The OnePlus 8 is the best option if you want a huge phone that doesn’t cost $1,000 or more. Although it’s one of the fastest phones available, it costs much less than other flagship devices at a typical price of just $700. It has a big, 6.55-inch screen, and the 1080p OLED panel produces dark blacks that look good when you’re viewing videos and photos. The OnePlus 8’s screen also has a fast, 90 Hz refresh rate (50% faster than the Pixel 4a’s 60 Hz screen) that makes animations and movement look particularly smooth. Even with the big display and 5G enabled, the battery is large enough to keep this phone running for two days on a charge.

The OnePlus 8 is one of the cheapest 5G phones available in the US, but it skips a few high-end features, such as water resistance and wireless charging, to keep the price low. And although it provides a clean, easy-to-use software experience, OnePlus’s update support isn’t as good as Google’s.

OnePlus sells the phone unlocked with support for AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon. The phone also works on T-Mobile’s 5G out of the box. Both T-Mobile and Verizon are selling the phone, as well, but to get millimeter-wave 5G support, you need to buy from Verizon. That will matter only if you live in a place where Verizon has rolled out millimeter-wave 5G; most people don’t.

The OnePlus 8 is one of the fastest phones you can buy. It has the same Snapdragon 865 processor found in phones like the Samsung Galaxy S20 and OnePlus 8 Pro, but it’s several hundred dollars cheaper and noticeably faster than Samsung’s phones. The high-refresh-rate screen makes animations look impressively smooth, and the phone opens apps almost instantly. On the flip side, animations can sometimes look rushed, whereas on the Pixel 4a the effect is more elegant, if a little slower. The base-model OnePlus 8 comes with 8 GB of RAM and 128 GB of storage, but no microSD storage expansion. The in-display fingerprint scanner is less convenient than the Pixel’s Face Match system, but it’s faster and more accurate than the in-display scanner in Samsung’s phones.

Like the Pixel models, the OnePlus 8 isn’t chock-full of redundant apps or interface clutter. However, OnePlus has started bundling Facebook Services with its phones—hopefully that doesn’t signal that more software bloat is on the way. The company’s Oxygen OS has a few useful extra features such as gestures to control your phone when your screen is off, duplicate messaging accounts for apps like WhatsApp that support only a single user, a more customizable home screen, and a number of “experimental” features tucked away in the OnePlus Labs menu. However, it doesn’t have an equivalent to Call Screen or the Pixel-exclusive new Assistant. OnePlus also falls short of Google on major Android-version updates, which it guarantees for only two years instead of three. But it does provide three years of security updates, which is more than most device makers promise.

You’ll find three cameras on the back of the OnePlus 8, and although the photo quality falls short of what you get from Google’s cameras, the results are very competitive with the photos from Samsung’s current phones. The 48-megapixel main sensor combines four pixels to act like one big pixel that collects more light (a technique known as binning), so you get 12-megapixel files and better low-light performance. The phone also has a 16-megapixel ultra-wide camera and a 2-megapixel macro lens. The macro camera replaces the telephoto from last year’s OnePlus 7T, and the results are mediocre even in perfect lighting. We would have preferred a telephoto lens, but the Galaxy S20 and Pixel 4a don’t have one of those, either.

The OnePlus 8 lasts about two days on a charge, which is impressive for a phone with 5G connectivity. The 4,300 mAh battery, which is substantially larger than that of the Pixel 4a, is also fast to charge. When you run low on power, the proprietary Warp Charge charger and cable (which costs about twice as much as a typical USB-C cable) operate at 30 W, much faster than the charging for the Pixel phones and even faster than the Galaxy S20’s new 25 W charger. The OnePlus phone also fast-charges at 15 W on standard USB-PD chargers (or with standard USB-C cables).

The OnePlus 8 feels solid, but it’s made from slippery glass, and you don’t get the benefit of wireless charging as with the Galaxy S20. On the side, this model also has OnePlus’s trademark alert slider, which changes your ringer mode instantly—a standard feature on iPhones but virtually unheard of on Android handsets for some reason. OnePlus does offer a handful of official cases that make the phone easier to grip, and they’re some of the best phone cases we’ve used—they fit perfectly and look great, although adding a case makes this already huge phone harder to hold. Because of OnePlus’s relatively slow support, you could have a harder time getting your OnePlus 8 fixed after dropping it than you would a Samsung or Google phone.

OnePlus does not offer a water-resistance certification on this phone (the carrier versions may have that certification, but OnePlus won’t confirm whether that requires hardware changes). More expensive phones usually have a rating of at least IP67, which means they’re tested to withstand short, shallow drops in water—the OnePlus 8 Pro and Galaxy S20 are both a little more resilient and carry IP68 ratings. The company says the OnePlus 8 should survive a splash (no promises), but you should not put that claim to the test. The phone also has no headphone jack, which is typical for high-end phones but disappointing nonetheless. What is surprising is that OnePlus didn’t even bother including a USB-to-headphone adapter in the box.