery experience so that's what they're counting on but let me talk about the cameras in this phone because these are also a throwback to Old OnePlus which if you remember those phones means not as good as the flagships but really solid so it's got that 50 megapixel main camera that bins down to 12 and a half megapixels and it gives me images that are generally pretty sharp and nice if you don't zoom in I mean I was pleasantly surprised that in most different types of shooting scenarios it was at least capable of giving me a solid shot even in low light when it does miss it tends to overexpose a bit and even more so with darker skin tones also focus is a little suspiciously slow sometimes so I found myself taking multiple shots of moving objects just to make sure I got a good one but you know what if the bar is being set at just a good enough camera that it's not a dead giveaway that it's a cheaper phone it clears that bar for sure I couldn't tell you how much that Hasselblad partnership is actually doing for photos here I mean color science maybe it seems like there's pretty balanced colors and nice Optical characteristics but like that's about all I can say about that I mean the photos look fine the ultrawide is definitely soft near the edges of the frame but at least it matches colors pretty well with the main and it does do macro when you get super up close to things but it's not good macro I mean it does the macro but yeah not great the only reason I'm not going to keep dailying this phone though aside from other phones that I have to test very soon is the software there's just some things that I I mean the software is fine lots of people use this software all over the world I have no problem with it there's so many little quirks and things that they just add up and they get annoying so here if you're going to be like old OnePlus One Plus let's have some feedback let's listen to some user feedback here so I'm an Android User who spends a lot of time in the notifications it's very important part of the phone a lot of other people spend a lot of time there too in every other Android phone that I've used when you have a notification you can swipe left or swipe right to clear them but for some reason on this phone you can only swipe away to the right if you swipe to the left no matter how fast your swipe is it pulls up settings and then you have to swipe again to clear so this is slightly annoying every single time and then in every other Android phone if I have multiple notifications from the same app then I can swipe down with one or two fingers to view each one and if I just want to open the app you click it or if you want to open a specific instance of that notification you can do that when it's expanded on this phone for some reason you can't swipe to expand the group of notifications you can only click it which expands it but then in the apps where there's a single notification and you want to expand it like a camera preview or a message preview or something with more information you can't just swipe like every other Android phone you have to tap this tiny bar at the top of the notification around that Arrow to view the preview that is even more annoying over time and then in every other Android phone if you pull down your notifications and you have a lot of them you can always go you know what never mind and then pull them all the way back up to close on this phone it takes multiple swipes to get through all your notifications and close them every time that's a little more annoying and then if you have music playing in the background say on Spotify or podcast or something you want to get to that app on every other phone it's a swipe and a Tap Away on this phone it's a swipe a tap and another tap to get to the app there's a bunch of little things like that from coming from almost any other Android phone that doesn't use color Os or this version of software and it would be fine if that's the default Behavior but there's at least a toggle to let me not have that happen every time but it happens every time but the good thing is other than that there's a lot of nice things like in this software it's very well thought out and laid out I think especially with the haptics and the combination of visual and haptic touches throughout it like pulling up and down the brightness slider you get this nice haptic feed feedback or going up and down in volume it's the same thing it very well thought out in that way so I think if OnePlus really wants to sort of redeem themselves and they look back a little bit at what was so successful with oxygen OS I know they eventually did this merge thing with Oppo and color OS but look at what people loved about oxygen OS and really think about bringing some of those things back okay so this one's competition at 6.99 it's kind of interesting I think today you'd probably consider buying a pixel 7 for 5.99 but what this phone will have over some of these other phones in this price range is some of the highest end specs the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 and the 1440p display specifically it'll always have some of those spec things if you're interested in that there's even a 799 version that has 16 gigs of RAM and 256 gigs of storage too so yeah that's that's what feels like sort of classic Redemption OnePlus is this a full Redemption no I'm not going to give them full Redemption status yet uh but if the if the character Arc of OnePlus was kind of like this and then like like this it does feel like this is a inflection point it feels like this is a little bit of a shift in the right direction at least so now I just hope they keep it going you know if they might be past their Peak but their performance and price of this phone show potential thanks for watching catch you guys in the next one peaceI was kind of wondering how long it would be before I could say this again if I'd ever say it again but OnePlus is kind of back so this is the new OnePlus 11. now people who have been following the industry for a little bit already know the story behind this phone which is OnePlus starting out hot as a fan favorite with a plus bang for the buck Flagship killer type of phones peaking I'd say around the OnePlus 7 Pro it's my phone of the year and then slowly descending into the very generic expensive Flagship that they swore to kill their last attempt at a phone the 10t is literally the worst phone that came out last year it won my bust of the year and I got a trophy for it and apparently they've used this as motivation they keep saying oh they now they want to redeem themselves now they're gonna turn it around and you know great like I think we all know the next phone was already in the works by the time they got that trophy but if you want to give me some credit I'll take some credit sure but the point is they're sort of reflecting shades of old OnePlus which is a really good thing because this phone is really good so this is a flagship smartphone right now for 6.99 in a world where the Galaxy s23 just came out it's 7.99 that's a sort of a de facto default for a lot of people my semi-hot take is this could be a better phone for a lot of people now it's not perfect and they still do some classic Corner cutting things to pull this off and there are still some software behaviors that I really do not like but here are the basics so if you want just a classic spec sheet bang for the buck summary this phone has a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 with 8 gigs of RAM a 6.7 inch 1440p 120 hertz OLED display triple cameras and a 5 000 milliamp hour battery with 80 watt charging for 699 bucks that's pretty damn good so I think because the phone has like the nice screen the big battery and the newest chip it begs comparisons to like the 900 000 other Flagship phones but like I said it does cut some Corners the big one being no wireless charging huge and then the other it's ip64 rated instead of IP67 so it'll survive a Mist better than a splash but on the design front I'd call this a mixed bag mixed bag you know it definitely is taking a step away from the ultra generic last generation the Hasselblad branding is back and we'll talk about the cameras in a minute but also the alert slider is back literally an iconic OnePlus feature that they somehow thought getting rid of last time was a good idea this one also has a very slightly textured matte black finish on the back not quite Sandstone level but enough to be interesting so I like it and the camera bump the camera bump is kind of a weird hybrid of smoothly wrapping around the side like Samsung used to but then turning it into a big circle Plateau that looks like a generic not seamless thing anymore at all it's whatever I don't mind it it's fine but you're not here for the back of the phone though like honestly if you just saw the back and saw the lack of wireless charging and a slightly awkward camera bump it feels like a 699 phone sure but the front is where it gets way more impressive 6.7 inch corner to corner thin bezel with a slight curve over the edges I wish it was flatter but it's not too bad 1440p resolution 120 hertz ltpo OLED 1000 Hertz touch sample rate and 1300 nits Peak brightness that's visible outdoors in all but direct sunlight and that little corner cut out for the selfie camera that's nearly as good as you can ask for these days and actually using a phone it's very Snappy and smooth it's got the fingerprint reader on the display in just the right spot it's fast and OnePlus One a little over the top with like the future proofing of the highest end fastest internals it's good details like this phone has not just Wi-Fi 6 or Wi-Fi 6E but the brand new Wi-Fi 7 not just UF S3 but ufs 4.0 the fastest storage and not just LP ddr5 but LP ddr5x the fastest memory available so this is legitimately very Snappy and it's a quick phone brand new but then because of those high-end internals I do expect the Headroom to age pretty well the snap Dragon Age Gen 2 has proven to be a pretty good chip like the other phones that have had it so far have been really good phones and this is too it's a powerful chip and the GPU is great but also it's been pretty efficient and that's affecting the battery situation and I think for battery on this phone this is where it feels the most like old OnePlus so the OnePlus 11 has a 5 000 milliamp hour battery great battery life so if I if I use it like normal maxed out High brightness 1440p and 120 hertz on I'm making it to the end of the day fine no problem when I go 1080P and still 120 hertz I was able to get two days out of this phone matter of fact I'm on the second day right now it's almost noon I have 31 percent that's pretty good I'm getting to the end of two light days with like seven eight hours of screen on time fine that's really good and then for charging in the US this one has 80 watt charging I think in China other versions have 100 watt charging there's a difference in electrical standards but super fast charging so if I ever found myself thinking oh I need a little extra battery it's kind of low right now it was rare but I could plug in for a few minutes and have more than enough it is that Oppo supervook charging Tech so it's still the brick with USB a instead of USBC but hey at least it comes in the Box plus the cable so I know also having wireless charging would be really convenient and it's kind of annoying going from a phone that does have wireless charging to one that doesn't but I think OnePlus is counting on people who have other phones now that don't have wireless charging moving to this one and finding it's like an awesome battery experience so that's what they're counting on but let me talk about the cameras in this phone because these are also a throwback to Old OnePlus which if you remember those phones means not as good as the flagships but really solid so it's got that 50 megapixel main camera that bins down to 12 and a half megapixels and it gives me images that are generally pretty sharp and nice if you don't zoom in I mean I was pleasantly surprised that in most different types of shooting scenarios it was at least capable of giving me a solid shot even in low light when it does miss it tends to overexpose a bit and even more so with darker skin tones also focus is a little suspiciously slow sometimes so I found myself taking multiple shots of moving objects just to make sure I got a good one but you know what if the bar is being set at just a good enough camera that it's not a dead giveaway that it's a cheaper phone it clears that bar for sure I couldn't tell you how much that Hasselblad partnership is actually doing for photos here I mean color science maybe it seems like there's pretty balanced colors and nice Optical characteristics but like that's about all I can say about that I mean the photos look fine the ultrawide is definitely soft near the edges of the frame but at least it matches colors pretty well with the main and it does do macro when you get super up close to things but it's not good macro I mean it does the macro but yeah not great the only reason I'm not going to keep dailying this phone though aside from other phones that I have to test very soon is the software there's just some things that I I mean the software is fine lots of people use this software all over the world I have no problem with it there's so many little quirks and things that they just add up and they get annoying so here if you're going to be like old OnePlus One Plus let's have some feedback let's listen to some user feedback here so I'm an Android User who spends a lot of time in the notifications it's very important part of the phone a lot of other people spend a lot of time there too in every other Android phone that I've used when you have a notification you can swipe left or swipe right to clear them but for some reason on this phone you can only swipe away to the right if you swipe to the left no matter how fast your swipe is it pulls up settings and then you have to swipe again to clear so this is slightly annoying every single time and then in every other Android phone if I have multiple notifications from the same app then I can swipe down with one or two fingers to view each one and if I just want to open the app you click it or if you want to open a specific instance of that notification you can do that when it's expanded on this phone for some reason you can't swipe to expand the group of notifications you can only click it which expands it but then in the apps where there's a single notification and you want to expand it like a camera preview or a message preview or something with more information you can't just swipe like every other Android phone you have to tap this tiny bar at the top of the notification around that Arrow to view the preview that is even more annoying over time and then in every other Android phone if you pull down your notifications and you have a lot of them you can always go you know what never mind and then pull them all the way back up to close on this phone it takes multiple swipes to get through all your notifications and close them every time that's a little more annoying and then if you have music playing in the background say on Spotify or podcast or something you want to get to that app on every other phone it's a swipe and a Tap Away on this phone it's a swipe a tap and another tap to get to the app there's a bunch of little things like that from coming from almost any other Android phone that doesn't use color Os or this version of software and it would be fine if that's the default Behavior but there's at least a toggle to let me not have that happen every time but it happens every time but the good thing is other than that there's a lot of nice things like in this software it's very well thought out and laid out I think especially with the haptics and the combination of visual and haptic touches throughout it like pulling up and down the brightness slider you get this nice haptic feed feedback or going up and down in volume it's the same thing it very well thought out in that way so I think if OnePlus really wants to sort of redeem themselves and they look back a little bit at what was so successful with oxygen OS I know they eventually did this merge thing with Oppo and color OS but look at what people loved about oxygen OS and really think about bringing some of those things back okay so this one's competition at 6.99 it's kind of interesting I think today you'd probably consider buying a pixel 7 for 5.99 but what this phone will have over some of these other phones in this price range is some of the highest end specs the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 and the 1440p display specifically it'll always have some of those spec things if you're interested in that there's even a 799 version that has 16 gigs of RAM and 256 gigs of storage too so yeah that's that's what feels like sort of classic Redemption OnePlus is this a full Redemption no I'm not going to give them full Redemption status yet uh but if the if the character Arc of OnePlus was kind of like this and then like like this it does feel like this is a inflection point it feels like this is a little bit of a shift in the right direction at least so now I just hope they keep it going you know if they might be past their Peak but their performance and price of this phone show potential thanks for watching catch you guys in the next one peace\n"