It is not all flowers, unicorns and rainbows over at OnePlus with the OnePlus 7 Pro running into some issues

When the OnePlus 7 Pro was released last week it sounded like an amazing phone (and it is) and users could not wait to get their hands on it with OnePlus unable to keep up with demand — one Chinese site sold US$144 million worth in one minute. Unfortunately some of that joy has been tempered with some negatives that have arisen regarding their first ultra-premium flagship.

Ghost touches

Those who had a OnePlus One will know all about ghost touches. They occur when the display registers touches that did not actually occur. Some users are reporting that they are experiencing these touches, mostly in the CPU-Z app but some are seeing it in others such as Chrome, Facebook, Hangouts and Instagram.

The OnePlus 7 Pro I have been using since Monday did not seem to have any of these ghost touches that I noticed, until I installed and opened CPU-Z. Inside this app it did cause these ghost touches as you can see in the first video below. The touches are not consistent and I apologise that most of the video is nothing but the only time the phone was touched during the recording of this display was to cancel the dialogue box that was open.

Other users have also uploaded videos to YouTube (see below) causing OnePlus to escalate the issue. OnePlus are encouraging anyone who has the issue to use either their community app or submit feedback via their forum to report it so they can get to the bottom of it. At this stage it is unclear if this is a software or a hardware issue but it does seem to be mostly triggered by CPU-Z so we hope OnePlus can find a fix for this bug soon.

DxOMark 111? Really?

When the OnePlus 7 Pro was announced there was a lot made of the quality of the camera with it scoring an amazing 111 with DxOMark8, putting it at about the same quality as the Huawei P30 Pro and the Samsung S10 5G. At the time the images in the DxOMark review seemed to belie the quality of the camera with the P30 Pro looking much better in nearly every picture shown. Real world tests though have shown that the camera is not as good as first thought with many reviewers saying that although it is a good camera it is not great.

DxOMark did state that they used different camera firmware to what was currently available on others’ phones and that may well be the case with an update about to be pushed out to the OnePlus 7 Pro to improve HDR and Nightscape images. OxygenOS Product Manager Jimmy Z confirmed that the next update for the OnePlus 7 Pro camera will bring “HDR effect and Nightscape [2.0] mode” and more fixes. The update is expected to arrive in the next week or so with Jimmy Z saying that from their testing, “photos look substantially better”.

We are yet to test out the OnePlus 7 Pro camera in any detail so cannot comment to our thoughts on it but will wait until this update to give it a final review.

3 times optical zoom?

OnePlus are advertising the camera as having 3x optical zoom but users have noticed that when using the portrait mode 3x optical zoom at 13MP is not possible. It turns out that to achieve the 3x optical zoom the 13MP lens gives 2.2x optical zoom and the 13MP image is cropped down to 8MP to give the final effective 3x zoom. While not technically incorrect on OnePlus’ behalf it is misleading. They issued the following statement to Android Police:

The OnePlus 7 Pro has 3x zoom with no digital zoom or loss of detail. The telephoto camera serves two main purposes: 3x zoom and portrait mode photography. It will switch the field of view depending on the camera mode. With 3x zoom, the telephoto camera delivers the advertised lossless 8 megapixels images. Portrait mode utilizes all 13 megapixels from the sensor in the telephoto camera.

Now that we have that cleared up we can all move along. Do not expect 3x zoom 13MP pictures, instead they will be 3x zoom 8MP images, or 2.2x zoom 13MP pictures if you prefer the full megapixels.

So while the OnePlus 7 Pro is an amazing phone, like all phones and devices these days, nothing is perfect and it has a few teething issues. Hopefully OnePlus can sort out some fixes for the above issues because the OnePlus 7 Pro has the potential to be the best phone released this year.