OnePlus 10 Pro review: Little remains of OnePlus’ original appeal

OnePlus is going through a period of upheaval.

The Chinese company lost its co-founder Carl Pei in 2020 and went through a tumultuous merger with Oppo last year. No one outside of the company knows what the future of OnePlus will look like, but its latest OnePlus 10 Pro smartphone seems to hint at what this new OnePlus era will be like.

OnePlus is part of a large conglomerate of smartphone companies under the umbrella of BBK. Just like General Motors runs a bunch of car companies, all BBK brands choose parts from the same basket and make similar products but target different markets. OnePlus subsidiaries BBK Oppo, Vivo and Realme are focused on China, while iQOO is focused on India. OnePlus was the West Wing of BBK. The OnePlus One launch countries were the US and Europe, which made a lot of sense. The three largest smartphone markets are China, India and the US.

Now that the merger with Oppo is taking place, it’s hard to say that OnePlus is still focused on the West. The OnePlus 10 Pro debuted three months ago in China and is just now arriving in the US. Even after this delay, the device will not be released in the US with all features intact.

The main difference between OnePlus and its competitors is “Warp Charge”, the company’s patented fast charging technology. The OnePlus 10 Pro improves upon this technology by offering 80W Warp charging. But OnePlus didn’t make the new 80W Warp Charger for the US market, so US buyers have to settle for last year’s just 65W charger. Nothing stops OnePlus from creating an 80W charger that works with the US 120V power grid; the company just didn’t do it.

BBK already has three other China-focused brands, so OnePlus’ priority in China could mean a retreat from the US market. The merger with Oppo also feels like a rebuttal to OnePlus’ original strategy. Once upon a time, OnePlus was important enough to be an independent company under BBK, but now it’s not.

The OnePlus-Oppo merger creates an awkward and unclear future for OnePlus software. OnePlus and Oppo have their own Android skins. OnePlus has traditionally stuck to the stock Android design and added extra features (although the company has moved away from that strategy over time). Oppo’s Color OS, like many Chinese Android skins, is the envy of Apple and looks like a fake version of iOS.

In July 2021, OnePlus and Oppo announced that they would be merging their polar opposite Android skins, saying the move would help the companies roll out updates faster. In December 2021, we first saw this single direction with the Android 12 update for the OnePlus 9, and it was kind of a disaster. Just last month, Oppo and OnePlus announced they were canceling their software merger.

So no, OnePlus didn’t make the 10 Pro software in one month; basically it was created according to the old plan. No one knows what the Android 13 update plan for this phone will look like, but you’ll get three years of major software updates. Blowing up your software division and then trying to rebuild it a month before the device’s launch is devastating, and I can’t say I expect major updates to go smoothly while OnePlus figures out what its software should be.

It is in this context that we bring you our OnePlus 10 Pro review. The yearly smartphone refresh cycle doesn’t stop for anyone, even if your company is in the midst of a complete reboot.