OnePlus 10T & Redmi K50 Ultra
3 months ago, we did a full comparison of the Realme GT Neo 3 and the Redmi K50, and they were probably the best Android phones with great value for money to buy in the first half of the year. Today, we’ll find out the best phones to buy under $500 in 2022 with a matchup, and now let’s give a passionate welcome to today’s two cowboys: the Redmi K50 Ultra and the Oneplus ACE Pro, the latter of which is available outside China as the OnePlus 10T.
Design
The design of both phones obviously comes from their flagship products, and if you have already had a Xiaomi 12 or OnePlus 10, you will definitely feel familiar. So both of them didn’t really work on their appearance design.
But if have to say something, I slightly prefer the design of the OnePlus model, which has a new texture on the back cover, providing a unique touch and greatly preventing fingerprints.
In terms of available color variants, Oneplus offers two different styles to choose from, I think most Oneplus fans will still go for the black version because it has a really cool surface texture, while Redmi offers richer options. The AMG co-branded model really looks different, but the other variants are pretty boring actually since we’ve seen enough Xiaomi 12 and 12s. As claimed, they’ll release a White variant later this year, but I think it won’t change anything.
They are very similar in size and weight, but when you hold them in your hands, you’ll immediately notice that the ACE Pro feels better in your hands and your fingers won’t snag while playing games because there is a smoother curved transition between the camera module and the back cover.
Another detail I want to point out is that OnePlus has placed the volume buttons and the power button on each side of the phone, so it is easier to achieve some operations by using a combination of buttons with one hand, such as taking a screenshot with them.
Display
The screen upgrade is a major selling point of the K50 Ultra. And they called it in a super strange way, the new 1.5K-resolution display.
This sounds really confusing and doesn’t really make sense, but actually all you need to know is that it’s a resolution a little lower than QHD but a little higher than FHD, which is not exactly an innovation for smartphone displays. Actually, we’ve seen that the Huawei P50 Pro also uses a similar resolution, but never heard of the word ‘1.5K’.
so why can’t Xiaomi just call it FHD+ Display? Make it look like the Apple Style for advertisement? Anyway, compared to the ACE Pro, the K50 Ultra looks slightly sharper when displaying small text, and it also has a higher screen brightness. so leave the strange 1.5K alone, and the K50 Ultra indeed offers a better display here no matter for indoor or outdoor uses.
But what I must say is that the higher resolution and brightness are not the most important thing, what really deserves your attention is that the K50 Ultra supports high-frequency PWM dimming, which means it can effectively avoid damaging flicker issues at low screen brightness.
The fact is that you can’t see these flickers with the naked eye, but they are real and some of you might easily feel them. so at least in terms of the screen, I can say that the K50 Ultra completely beats the ACE Pro.
Performance & Gaming
The power and efficiency of Snapdragon 8+ are undeniable, but since we’ve tested more and more phones with the Snapdragon 8+ platform, we’ve discovered that even though Qualcomm has returned to the arms of TSMC, if you want to build a phone that can play any mobile game without worry, you still have to put some effort into the thermal design.
From these gaming tests, we can see that the framerates are very close, and it is clear that current mobile games are no longer a threat to the Snapdragon 8+. The real difference lies in the phone’s temperature. perhaps due to the larger VC Vapor Chamber inside, the ACE Pro’s surface temperature during gaming is significantly lower than that of the K50 Ultra.
Now let’s go back and look at the benchmark, I was expecting they would perform closely on benchmarks. And yes they are, as you can see they both achieved very close results to each other, and other Snapdragon 8+ phones as well.
Stability
But when I ran the 3DMark Wild Life Extreme test on the K50 Ultra, the test was terminated due to overheating and the phone closed all background applications. Not just once, but three times I tried, and the K50 Ultra just couldn’t complete the test, either in balanced or performance mode with the latest software version.
This means that if there are future mobile games that require higher performance, this K50 Ultra may be easier to knock out by heated issues. Also in this hottest summer, the ACE Pro can provide a more stable experience. I don’t know if Xiaomi will be able to fix this in a future software update, but at least for today, I would vote for the ACE Pro.
Cameras
Now let’s talk about the camera, for these two budget phones we only need to focus on their main camera, trust me you really won’t use the other two lenses on both of them, especially their 2 MP macro lenses. but luckily at least their main lenses are still good.
The 108MP CMOS on the K50 Ultra looks stronger than the 50MP CMOS on the ACE Pro, but in reality, you can hardly tell which is better in terms of detail from the samples we shot here.
What’s even more embarrassing is that when you turn on full pixel mode in the K50 Ultra, you’ll find that the photos are still not as sharp as the ACE Pro, even though it has only half the pixels of the K50 Ultra. Considering that one of the longest things Apple has stuck with over the years is using Sony’s sensors, it’s probably not hard to understand such a result here.
When it comes at night, the ACE Pro takes even more impressive photos and we can see better dynamic range and colors. No one knows exactly how many IMX766 the OPPO Group purchased from Sony, but as the saying goes, what goes around comes around, and in terms of photographing, they really beat competitors at the budget level with this sensor.
Battery & Charging
The ACE Pro supports greater charging power than the K50 Ultra, and as a compromise, it has a smaller battery, but from using it these days, I found that both the performance of their battery life and charging speed are very close, with the ACE Pro being faster in the first ten minutes of charging. Considering that they don’t support wireless charging either, you really don’t need to get too tangled up in the power solution.
Conclusion
In my opinion, the ACE Pro finally wins the trophy. And at the $500 pricing, OnePlus made the better choice, with the better design, better main camera, insane cooling solution, and most importantly, up to 16GB of RAM storage for options, which makes the ACE Pro really a new flagship killer.
It can stay with you for a long time. As for the K50 Ultra, until the end of this video, I still can’t figure out why Xiaomi didn’t bring them on the 12S, no matter the 2K screen on the K50 or the 1.5K screen on this Ultra version. For the Redmi K series, they really should have spent the money on the camera and cooling solution as it should have been a flagship killer.
Buy the K50 Ultra @Giztop here, or the OnePlus ACE Pro [OnePlus 10T] here
