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While there is a lot to like about the P20 Pro, I quickly started to miss my old OnePlus phone and all of the awesome features it offered.
After a year with Huawei’s flagship, I had had enough, so I went back to a OnePlus device – the OnePlus 7T.
Here’s what I learned in the process, and what you need to keep in mind before switching between brands of phone.
Software is king
The most important thing I have learned is that software matters. A lot! In my opinion, this can make or break the smartphone experience and it’s something you need to keep in mind when switching brands.
Software is the main reason I switched from Huawei to OnePlus. Huawei’s EMUI skin that sits on top of Android is frustrating in more ways than one. The overall design is dated in my opinion and there were far too many apps preinstalled on my P20 Pro that I never used and couldn’t remove. The Settings menu seemed a bit messy to me and was hard to navigate, some apps – especially Google News – would crash often, and those articulation gestures for taking screenshots and launching split screen mode only worked halfway. time for me – on a good day.
But the bigger issue was Huawei’s aggressive battery management, which resulted in important notifications hours later or, worse yet, not arriving at all. I tried all kinds of things including whitelisting some apps but nothing fixed the problem. At least not in the long run.
OxygenOS is the best Android skin on the market.
On the flip side, I find OnePlus’ OxygenOS a pleasure to use. This is by far my favorite Android skin. It looks clean, simple and modern. It also doesn’t have any bloatware on board. What it does have is a bunch of features that improve the overall user experience, which I missed a lot when using the P20 Pro.
These include offscreen gestures that let you open an app of your choice simply by drawing an O, V, S, M, or W on the screen when it’s turned off. You can also drag two fingers down the screen to pause / play the song you are listening to or draw the characters to skip to the previous or next track. I just love these gestures. They are useful because I listen to music every day and can quickly open my most frequently used apps, as well as tools like the flashlight, in the blink of an eye.
Other cool software features that enhance the overall phone experience include Shelf, a secondary, customizable home screen panel that doubles as a feed and place to quickly access recent contacts, weather forecast and much more.
Then there are little things like the ability to swipe anywhere on the screen to pull down the notification shade or swipe up to open the app drawer (you don’t get that with phones. Huawei), a more logical settings menu, and the ability to play with the appearance of the operating system by changing the accent color, and so on. Most importantly, OxygenOS is working – I’ve never had an issue with frequent app crashes like with my P20 Pro.
The Many Flavors of Android: An Overview of the Main Android Skins
Software updates are also an important thing to keep in mind when changing brands. OnePlus phones don’t upgrade to the latest version of Android as quickly as Pixel phones, but the company ships updates much faster than Huawei and most other manufacturers.
The main point to remember is this: Before you upgrade to a phone from another brand, be sure to try it out at your local electronics store. Play around with the software to see how you like the look. Find out what features it has to offer by delving into the settings menu. Also, be sure to check out the review of the phone and its software online as well as read dedicated articles on the topics of OxygenOS, Samsung’s One UI, and other Android skins. Research is the key to a good buy.
It’s not all about raw power
Software is king, but so is hardware. But don’t make the same mistake I did and just focus on raw power. Yes, the OnePlus 7T’s Snapdragon 855 Plus is an overall faster chipset than the P20 Pro’s aging Kirin 970, but honestly I don’t see much of a difference in my day-to-day use.
What makes the difference to me are little things like the alert slider on the OnePlus 7T, which allows me to quickly switch between three notification modes – ring, vibrate, and silent – without needing to turn on the. screen. Love it and I really missed it during my time with Huawei’s flagship. Then there’s the Super Fast Warp Charge technology that takes the 7T’s battery from zero to 100% in just over an hour. Granted, the OnePlus 7T isn’t the fastest charging phone out there, but it’s faster than my old Huawei P20 Pro as well as newer flagships like the Samsung Galaxy Note 10 and Pixel 4 XL.
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These are the features that matter to me as I use them every day and greatly improve my experience with the phone. On the flip side, features like wireless charging, an IP rating, and even reverse wireless charging – everything Huawei phones offer and the latest OnePlus lacks – these are personally insignificant to me. The same goes for the sophisticated 90Hz display on the OnePlus 7T, as I don’t see much of a difference compared to 60Hz displays on phones like the P20 Pro and many others. I am not the only one in this case, apparently.
The point I’m trying to make is that when you compare the specs of two phones from different brands that you want to buy, you need to focus on the items that you will actually be using. That’s why instead of just reading the spec sheets, it’s much smarter to look at phone reviews and style Vs comparisons because you can learn more about the experience a device offers and how it stacks up against. competition instead of a bunch of numbers and buzzwords. .
Compromise, compromise, compromise
If you’re switching from one brand to another, you’ll usually have to make a compromise or two, especially if you’re not switching from a super old phone. For example, while I prefer the OnePlus 7T over the P20 Pro overall, there are still things that I miss about Huawei’s flagship.
The P20 Pro has a superior camera setup in my opinion. The phone takes fantastic pictures especially in low light conditions which is the main reason I got it. The images captured with my OnePlus 7T aren’t bad either, they’re just not as good as the P20’s. The phone also has a bigger battery, a faster and more accurate fingerprint scanner, and while that’s not a problem for me when buying a phone, the IP67 rating gave me a little piece of peace of mind that he would survive a dip in the water.
Read more: Huawei P30 Pro camera review: next-level optics, low-light champion
There is no such thing as the perfect phone, because the competition always offers at least something that your phone doesn’t. It is like that: do not be plagued by the urge.
It depends on what you value most
If you are considering a rebranding in the near future, I hope this article has given you an idea of ​​some of the things to consider and watch out for.
It’s all too easy to get caught up in all the marketing gibberish, or the opinions of people around you, and even tech media wrangling over which phone is the best overall. Don’t buy a phone just because it’s considered the most powerful or the most feature-rich. Don’t buy a phone just because it scored two points higher than its major competitors in a benchmark test. Get it because it meets your needs, whether it’s great cameras, a clean software experience, a full screen display with a pop-up selfie, a small footprint, or ‘eye-catching design.
You should base your buying decision on the features you value the most.
For example, I know the Galaxy S10 Plus is a better phone than the OnePlus 7T, objectively speaking. It has a lot of features and upgrades that you won’t find on the OnePlus 7T, including wireless charging, reverse wireless charging, an IP68 rating, a QHD + display, expandable storage, and a headphone jack, among others. However, it’s no better than the OnePlus 7T for me. I prefer OxygenOS to Samsung’s One UI, and features like Warp Charge and Alert Slider mean more to me than wireless charging and all the extra bells and whistles the Samsung flagship has to offer. For you, it may be the other way around.
So, when you are considering switching brands and choosing between two or more phones, you should base your buying decision on the features that you value the most. It’s that simple.
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