Honor 20 Pro vs. OnePlus 7 Pro: which one should you buy?
With the recent launch of the OnePlus 7 Pro and Honor 20 Pro, many of you may be wondering how you should spend your money. Despite offers incredible specs and high-end cameras, there are quite a few differences which set these phones apart. We’ll break things down by category, but we’re going to leave the final decision up to you.
Design
Both Honor and OnePlus deserve a lot of credit for the designs of their new flagship smartphones. They’re both built with metal frames and have curved glass backs, but Honor has put in a bit more work into it this year by adding an additional 3D layer which gives the glass a sense of depth. If Honor is to be believed, only 20% of the glass panels which are produced are actually used since the others don’t meet the company’s standards.
That being said, the OnePlus 7 Pro is quite stunning and we’re enamored with the Almond color option. OnePlus also gets a lot of points for delivering a gorgeous edge-to-edge display since it has a pop-up front-facing camera which is hidden below the AMOLED panel. Honor’s phone does have the smallest hole-punch cutout for its front-facing camera, but we definitely prefer the uninterrupted look of the 7 Pro.
Performance
In the past, mind-bending performance was reserved for the most expensive devices on the market, but OnePlus and Honor are proving that you don’t need to spend an arm and a leg to have a device that can outclass the competition. The interesting thing is that these two devices use completely different chips. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 inside the OnePlus 7 Pro is quite common since it’s being used in nearly all flagship-tier devices in 2019, but Huawei’s Kirin 980 that’s found inside the Honor 20 Pro is in the same category.
The real difference in performance between these two phones comes down to RAM and RAM management. The Honor 20 Pro comes with 8GB of RAM, but you can configure the OnePlus 7 Pro to have up to 12GB. On to of that, OnePlus has tweaked the software so that it holds your favorite apps in memory at all times so that they launch instantaneously, even if you haven’t used a specific app since the beginning of the day.
Cameras
Trying to decide which device has a better camera is typically pretty easy if you rely on DxOMark scores. Unfortunately, both phones received the same exact rating of 111. While that number is the second highest score that DxOMark has given in its smartphone camera reviews, you will find that there’s actually a big difference in the camera experience offered by the OnePlus 7 Pro and the Honor 20 Pro.
We’ve only tested the cameras on these two phones for a few hours, but if we had to choose between them based solely on the camera experience, our vote would go to the 20 Pro. Huawei and honor have a long history of delivering exception cameras and the low-light capabilities of Honor’s phone gives it a clear leg up over OnePlus.
That being said, OnePlus has managed to roll out software updates to its older devices to improve camera performance, so we could see them do something similar in a few months.
Software
While hardware is what most people look at when trying to decide which phone they want, the software running the hardware is just as important. In this category, Honor and OnePlus are complete opposites. Honor’s software approach is to imagine every possible customization option you might think of, throw in a few more for good measure, slap on a quick coat of paint to make it look different and call it a day. It’s functional but often slow and unrefined.
OnePlus is more subtle, delivering small improvements on stock Android, adds in a few customization options, but keeps things simple and minimal to ensure that the software allows the hardware to truly shine.
Price
OnePlus has always been known for delivering amazing smartphones at an exceptional price. At 709 €, the new OnePlus 7 Pro is the most expensive device the company has ever built. It still offers incredible value, but the Honor 20 Pro has it beat. Selling for just 599 €, the Honor 20 Pro has a 15% price advantage over the 7 Pro and that’s before you take into account that Honor’s phone comes with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage while the entry-level OnePlus 7 Pro only has 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage.
Conclusion
There’s definitely a lot to like about both phones which makes it hard to choose a clear winner. While we prefer many of the features offered by the OnePlus 7 Pro, the price and camera performance of the Honor 20 Pro make it just as viable of an option.
Unfortunately, we do have to mention that things are a bit uncertain for Huawei and its Honor brand at the moment due to the U.S. trade blacklist issue. The company has been given a 90-day reprieve from the blacklist in an effort to sort things out before it goes into full effect, but the Honor 20 Pro could be affected as a result since Google will be cutting Huawei off completely from its Android security updates and access to the play store on new devices. The phone should have no issues at launch, but we simply don’t know what things will look like 6 months down the road.
Let us know what you think of the OnePlus 7 Pro and the Honor 20 Pro and which device you’d be willing to spend your money on in the comments below.