OnePlus 14 Pro Review

It was 2am on a Tuesday and I was sitting cross-legged on the bed watching the OnePlus 14 Pro charge from stone dead. Not because charging is a hobby of mine — though by now, maybe it is — but because I didn’t believe the numbers. 50% in about 12 minutes. Past 80% at the 25-minute mark. And at 34 minutes flat, 100%. I screenshotted it, because otherwise nobody was going to take my word for it.

That moment is the whole phone, really. It grabs specs you’d normally only see north of Rs 1,20,000 and stuffs them into something that starts at Rs 69,999. Snapdragon 8 Gen 5. A 6000mAh slab of a battery. 100W SUPERVOOC. Hasselblad cameras. And it does all that without the usual sense that something got quietly gutted to hit the price. Two weeks of heavy use in, this thing is an almost silly amount of value.

What’s in the box

OnePlus still gives you a charger. The 100W SUPERVOOC brick, plus a USB-C to USB-C cable. There’s a clear TPU case in there too — thin, but enough to keep the phone safe for the first few days until you order something better. SIM pin, paperwork, the rest. Small thing, sure, but when Samsung and Apple can’t be bothered to include a brick at their prices, OnePlus tossing one in at Rs 69,999 is worth saying out loud.

A design that actually has a face

Most phones these days are rectangles that differ only in how their cameras are arranged. OnePlus went the other way with a big circular module on the back. Bold. Divisive, definitely — some people will hate it. I came round to liking it a lot, because it gives the phone an identity you can pick out from across a table.

Two colours: Midnight Black and Glacier White. Mine’s the white, with this frosted, almost-ceramic finish that throws light around without turning into a fingerprint magnet. One of the nicer-looking phones I’ve held in a while, honestly. A precision-machined metal frame wraps the edges, and the whole thing feels solid without feeling like a brick.

On weight — 219 grams. That’s lighter than the Samsung S26 Ultra at 229g, even though OnePlus packed in a much bigger 6000mAh battery. I’m not sure how they managed it, but the balance is good too. Doesn’t go top-heavy or awkward whichever way you hold it.

One thing I’ll flag, though: it’s IP65, not IP68. So jets of water — rain, a splash — are fine, but don’t dunk it. For most people that’s a non-issue. If you’re the type who reads in the bath or shoots photos in the pool, file it away.

A display that has no business being this good at Rs 69,999

OnePlus fitted a 6.82-inch LTPO4 AMOLED with 4500 nits of peak brightness. Sit with that a second — 4500 nits. Samsung’s S26 Ultra, at nearly twice the money, peaks at 2600. Apple’s iPhone 17 Pro Max does 3000. By raw brightness, the OnePlus has the best screen in this whole roundup.

Outdoors that translates to spectacular readability. I was going through photos on it during a sunny Pune afternoon and never once hunted for shade — the screen just stayed visible. Colours are nicely calibrated thanks to the ProXDR tuning, accurate without tipping into the oversaturation a lot of AMOLED panels fall for.

Resolution’s 3168 x 1440, so proper Quad HD+. Text is crisp, photos look detailed, HDR streaming looks gorgeous. Adaptive refresh runs 1Hz to 120Hz — the sheet says 144Hz, but most of the time it caps at 120 to save battery, which seems a fair trade. You can force 144Hz in settings if you must.

The under-display fingerprint reader is quick and reliable. Maybe a hair behind Samsung’s ultrasonic sensor, but we’re splitting fractions of a second. The always-on display in OxygenOS is well done — time, date, notification icons, battery, all without waking the full panel. Barely touches the battery.

Hasselblad cameras, and why the colour sells it

OnePlus and Hasselblad have been at this for a few generations, and it keeps improving. What Hasselblad brings isn’t some hardware trick — it’s colour science. The way it handles colour, skin tones especially, has a warm, faintly golden quality that flatters portraits without making them look fake. Shoot the same face with the OnePlus 14 Pro and a Samsung S26 Ultra side by side, same person, same light, and they come out clearly different. Neither’s exactly wrong. But the Hasselblad rendering has something a lot of people just find nicer.

Hardware-wise it’s three cameras. A 50MP main (Sony LYT-900), f/1.6, does the heavy lifting. Sharp, good dynamic range, and that Hasselblad processing quietly making everything look a touch better than life. In daylight the results are excellent — close to Samsung and Apple, and honestly I sometimes preferred the OnePlus frames purely for the colour.

The second lens is a 50MP periscope telephoto at 3x optical. It pulls its weight — sharp at 3x, usable at 5x, and even 10x digital held more detail than I expected for travel snaps, grabbing a monument or a street sign from a distance. Not the iPhone 17 Pro Max’s 10x optical, obviously. But for the money? Impressive.

Rounding it off is a 48MP ultrawide with minimal edge distortion. Group shots and landscapes come out clean, straight lines staying straight near the corners — something cheaper ultrawides routinely botch.

Night mode has jumped this year. I shot a fair bit in dim restaurants and on badly lit streets around my neighbourhood, and the results genuinely impressed me. Natural colour, none of that yellow-orange cast older OnePlus phones used to throw. Shadow detail held, noise stayed in check. Not Pixel-grade computational wizardry, but solidly in the very-good camp. A year ago I wouldn’t have said that about a OnePlus night mode.

The front camera’s a 32MP f/2.4. Fine for video calls and selfies. Not the best in the class — Samsung and Apple both have stronger selfie cameras — but it does the job without embarrassing you.

Video from the main camera is good, 4K 60fps with steady stabilisation. Walking and filming gave me smooth footage, none of that over-eager electronic wobble some phones add. The mics pick up voice clearly, though wind is a problem outdoors — same as nearly every phone, to be fair. For casual travel vlogs or filming a family thing, it’s plenty. Pros will still reach for an iPhone, but that’s a bar most people aren’t aiming at.

One camera feature I didn’t expect to touch but ended up loving: Hasselblad’s XPan mode. It shoots in a wide panoramic ratio that mimics the old Hasselblad XPan film camera, and the results have a cinematic, film-graded quality to them. I shot a few sunset frames across the Pune skyline this way and they came out genuinely artistic, not the usual stitched phone-panorama mess. A lovely touch for anyone who cares about photos.

Performance: this chip at this price is a bit absurd

Same silicon Samsung wants Rs 1,34,999 for. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 on 3nm, paired here with 16GB of LPDDR6 in the unit I tested (a 12GB base model exists too). Performance is, no shock, blistering.

Everything opens fast. App switching is instant. Heavy jobs like editing 50MP RAWs in Snapseed or rendering in CapCut go off without the phone straining. BGMI maxed out? Smooth, no dropped frames across a 45-minute run. The Cryo-Velocity VC cooling keeps the surface from getting past mildly warm.

What struck me more than the raw speed was the consistency. Plenty of phones feel quick for the first hour, then start throttling under sustained load. This one didn’t. I ran a stress test — 40 minutes of BGMI, straight into 10 minutes of camera, then Chrome with 20 tabs — and got no slowdown, no jank. The 16GB clearly helps hold things in memory.

OxygenOS 16 on Android 16 is clean and snappy. OnePlus has always resisted clogging its phones with junk. You get the Google suite, OnePlus’s own phone, messaging and gallery apps, and that’s about it. Next to Samsung’s One UI (better than it was, but still shipping a dozen Samsung duplicates of Google apps) or Xiaomi’s HyperOS (which has actual ads in the interface), OxygenOS feels refreshingly bare in the best way.

Battery: what 6000mAh does for you

I held this section back until after performance because they’re tied together — a fast chip means little if the battery’s dead by 4pm. The 14 Pro’s 6000mAh cell is the biggest in any mainstream flagship I’ve used lately, and it shows.

Screen-on time landed between 8 and 10 hours, consistently. On a normal day — WhatsApp nonstop, an hour of Instagram, half an hour of camera, some Spotify, maybe 20 minutes of gaming — I’d hit 11pm with 30-35% left. Twice during lighter days, mostly texting and browsing, I stretched it into a second morning before charging.

Two-day battery from a flagship. I honestly can’t remember the last time that happened.

And then the charging. 100W SUPERVOOC. Empty to full in 34 minutes. I timed it across several cycles and it barely wavered — 33 to 35 minutes every go. What that means in practice is that battery anxiety just evaporates. Drain it completely and half an hour on the cable hands you a full day back. I’ve started charging while I shower in the morning, and that alone is enough.

Wireless charging is 50W, but only on the 16GB variant — not the base 12GB, which is a genuinely odd omission. 50W wireless is brisk enough that a 30-minute desk stint adds real charge.

What’s missing, and what could be better

No phone’s perfect at any price, and the 14 Pro has a short list of trade-offs.

IP65 instead of IP68. I’ve said it already, but it’s worth repeating, because line it up against a Samsung or Apple flagship and both give you full IP68 submersion. At Rs 69,999, something had to give, and this is understandable — but it’s still a gap.

Hasselblad’s colour is a taste, not a standard. Some people find the warm tones too warm. Next to Samsung’s more neutral processing or the Pixel’s cooler, true-to-life look, the OnePlus rendering stands apart. If you’d rather have clinical accuracy than flattering warmth, you’ll be reaching for the colour sliders more often.

Retail’s thin next to Samsung and Apple. You can buy through OnePlus.in, Amazon India, and OnePlus Experience Stores — but it won’t be sitting in your local mobile shop. Fewer service centres, too, though they’ve grown a lot in the past year.

Calls, speakers, the daily grind

Call quality on Jio 5G and Airtel 5G was clear and steady throughout. The earpiece is loud — loud enough to hear comfortably in a clattering auto, which is my personal benchmark for earpieces at this point. Speakerphone’s good through the dual stereo speakers, clear at a sensible volume. Not the loudest I’ve tested (Samsung edges it), but the sound stays balanced, no harsh treble or distorted bass when you crank it.

Haptics are a step up from the OnePlus 13. Keyboard buzzes are tight and precise, notification taps distinct. Getting close to Apple’s Taptic Engine, though there’s still a gap if you put them side by side. Anyone coming off a non-Apple phone will find them perfectly satisfying.

GPS lock was fast across testing — usually under three seconds when I opened Maps. Navigation through Pune’s tangle of flyover junctions was spot-on, the arrow tracking my position even in the GPS-hostile gaps between tall buildings. No phantom drift, no sudden jumps.

One small thing that won me over: the alert slider on the right edge. OnePlus has kept the physical switch for flipping between silent, vibrate and ring without touching the screen. Simple. Useful. The kind of thing that, once you’re used to it, makes every other phone feel like it’s missing something. Samsung and Apple have both ditched physical mute switches on their latest models, which only makes the slider feel more valuable.

Specifications

Pros and Cons

Price and availability

Rs 69,999 for the 12GB/256GB base variant. Available on OnePlus.in, Amazon India, and OnePlus Experience Stores. The 16GB/512GB costs more but adds wireless charging and extra storage, which makes it the one I’d point you toward if you can stretch for it.

Back to that 2am moment

I keep coming back to sitting there watching the battery climb. Because that one feature — 100W charging on a 6000mAh battery — genuinely changes your relationship with the phone. The anxiety’s gone. You stop planning your charging around your day. You stop carrying a power bank. You just use it, top it up for half an hour whenever it dips, and get on with things.

And that’s the real pitch. Not that it’s the absolute best at any one thing — Samsung’s cameras are more versatile, Apple’s chip is technically quicker, Google’s computational photography is a notch better. But the OnePlus hands you 95% of all of it at a price that doesn’t need a loan, in a phone that charges faster and lasts longer than any of them. For the busy professional who doesn’t want to agonise over a phone — who just wants something excellent that works, charges fast, and keeps going — this is probably the smartest buy in the flagship segment right now.

It’s 2am again as I finish writing this, funnily enough. The phone’s at 68% after a full day of heavy use. I’m not even going to plug it in tonight. There’ll be plenty left by morning.

Full Specifications

Pros

• 100W charging 0 to 100% in 34 minutes
• Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 at competitive price
• Hasselblad camera system
• 6000mAh huge battery
• Clean OxygenOS minimal bloatware

Cons

• IP65 only not IP68
• Limited retail vs Samsung Apple
• Camera colour subjective
• No wireless on base variant

Our Rating: 8.8/10 · Price: ₹69,999