Samsung Galaxy S10 5G vs OnePlus 7 Pro 5G vs Oppo Reno 5G – Which is the best 5G phone?

ByJames Smythe June 19, 2019

5G is finally here, EE was the first company to launch it in the UK and this is being followed up by Vodafone on the 3rd of July and Three sometime in the near future.

So after so many years of hype is it worth it and what is the best phone to get 5G on?

Coverage

Before you commit to a 5G phone you may want to check your coverage, as usual with a new network, it can be patchy at best.

At the moment there is just EE with a 5G network and that covers London, Birmingham, Manchester, Edinburgh, Belfast and Cardiff.

By the end of 2019, there will be ten pore cities including Bristol, Leeds, Liverpool, Glasgow and more.

Vodafone launches on the 3rd of July in Glasgow, London, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Cardiff and Bristol.

5G will then arrive in Birkenhead, Blackpool, Bournemouth, Guildford, Newbury, Portsmouth, Plymouth, Reading, Southampton, Stoke-on-Trent, Warrington and Wolverhampton later this year.

Three are launching in 25 towns but there is no specific date for their launch yet, it should be within the next few months though.

Even if you do have 5G coverage, don’t expect the best speeds all the time, certainly not the gigabit speeds that have been claimed with 5G. Many users are reporting 400Mbit/s down though, but it can go as low as 200Mbit/s. This is still faster than most home broadband packages.

Phone & Contract Prices

Early adopters will get stung with a premium price. If you look at the Samsung Galaxy S10 5G which has with 256GB/8GB, the phone costs £1099 SIM-free, which is £200 more than the 128/8GB S10+.

A 30GB EE contract is £10+£79pcm or £1996 in total, so that makes the contract £897 or £37.38pcm. Alternatively, a 5G sim only plan is £37 with 40GB of data.

A 4G 50GB will set you back just £27pcm. EE muddies the water a little by offering swappable benefits on the 5G contracts, this can include a music data or video data pass, which allows you to use data without it eating into your allowance.

However you look at it though, 5G is going to cost you a premium.

The other two phones comes in a fair bit cheaper than the Samsung. The OnePlus 7 Pro 5G is £50 + £69pcm for a £1706 total contract price.

The Oppo Reno 5G is the cheapest at just £50 + 64pcm for a £1586 total contract price.

Phone Comparison

All the phones are amazing, each one has its own strengths and weaknesses. There is no clear winner.

Both the Oppo and OP7 use pop out cameras which give you a beatiful screen with no notch. The OP7 has that 1440 x 3120 pixels display running at 90Hz and it also uses UFS3.0 for storage so it should be faster for real world usage than the other two.

Both the Oppo and OP7 use the Snapdragon 855 chipset while Samsung uses their own Exynos 9820. The Exynos 9820 is known to be less efficient for your battery than the SD855.

The Oppo has the periscope lens which gives it a 5x optical zoom and 10 times hybrid. It is also the only one with a microSD slot.

Samsung is the market leader and it has retained this position for good reason, they make great phones. The spec sheet doesn’t necessarily make it look the best, but numbers are not everything, and many people would argue the camera performance is better than the OP7Pro.

The Samsung has the largest battery, and is the only phone on the market to feature Wi-Fi 6