If the OnePlus 7 Pro launch event yesterday showed us anything, it’s that there’s increasingly little justification to charge over $1000 for a maxed out smartphone.
The Chinese company’s entire offer is built around the idea of affordability, and it has always operated just below the manufacturers of the highest-end smartphones: Samsung and Apple.
But the OnePlus 7 Pro changes that. The specs speak for themselves; AMOLED all-screen display with a 90Hz refresh rate, Snapdragon 855 processor, (up to) 12GB of RAM, UFS3.0 standard storage, 4000mAh battery and a triple camera setup that includes wide-angle and telephoto lenses.
The cheapest model costs $669, whereas the most expensive is $749. It’s not cheap, certainly not by OnePlus' standards. But up against the priciest handsets with the same amount of storage from Samsung ($999) and Apple ($1249), there's a significant chasm in affordability.
I’m yet to put the device through The Review Machine, and other early reviews suggest the camera doesn’t match up to Samsung or Google’s offering (a difficult task, even for Apple). There may very well be other issues (lack of official water resistance rating for example), but every phone has them.
On the headline news though, the OnePlus 7 Pro appears to be a reasonably complete package that clearly operates on the highest end - as OnePlus intended it to.
That probably means Samsung and Apple will have to start reconsidering their pricing strategy if the OnePlus 7 Pro proves to be popular. Breaking the market dominance of the iPhone and Galaxy ranges is probably near impossible, but with consumers reluctant to upgrade their phones and a renewed interest in cheaper handsets - there may be a turning point where it becomes difficult to justify charging $1000 or more for a top-end phone (especially an Android device) when a rival equally powerful handset costs far, far less.
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